More details on Studio Cadena's Marfa Texas Housing finalist entry

Located in the Chihuahuan Desert in Texas, the small town of Marfa currently has no property zoned for multi-family housing. It's not that multi-family housing zoning isn't permitted, it just doesn't exist...yet. And with increasing tourism in Marfa, housing for full-time residents might become less accessible with the presence of vacation rentals and part-time residents.

Design Marfa organized the Marfa Multi-Family Housing ideas competition to address these issues and to also encourage more housing-design projects for the city.

Brooklyn-based practice Studio Cadena shared with us their finalist entry, "THE LONG HOUSE". The winners are expected to be announced in the next few days, so until then, let's sneak a peek at Studio Cadena's design below.

Project description:

"Multifamily housing for the city of Marfa, Texas. Given its remote location and relative isolation, Marfa has a defining relationship with its surrounding desert landscape that shapes its experience of place. It is essential to reinforce this strong link and provide housing that is interwoven with its site." 

"The Long House adopts a flat and horizontal design that preserves a sense of immediacy to its surrounds without sacrificing the needed density."

"By hybridizing two different building typologies, the courtyard house and the standalone house, a new kind of housing form is shaped to respond to the peculiarities of Marfa’s cultural, economic, and natural context."   

"A long, low, linear building divides the sites into a series of open communal spaces – a series of open courts. These spaces, protected by building on three sides, result in semi-private communal areas ideal for shared living, yet remain connected to the street."

"Rather than an object on the site, the building becomes a thickened line set within, and softly buffered from the street, by its surrounding landscape."