RESEARCH General Art

HOUSING
Student-built home intended to be catalyst for community

Melissa Mitchell, News Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

5/1/03

Photo by Bill Wiegand Students of Osman Ataman, professor of architecture, are building a house in East St. Louis.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — If they build it, residents will come.

At least that’s the plan motivating architecture students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who are engaged in a project that might be described as modern-day
barnraising – with a twist. The 18 seniors and graduate students, working under architecture professor Osman Ataman, are taking their design-studio experience to the streets – or more precisely, to a largely vacant lot – in the Alta Sita neighborhood of East St. Louis, Ill. There, they are building a two-story, single-family home – the first of many that Ataman hopes will be built on the site in a community that’s been fighting the effects of urban blight for many years.

The home, which will be sold through a local developer to a low-income family, is being built for the most part by "enthusiastic but unskilled labor," Ataman said; exceptions include plumbing and electrical work that’s being done by professional contractors. Construction, expected to be completed by mid-May, represents the final phase of a nearly yearlong design-build project, organized as part of the university’s East St. Louis Action Research Project. Since 1990, the community assistance and development program has brought together students and faculty members from the School of Architecture and departments of landscape architecture and urban and regional planning to work cooperatively with East St. Louis residents to address immediate and long-term community needs.

Last fall, Ataman’s students visited the building site and met with members of the Alta Sita Neighborhood Association, which purchased the four-acre parcel of land intended for the housing development. Students created their own individual designs, following design specifications requiring the homes to be between 1,500-2,000 square feet in size; one to 2 1/2 stories, with two to four bedrooms; and a construction budget of $103,000 or less. Ataman and the project’s general contractor selected a design by graduate student Kasey Kluxdal of Elgin as the conceptual design for the house.

"Though each group member developed their own design, it was not done in a competitive sense," Ataman said. "No one design was better than another – just different. All of the schemes developed by the students are doable, well-designed housing units." This semester, students worked with their professor and the contractor to revise and redesign the project. The work included creating construction documents, researching various building materials, redesigning windows and making other adjustments to ensure that construction came in under budget.

Ataman said the experience students have gained working on the real-time project, with its built-in assortment of real-world problems and solutions, is invaluable. "Students learned that design is only 10 percent of the entire project, which also includes (considerations involving) materials, cost, client needs, environment and context, and marketing.
Everything we talk about, it’s here. They learned how the architecture profession is run. Some of them can graduate tomorrow and set up their own firms."