Anna Grace Calhoon and Rupan, second-year graduate architecture students in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s School of Architecture, were awarded third place in the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s 2024 Timber in the City: Urban Habitats Competition. 

The team’s submission was a part of Professor Tricia Stuth’s Housing America VI: The Unfinished and the Incremental studio held in the spring in collaboration with an integrations seminar led by Assistant Professor Jeremy Magner. The competition presented a challenge for students to delve into wood construction in Knoxville’s Depot District. 

Stuth had the studio focus on the Regas Building, an 1891 five-story building originally named the Caswell Harris Building, which now stands two-stories tall and serves as a non-profit resource center and headquarters to Knoxville Leadership Foundation. 

“The building’s history has evolved over the century with the nearby train station drawing people into the city and, later, the interstate driving families into the suburbs,” said Stuth. “Soon after, the building suffered a damaging fire, its context had changed so drastically that there seemed no reasonable argument for refurbishing the building and the top three stories were unceremoniously removed.” 

With the past decades seeing a resurgence of Downtown Knoxville, Calhoon and Rupan reimagined the building with an additional eight-story heavy timber structure offering housing. The pair drew upon personal experiences of housing’s economic and social concerns that have impacted them as out-of-state students. 

Rupan, an international student from India, proposed one of their target audiences after her own experience struggling to find affordable housing upon moving to Knoxville.  

“Old Knoxville itself had a history of immigrants, Irish immigrants in particular, so we drove off of that,” she said. “Between the history and my personal experience, it showed us that we need to cater to international students, particularly for housing. We also saw that the area has a lot of unhoused individuals, and the nearby temporary shelter is always full. There is a lack of institutions that are trying to provide adequate housing.” 

Calhoon added that the hope would be that the international students and young families, although maybe in different life stages, would be able to communicate with each other and share life experiences.  

“The project was centered around communal space for people to talk with each other,” she said. Because of this, the pair designed an eight-story timber structure with porches, liminal tracks and interstitial crosswalks to encourage interactions amongst the tenants. 

The pair drew inspiration from UT’s Art + Architecture building’s open atrium to allow individuals to connect by seeing each other across walkways. 

“It would allow these different age groups to come into accidental meetings, where you bump into a person and have a chat in community spaces like a shared kitchen or gathering room,” said Rupan. “We were focused on creating these little moments and spaces in our design rather the architecture being the dominant hand of the whole project.” 

The pair considered the financial situations of their audience and challenged themselves to consider cost saving solutions in their design that would keep tenants bills low. 

Their design included an all-electric ductless HVAC system (offset by a rooftop solar array) with heat recovery ventilators for residential units to allow users individual control over their environment and indoor comfort levels. Residents will be encouraged to use passive systems that lower energy consumption through ceiling fans and cross ventilation. The pair included a green roof to assist in rainwater management, collecting and re-circulating water within the building for secondary uses. 

“I really appreciate the commitment of Anna Grace and Rupan to tackle the premise of ‘integration’ beyond the logical or practical coordination of building systems,” said Magner. “Their project manages to bring a complex set of technical and social aspirations together in hopeful and imaginative ways that produce synergy between people, buildings, and environment.” 

The pair began to consider ways timber could be incorporated into the design where they would traditionally use steel or concrete frames. Calhoon said the pair wrestled with technical demands of exposing the structure of the building, but ultimately loved the richness and warmth that the material added. 

Jurors for the competition included Omar Al-Hassawi, ‎Washington State University; Erik Barth, Wentworth Institute of Technology and Gensler; and Veronica Madonna, Athabasca University. 

The competition is administered by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and sponsored by the Softwood Lumber Board. 

Housing America is an ongoing series of studios, led by Stuth and Professor Ted Shelton, that use housing as a vehicle to consider how architects are to operate ethically in contemporary society.