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Metropolis Editors, Natural Habitat, sustainability, sustainable architecture

METROPOLIS Introduces Natural Habitat, a Sustainable Homes Video Series

The series debuts with a tour of a tranquil upstate New York retreat designed with Passive House principles.

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rendering of a social club that fosters community
Yerim Jang’s Threads of Journeys project reimagines the social club as a hub that celebrates immigrant experiences by creating connections, fostering interaction, and blurring spatial and cultural boundaries. Courtesy Yerim Jang

June 11, 2025

These Students are Reclaiming Community Through Experimental Design

Future100 award–winning student projects reimagine what nurtures society—and what the traditional housing market neglects.

By: Stephen Zacks

Community is one of the most neglected dimensions of contemporary society, often overshadowed by the dominant belief that capital accumulation and consumption can fulfill our every need. A collection of projects from Future100 student portfolios highlights the essential role of noncommercial community spaces in fostering well-being. These projects rethink institutions that serve as third spaces or meeting places between home and work, offering opportunities for neighborhood residents to gather, strengthen social ties, and repair damage from past problematic legacies against communities of color. 

Threads of Journeys project. Courtesy Yerim Jang

Adaptive Reuse for Amplifying Community Spaces

Several of these projects concentrate on amplifying community-based institutions. In her proposed renovation of a Lithuanian American social club in Providence, Rhode Island, RISD interior architecture graduate student Yerim Jang reimagines a public space that honors its heritage while expanding its relevance. Called Threads of Journeys, the community center features interactive exhibits and video oral histories to preserve the club’s history, while flexible, modular spaces invite diverse groups from the surrounding neighborhood to meet and collaborate.

In her reimagining of a historic farmers’ market in San Francisco at the nexus of the Bernal Heights neighborhood, a canyon, and a highway, California College of the Arts M.Arch student Layla Namak intervenes to expand the market’s role as an urban connector. Observing that the existing building didn’t encourage visitors to circulate throughout its interior, Namak proposes replacing it with a soaring, exuberantly daylit structure that pulls people through from one end to the other. Along with a food hall and stalls for produce vendors, the plan includes classrooms, social services, and a library to engage community users.

CUNY student Evelyn Krutoy has proposed an urban garden project (left) located in Flatbush, Brooklyn’s Little Caribbean neighborhood. The project aims to create an accessible cultural space for youth that provides intergenerational community and connection to nearby urban landmarks such as the Flatbush African Burial Ground. Courtesy Evelyn Krutoy
Reclaiming Albinas Legacy by Omar Leon is a mixed used block in Portland, Oregon that encourages healthy lifestyles through green roofs, community gardens, and rainwater collection. Courtesy Omar Leon

Holistic Community Planning

In the Little Caribbean area of Flatbush, Brooklyn, bachelor in architecture student Evelyn Krutoy at the City College of New York designed a community center in consultation with the GrowHouse neighborhood organization, with space for gardens, food vendors, art exhibitions, and educational exchange. Employing terra-cotta details and rich colors, Krutoy wove together a communal kitchen, café, coworking, classroom spaces, offices, and a rooftop garden–creating a design that sensitively addresses the urban design scale as well as the scale of the interior. 

For his design of a city block in Portland’s Albina neighborhood—previously razed for a never-built hospital—Cornell bachelor in architecture student Omar Leon integrates residential buildings and community spaces into a holistic concept of well-being that includes community gardening, green building, and healthy lifestyles. Instead of private backyards, the plan prioritizes shared central spaces. “Since the whole block was empty, the idea was to create those smaller communal spaces at the block level to create a community that was self-sufficient in a way,” says Leon.

The Archipelago, designed by Brandon Gicquel, is a reinterpretation of the New Orleans shotgun home stacked into a contemporary multifamily residence organized around a central courtyard. Courtesy Brandon Gicquel

Fostering Community Using AI-driven Regenerative Design

At a similar urban scale in Los Angeles and New Orleans, Sci-Arc M.Arch recent graduate Michael Boldt and Tulane bachelor in architecture student Brandon Gicquel explore how housing developments can preserve and produce communities. For Boldt, that meant creating mixed-used residential spaces in L.A.’s Arts District on the site of a polluted rail yard that has been adopted as an ad hoc arts space. His design process involved using a 3D scan of the site with AI-driven regenerative design to grow buildings that also preserve shared artist spaces for fabrication, assembly, and living.

Gicquel’s design borrows the vernacular of shotgun houses in New Orleans’s West Riverside neighborhood, rotating and stacking volumes around a central courtyard so that artists and musicians of different ages and cultural traditions have room to perform and show their work. “The emphasis shifts from the dwelling unit to the courtyard,” says Gicquel. “A community is generated as opposed to the isolated living approach that is often prevalent in suburban communities.”

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