The Mexico-based practice SAC Studio de Arquitectura y Ciudad won first place in the Denver Architectural League’s ideas competition for riverfront micro-housing. SAC team members: Wyatt O’Day, Rodolfo Unda, João Barbosa, Jovana Grujevska, and Armando Birlain López.

On Friday the Denver Architectural League announced the winners of its micro-housing ideas competition. The contest solicited designs for an eight-unit building with micro-apartments that range from 250 to 375 square feet, sited on a narrow swath of riverbank in a sparse industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown. The league invited architects to imagine a structure so virtuous—net-zero, built on a leftover slope of undesirable land, virtually no parking, etc.—that its inhabitants might just be theoretical figments themselves. (Who wants to live in 250 square feet and be forced to take the bus to town?)

All in all, the competition drew 70 proposals, 25 of which came from abroad. And what do you know, the winners all hail from outside the United States, which makes sense given this country’s general discomfort with small (New York, San Francisco, and this place excepted). Read more!

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Roth Sheppard’s design competition is inspired by micro-units in Europe, such as this short-stay apartment in The Hague by Maff. Photo courtesy of Maff

Architects love to design micro-apartments, but do people love to live in them? Jeff Sheppard, principal of Roth Sheppard Architects, hopes so. He and his colleagues at the Denver Architectural League are betting that tiny units will appeal to young Denverites who find themselves priced out of the mortgage market and who want to live in dense neighborhoods. The league recently launched a tiny-dwelling design competition that adds up to a particularly tall order: an eight-unit net-zero building on a difficult slice of riverbank on the outskirts of downtown. At 375 square feet a pop, the units will definitely be more generous than the 220-square-footers planned for San Francisco and the 250 now allowed in New York—but still diminutive compared with Denver’s 500-square-foot prefab tiny Starbucks. Read more!

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