Over the last 25 years, the city of San Francisco has tried countless strategies to mitigate the housing crisis that they have been suffering. A further investigation into new strategies to design higher-density affordable housing for the residents of San Francisco is where this project began.
The Studios on Oak looks towards the young adults of the city to provide their demographic with a building typology that is new to the area: University Mixed-Use Housing. The project site, located at the eastern end of the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, is a quick 15-minute walk from the University of San Francisco, whose design school is in a crisis of its own. The university is running out of space for their growing program; a microcosm of the greater struggle of the city. This project looks to tackle both of these concerns in one effort.
The Studios on Oak is a four story mixed-use building. The lower two floors serve as a satellite design campus for USF, fit with a lecture hall, library, studio spaces, staff offices, and lab space. The upper two floors serve as student housing, fit with 18 studio apartments and 2 two-bedroom apartments. The students have an all-in-one building that occupies a mere 10% of the city block it rests on, providing precedence for more housing like it in the future.
The key to denser housing is maximizing usage of space. Spaces that are left behind in design, or negative spaces, are inevitable in buildings, but this project looks at that inevitability and asks how to avoid it. While the programmatic blocks are packed with functions, the negative spaces are too.
On the ground level, the space leftover is used for circulation and as a covered outdoor space. On the second level, it is used for a student lounge. On the third level, an outdoor patio for the student residents.
Utilizing every square foot of a project site makes for more efficient housing and, hopefully, a more efficient San Francisco in the future.
ARCH 3020 Studio | Instructors: Andrew Ballard and Gautam Pradeep