SEED is a Sustainable and Elegant Equity Development supporting home ownership in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Our team was motivated by the fact that the project was identified as affordable workforce housing aimed at providing individuals a piece of equity in a persistently underserved urban neighborhood with inadequate access to quality housing, public amenities, and healthy food options.

The design makes a substantial contribution to correct these deficits by building a community of 25 beautiful homes, which are also affordable for home ownership. We reconstituted the long vacant urban lots and established a cohesive presence that was more than a series of individual domestic buildings. The street facade provides demarcations for each inhabitant to identify with their space within a unified urban massing that holds together as a single project facing two different streets. We used a lightweight concrete panel rainscreen to link all three buildings, establishing a common facade with durable materiality. Projecting custom box-bay windows punctuate the facade and give the building a strong identity within the urban context. A shared courtyard garden serves as a collective oasis with vertical circulation along the internal perimeter, imbuing that space with consistent foot traffic and visual connectedness to the residential community.

SEED complies with US EPA Energy Star and Enterprise Green Communities, utilizing at least 20% less energy than conventional projects. Units are affordable regarding anticipated utility costs—the team’s decisions to incorporate energy recovery ventilators, water-saving devices, and self-shading custom box-bay windows had a positive impact on the building’s ability to meet those standards.

For more details, see:
Designed for Habitat: New Directions for Habitat for Humanity by David Hinson and Justin Miller

Habitat NYC Project Page