Integrating prefabricated wood construction, social space planning, and Passive House standards, the University of Arkansas Community Design Center creates an energy-efficient and community-oriented living environment

Sheridan, Arkansas, USA

University of Arkansas Community Design Center’s Rural Pocket Neighborhood exemplifies a holistic approach to affordable housing by merging social, material, and energy systems.

This pocket neighborhood for a rural timber production community in central Arkansas triangulates three concepts: addressing local construction market failures through prefabricated off-site construction with high energy efficiencies, creating housing affordability, and building a sense of place that promotes sociability.

For its conception and design, the project has been awarded a 2024 American Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

The pocket neighborhood is a new real estate product for middle America substituting shared neighborhood greens for front yards and car parking in garages at the front of the house.

Pocket neighborhood planning introduces a “shared street” with rain gardens and bioswales in the space of the street and alley.

The “green street” reduces the need for hard-engineered and costly underground drainage—40 percent of street costs in the southeast. Here, the street is an ecological and social asset rather than a liability.

Prefabricated housing construction incorporates SIPs (Structural Insulated Panels) technology, a wood-and-foam sandwich panel that recycles wood waste streams with insulative R-values meeting Passive House net-zero standards.

Rural regions have suffered from the public sector’s financialization of services and the withdrawal of social care for youth, seniors, and families, privatizing services for only those who can afford to pay.

South Arkansas lacks both an adequate supply of housing and a diversity in residential environments, reinforcing instability in regional quality of life.

A powerful counter to the absence of social care fixes is housing-neighborhood types that can readily support various levels of cooperative living.

The average American house is 2,400 square feet (223 square meters).

While all five neighborhood house types here are under 2,000 square feet (186 square meters) and some, at 800 square feet, their “living transects” incorporate extensive covered building frontages—porches, galleries, balconies, and patios.

Generously sized building frontages add qualitative semi-private living space at 25 percent of the cost of conditioned space.

The deployment of shared neighborhood greens and street spaces create a pedestrian and play network where the neighborhood template adds both value and social capital. The resultant density is twice that of surrounding subdivisions. The constraints inherent to SIPs technology compels a one-volume formal solution to achieve affordable building design.

The three-pronged concept creates cost effectiveness while delivering more services and a meaningful range of public/semi-public/semi-private/private spaces in a compact neighborhood footprint.

The automobile does not dominate the neighborhood as it usually does in subdivisions.

The right housing environment may be the single most useful tool for building community resiliency and security amidst rural precarity.

Project: Rural Pocket Neighborhood: Affordable Housing in Sheridan, Arkansas
Architects: University of Arkansas Community Design Center
Design Team: Stephen Luoni, Victor Hugo Cardozo Hernandez, Shail Patel, Kayla Ho, Saxon Ewalt, Morgan Clupka, Michael Schmidt, Jubal Young, Nathan Crofts, Chloe Hendrick, Callie Barnett, Abigail Price, Riku Suzuki, Kayla Hart, Mackenzy Moore, and Landon Butler
Client: U.S. Department of Agriculture – Forest Service
Photographers: University of Arkansas Community Design Center