
After weeks of workshops and charrettes, the 5th-year teams have been chosen! The 18×18 House team, and your official new besties are: Naomi Tony-Alabi, Jake Buell, Meagan Mitchell, and Julie DiDeo!
The name 18×18 House comes from the dimensions—18’ x 18’—or the size of two parking spaces. As some US cities are negotiating with developers to swap out parking spaces in exchange for housing units that are affordable, one of our Front Porch Initiative partners approached the faculty team with a challenge to design an affordable unit that could fit within the footprint of two 9’ x 18’ parking spaces. In order to offer enough space for occupants to live comfortably, the team has taken this on as a double-story house.



While the student team does not yet know their client or site, the nature of the 18×18 House holds many possibilities:
In urban neighborhoods, the scale of the footprint could be a good size for accessory dwelling units (ADUs), independent living spaces that are built on the property of existing homes. These can be built on single-family properties to create more density and housing opportunity.
In rural neighborhoods, a house this size can be built on family properties that may not have usable space for a larger home. The 18×18 House can provide extra space for a family to grow/maintain the kinship network on sites without large areas for new construction.
As the newest addition to the family of Rural Studio “stair houses,” the team was challenged to have the stair do as much as possible because of how much space it would take from the small footprint. The team studied different types of stairs and spaces in previous Rural Studio homes, testing how different combinations fit within the footprint like puzzle pieces. Each modification to the stair type changes the floor plan completely, resulting in the “plan matrix:” a collection of plan iterations which as a baseline for new explorations to branch out.




Since then, the team has visited several recently completed Rural Studio projects (Myers’ Home, Mrs. Patrick’s Home, and Ophelia’s Home) to begin to understand kinship networks and the scale of living spaces as they are being used here in Newbern. Visits from consultants Joe Burns, Julie Eisenberg, and Hank Koning also had the team work on drawings, mockups, and models to explore different possibilities for the floor plan and the stair.




Soon the 18×18 House team will start to build mockups and continue exploring the challenge of the multi-functional stair, but for now Halloween reviews are steadily approaching. The team is testing iterations with one large question in mind: Can one design be created for a developer where the first and second floors can be flipped easily to allow for sleeping downstairs and living upstairs as a potentially accessible building option? Follow the team’s journey to find out!




