Design Principles of Nubanusit Neighborhood

 

 

Nubanusit Neighborhood & Farm is a planned, environmental community for twenty-nine families with a Common House and an organic farm.  The houses are sited around shared entry spaces in order to reinforce social interaction.  Each house is also orientated outwards to cultivated or natural landscapes in order to provide views and insure outdoor privacy.  At the center of the neighborhood are the Common House and a large village green that encourage social contact.  The design achieves a balance between the need for individual spaces and for common areas shared by all. 

The basic buildings themselves – a single family house, a duplex farmhouse, and a four unit barn-like structure—are distinctly vertical in expression.  This is articulated with the use of three varieties of red- cedar shingles, vertical siding, and clapboards within the overhanging gable ends. Natural porch columns, unshaped by the lathe, provide a fourth variety of the cedar.  This expression of New England vernacular architecture allows a variety of options to be added at the lower level that enable a degree of customization, as well as provide scale and connection to the ground plane.  These options include farmers’ porches, screened porches, sunrooms, and down stairs “away rooms.” The resulting style also provides intrinsic building-efficiency.  The main roofs are steeply pitched to allow for the installation of solar hot-water panels to maximize heat gain during the winter months. The secondary roofs, with their shallow pitches, allow for the installation of solar photo-voltaic panels that optimize their efficiency during the summer months. The effort to keep windows at a smaller scale reduced the amount of heat loss and therefore determined that a smaller heat plant would be needed.

An experience of architectural diversity has been created out of essentially simple components and appropriate orientation of each adjacent building.  A further impression is that a village “density” has been achieved that is more reminiscent of older European settlements than modern American developments.  This was enabled not only by the compact architectural design, but by a site plan that strategically places the cars and parking areas outside of, rather than within, the neighborhood.  This pedestrian-friendly village encourages the social interaction of the cohousing residents and achieves their desire to have a minimal impact on the earth.  
 
 
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