Following the citizen Housing and Planning Council’s guidelines to improve housing and neighborhood conditions, the design provides an array of housing opportunities for New Yorkers ranging from single adults to extended family housing. Encouraged to comply with fire safety laws, height limitations, and handicap accessibility, we created a place to be called home for families and children to have opportunities to experience the many cultures held within New York City, but within the safe confines of their own apartment complex by engaging in the rentable multi-purpose rooms located on the main floor.

In order to perform properly and create uniform stiffness, accommodate lateral movement from all directions, and all loads without creating torsional unbalance; the “height active” design strategy being used is a combination of a casing system and bay system. This hybrid system utilizes the site’s restrictions to its best advantage. The northeast and northwest sides of the New York City apartment complex are currently adjacent to other structures, these walls are solid to ensure control over the living experience regardless of the neighboring conditions; they also act as a casing for the apartment’s structure. The bays of each level are secured to the northeast wall and act as two way slab as to best distribute any active loads to the supporting walls. Each bay also prevents any torsional unbalance by distributing all external and internal forces to supporting walls. To prevent these two-way slabs from becoming overwhelmingly thick, the shear walls dividing each of the residential rooms act as load-bearing walls transferring the load to the foundation directly. While each of the bays grow in surface area as the building rises, the division walls increase in depth to accommodate both its function of dividing the apartments and transferring weight into the foundation directly.