342 units
Average sq. ft./unit: 600 (Scenario 1)
655 (Scenario 2)
Additional drawings

This urban metro infill site is located adjacent to rail transportation, a private college and a downtown area. The apartment project is designed to accommodate and encourage tenants to park their cars and ride or walk.

The buildings are designed to fit within this urban infill environment encapsulating resort level amenities, with small view corridors from the exterior providing glimpses of these attractions. Green site and building technology has been a major driver in all decisions. In addition to the transportation considerations, the building courtyard opens to the south to bring sun into the two recreation areas. Open breezeways not only facilitate ground level air movement into the courtyard but help keeping air movement through the natural ventilated corridors.

Depending on the solar unit efficiency selected, carport mounted solar panels can generate up to 1 mega watt, which is approximately the projected demand of the apartment project, rendering the project carbon-neutral.

To turn unattractive street facing ground floor units into assets, the project has live/work apartments on these elevations. To maintain the cost efficiencies of the project, these live/work units are designed to stack with the units above. As the additional costs of these units are limited to the street front entries their rent need only be a slightly higher then the apartments above which the live/work units can easily demand.

All of the other units in the project also stack, including the loft units on the fourth floor in the higher central architectural elements. With the exception of the studio units and the loft units that stack above the studio units, all units use American’s proprietary corridor utility wall system, which reduces construction cost, shortens construction time and reduces sound transfer between units.

To help in the financial evaluation of the project two alternate sets of unit plans were developed, one that averages 600sf per unit and a second that averages 655sf. As the project is catering to the Echo Boomer generation many of which are students attending the adjacent private college, the project was designed with a unit mix of 17% studios, 6% lofts, 11% live/work, 47% one bedrooms, and 19% two bedrooms.

This project, like all of American’s Pre-Value Engineered designs, has been developed to provide our clients quality architecture that makes sense financially in the “new” economy.

Copyright © 2010 American Multifamily, Inc.