Highrise Island Housing in Honolulu

초록

This paper presents the design exploration of housing flexibility and diversity in urban fabrics of Honolulu. The exploration began with the premise that high-rise housing in Honolulu is not a viable solution within such a unique natural and urban setting. Students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have challenged the issue by testing and experimenting on a variety of distinct housing alternatives within the studio. This study laid the groundwork of each student’s design development throughout the project, upon completion a variety of different designs and solutions were proposed responded to distinct themes and problems. In this article, different types of housing prototypes and their distinctive clustering as a unique “urban village” as a whole are shown, and the final model of the studio as a collective form is presented. This exploratory piece of research and pilot design study is intended to examine existing theoretical research and design precedents by revisiting their issues and problems and suggesting a new high-rise housing alternative for contemporary housing in Honolulu.