What would missing middle housing look like in Miami?
Miami is known as a city of towers and single-family homes, with very little in between. As the city has grown and diversified, walkability and affordability have become civic priorities in reshaping its car-oriented luxury enclaves. Funded through a grant from the Knight Foundation, we created a housing prototype to jump-start interest in low-rise, high-density neighborhood development models. The result is intended as a template to be expanded, modified and repurposed, inspiring other developers and architects to pursue similar projects.
HI RES MIAMI
Knight Foundation + Townhouse Center / ISA / Miami FL / 2013
The HI RES prototype doubles Miami's typical suburban-scale FAR, creating a medium-scale urban fabric with up to ten times the typical unit density. This higher resolution model focused on the missing middle scale creates a more flexible and resilient urban fabric and unlocks new development potential.
A variety of deployment possibilities allow the HI RES prototype to work as infill or block-scale development, with parking on- or off-site. A three-story envelope is designed with an exterior access stair allowing for multiple configurations of units depending on context.
Diverse layout possibilities allow for context sensitivity and development flexibility. The basic three-flat provides three two-bedroom apartments in a stacked layout, and an alternate arrangement creates four studios above a ground-floor street-facing retail space.
A circulation gap between buildings serves both social and environmental functions. The exterior stair also includes terraces encouraging social interaction, and a porous party wall allows access, light and ventilation. Off-the-shelf materials and everyday construction techniques maximize affordability.
