Air Stoop

Embedding Public Common Space Into Modular High-Rise Apartment

Instructor: Scott Erdy

Fall 2020

In America, a stoop is a small staircase ending in a platform and leading to the entrance of an apartment building. Traditionally, in North American cities, the stoop served an important function as a spot for brief, incidental social encounters. Homemakers, children, and other household members would sit on the stoop outside their home to relax, and greet neighbors passing by. In Jane Jacobs’s book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she includes the stoop as part of her model of the self-regulating urban street. Here, the key problem with the existing high-rise building is that there is no intermediate space for social interaction as other street-level housing typologies can provide such as the front porch and a stoop space. Typical high-rise spaces are condensed and spatially monotonous that people just want to get into their private space or to get out of the building as soon as possible. You cannot feel the street vibe in this building. My aim is to bring back the idea of stoop from the street level as a social device for the high-rise apartment and a continuous stoop space will become the public common space as a strong vertical and horizontal bond to provide a dynamic street vibe for everyone.