Vertical Village
A living building for a co-living, co-working community
Vertical Village is a multi-storey mixed-use adaptive reuse proposal for the iconic James Smith Building on Wellington’s lower Cuba Street. The proposed new spatial programme incorporates co-living, co-working, and community spaces, as well as a rooftop garden, green atrium, and ground floor public market. The project is guided by the Living Building Challenge regenerative design framework, with each space designed to promote meaningful connections between residents, the community, and nature's living systems.
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The new spatial programme includes 15 apartments ranging from 1 to 4 bedrooms with both one and two-storey apartments. The co-living and co-working environment provides residents with shared access to facilities such as three kitchens with multiple dining spaces, co-working spaces, bike storage, and a variety of meeting rooms. These facilities are complemented by green spaces, a gym, a theatre, recreational rooms, and laundry. A key aspect of my design process was focusing on the transitional spaces, connecting shared spaces to the resident apartments. The decision to use a co-living and co-working concept alongside the LBC framework was to aid in the creation of a foundation that provides a strong sense of community within the building. Additionally, the co-living concept has become increasingly appealing to younger generations as housing shortages are settling in. This concept means that residents are able to reduce their living expenses by sharing common facilities and creating more bedrooms within apartments.
The design replaces the need for large individual kitchens and encourages the use of shared common spaces. I wanted to further develop the idea of a co-living apartment by creating a front porch area outside every apartment, where residents can relax while also being in a public area that is still their own. A key feature of the building is the atrium that cuts through the middle of the building. The atrium provides light into the interior and additionally connects the rooftop green space all the way down to the ground floor. The second, third, and fourth floors are connected through two mezzanine floors that provide views from above down to the lower levels. I have
chosen to communicate my final design project using the framework of LBC. Using each petal to reveal essential aspects of my design proposal speaks to different requirements of the challenge. I have created an exploded floor plan drawing that helps to identify exactly where each detail is located across the floors, demonstrating how the spaces interact.
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