The “Rock Street Pocket Housing” plan (also known as the Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood) has brought an American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design to the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corp. announced today.
The pocket neighborhood, designed by Design Center staff and architecture students at the University of Arkansas’s Fay Jones School of Architecture for NLRCDC property on Rock Street between 17th and 19th streets in the Pettaway neighborhood, features affordable homes of modern design clustered around a shared greenspace. The award is the second for the Pettaway design: Last year, it won the “On the Boards” Grand Award of Residential Architect magazine.
Juror comments from the AIA website on the award:
This is a great integration of inventive architecture and sustainable urbanism into a traditional, low-income fabric. The project does a very interesting and successful job of comingling variations of public and private space. By creating variations in the housing typology, building placement on the site and landscape treatments, the development proposal has appeal to multiple household types, creates private and shared space, and it completes the urban context of the neighborhood.
It is thorough, achievable, and detailed with a fresh design approach that is also supportive of the context. The individual house designs do a remarkably good job of negotiating fronts to both the street and the communal space.
The project will be featured in Architectural Record magazine and at the AIA’s annual expo and convention this June in Denver.