Co-housing

A planned suburb. In the first decade of the 20th century Houston doubled in size, and wealthy professionals left the crowded center for new suburbs at its edges. In 1911 the land speculator John W. Link's Houston Land Corporation platted Montrose, the city's first planned subdivision: 3,370 acres of prairie southwest of downtown, about 1,000 lots, and more than $1 million of streets and utilities. When it was finished it held over half of Houston's paved streets.

The plan was organized around four boulevards with esplanades (Lovett, Montrose, Yoakum and Audubon Place), meant for mansions facing the planted medians. But Link didn't intend the neighborhood to be exclusive: the lots between the boulevards were sized and priced for middle-class families, and a streetcar ran to downtown. Link built the first mansion himself, on Montrose Boulevard in 1912; it later became the first building of the University of St. Thomas.

Decline and counterculture. After the Second World War, returning soldiers moved their families to new subdivisions farther out, and by the 1960s Montrose was largely elderly. Mansions came down and houses were turned to commercial use. Low rents, duplexes and apartments then drew people looking to escape the South's social norms: gay men and women, artists, bohemians. By the 1970s tattoo parlors, gay bars and sex shops had replaced the grocers and boutiques on Lower Westheimer, and the first Pride parade in 1979 made Montrose the heart of Texas counterculture.

Pressure. Photographs from walking the neighborhood in early 2017: older low buildings, many converted to offices, next to the large podium apartment blocks going up along the Southwest Freeway (US 59).

Nearly a quarter of Montrose's homes date from before 1940, but a fifth were built in the single decade 2000–2009 alone: the neighborhood was being rebuilt faster than at any time since it was first laid out.

Rents in Montrose stayed a few hundred dollars a month above the Houston average, and both climbed by about a third between 2011 and 2015. The neighborhood that had been Houston's refuge for people on the margins was becoming one of its most expensive.

The site is a group of blocks around the Menil Collection, the museum campus founded by John and Dominique de Menil. Much of the surrounding land is owned by the Menil Foundation, which keeps its bungalows painted the same grey and rents them out, so the museum sits inside an ordinary neighborhood of small houses and big trees.

The housing fills the blocks between the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel and Richmond Avenue, where the grey bungalows already are. It keeps their pattern of small buildings in a field of trees rather than replacing it with a single large block.

The studio, titled Happy Together, began with single units, each built on one organizational type. This duplex already has the project's basic move: bedrooms in pairs around a shared bathroom, opening onto a kitchen, a long dining table and a terrace that everyone uses.

The next exercise stacked and linked units into larger clusters. Here the L-shaped units wrap small open courts and connect by a bridge, the start of the bars-around-courtyards arrangement in the final plans.

Each bar is one room deep plus a shared strip. Bedrooms are paired around shared bathrooms along the street side; the courtyard side is a single open run of kitchens, long dining tables and sitting areas that the residents of each cluster hold in common. The bars angle to follow the site, and on the upper floors they bridge across the street to tie the blocks together.

One continuous roof slopes across the whole project, from four stories at its low end to nine at its high end, so the scale steps down toward the neighborhood's houses.