The DIY Approach to Housing

Building faster, cheaper, and with greater satisfaction: the advantages of being an architect-developer.

In the Fall of 2015, the AIA New York magazine Oculus published an article on architect-developers as part of their housing issue written by Lisa Delgado. Download the original article here: {The DIY Approach to Housing}.

Delgado describes the work of three architects who are putting their skin into the game of their own work. Her first example is thread collective and their project, TroutHouse, a three-unit residential building with office space
on Troutman Street in Brooklyn, NY. TroutHouse was the first development for the three principals of thread collective, Elliott Maltby, Mark Mancuso, and Gita Nandan. They developed the project to use as their own office space and to show off their design and sustainable sensibilities.

The principles learned as much as they could from developers they were working with on prior projects and by reading as many books as they could on development. They found that by being an Architect & Developer, they were able to design much more efficiently. “Being both developer and architect makes the project go so much faster,” Mancuso explains. In the standard architect-developer relationship, “we design something and then go to the developer-client, and then the design changes because we have to tailor it to what they want. But since we were our own client, we designed this thing so fast.”

Sam Bargetz of Loadingdock5 got together with a group of friends to develop a four-unit residential building in Brooklyn for them to each live in. “You cut out the middleman,” says Bargetz, referring to the developer involved with most projects. “It makes the project much more affordable.” The savings allowed Bargetz to build its development to Passivhaus standards.

The efficiency of the architect as developer model can allow what would otherwise be a crappy developer building to really sing with design. This is evident in The Stack, a project that was co-developed by Gluck+ in upper Manhattan. At $220 per square foot, the multi-family project “cost less than what a typical developer would’ve spent on a crappy building,” says Gluck+ principal Charlie Kaplan. “And yet architecturally, it is a really interesting building.” Gluck+ was the architect, construction manager, and co-developer of The Stack project, which gave them the advantage of maximum efficiency. They utilized modular pre-fabricated units to speed up the on-site construction time. Founder of Gluck+, Peter Gluck enjoys trying to solve the issues in New York City while limiting the disruption a traditional construction site dictates. The off-site construction meant “much less mess in the city, much less congestion. We’re not waiting for somebody to ask us to solve problems,” says Gluck. “We see the problems, and we try to solve them.” Gluck criticizes architects who “sit in their office waiting for somebody to call them to do a development – and then wait a long time.”