American firm Salmela Architect has designed a solar-powered, urban infill house that is meant to demonstrate a new way forward for single-family housing.
The project, called Electric Bungalow, is located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It was designed for Thomas Fisher, a longtime architecture professor at the University of Minnesota, and his wife, Claudia Wielgorecki.
Electric Bungalow is in Minnesota
The house sits near the university, in the St. Anthony Park neighbourhood.
The clients have lived in the area for two dozen years. After purchasing a new property near their original home, they contacted Salmela Architect ? based in Duluth, Minnesota ? to design a sustainable dwelling that embraced the local context.
The house is intended as a design toolkit "They envisioned a new home that could serve as a prototype for building environmentally friendly, self-powered infill housing that was sensitive to the existing neighbourhood form within a relatively modest budget," said the firm.
Electric Bungalow is meant to demonstrate a new way forward for single-family housing. Its toolkit of design strategies can be used on any site and be adapted to a variety of needs and tastes, the architects said.
Protruding windows direct the eye upwards
"Our urban housing stock is energy inefficient and deteriorating," the firm said. "This compact home addresses a handful of impending crises with optimism and exuberance."
The project required the demolition of a run...