Urban Design
What is “Opticos”
Social &
Environmental
Responsibility
Media Room
Opticos Wins Santa Fe's GreenWORKS Design Competition to Create Affordable, Green Housing in the HIstoric CIty Center
February 5, 2009—Berkeley, CA—Opticos Design, Inc., a Berkeley based, multi-disciplinary design firm, is pleased to announce that it is one of the two winners of the GreenWorks Design Competition sponsored by two Santa Fe development organizations--Enterprise Community Partners and Green Communities and the City of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Besides winning a cash prize, the intent is for the City of Santa Fe to build out the winning design in the city’s Westside Guadalupe Historic District.
The competition was juried by a panel that included Michael Pyatok—one of America’s most respected designers of affordable housing, and a leader in the development of participatory community design methods. Entries were encouraged to provide a site design for as many as six homes on the quarter acre lot with affordability, observance of a rigorous green building checklist and local building codes, scalability, respect for the local and regional historic character, and the incorporation of community input, as key challenges.
The winning Opticos design integrates 6 one and two-bedroom units on a quarter acre around four unique courtyard spaces and a shared community room which is the heart of the plan with its kitchen, library and large communal hall. Surprisingly, according to Opticos Founding Principal Daniel Parolek, one of the biggest challenges for such a project is often the local building code, "This courtyard housing design is green, affordable, and rooted in the history and culture of Santa Fe, and its shows that affordability and good design can go hand in hand. We are excited about this design because it is an example of how well-designed density can play a role in the evolution of existing neighborhoods to meet the growing market demand for attached housing. This project also demonstrates how cities can rethink their zoning regulations such as parking requirements, setbacks, densities, and other elements that are often obstacles for projects similar to this and replace them with an approach based on reinforcing walkability, a specific, appropriate form, and building types endemic to a region."
To call the Opticos plan green is something of an understatement. Green features include: passive solar heating and cooling; maximization of cross ventilation through site orientation and shallow building depths; use of local materials and construction techniques including recycled and reclaimed materials; solar panels, greenliving roofs that provide passive cooling, increased insulation and the cultivation of native plants that encourage renewal of locally scarce bird species; low/no voc finishes, drought tolerant indigenous landscaping; an edible organic community garden and roof runoff rainwater collection for use in irrigation.
Opticos was ideally suited to design in-fill urban space in a historically layered community like Santa Fe because its practice maintains a constantly evolving dialectic between macro and micro scale design. Daniel Parolek and his partner Karen Parolek are two of the pioneers of a radical new alternative to city and county zoning codes—Form-Based Codes (www.formbasedcodes.org)—a method of regulating development on the scale of an individual building and creating a predictable public realm to achieve a more unified community vision based on time tested forms of urbanism. Many cities small and large, including the City of Miami, Florida, are in the process of replacing antiquated zoning codes with Form-Based Codes. Opticos participates in this process on many levels including authoring Codes in collaboration with local governments, developers, and citizen groups in Grass Valley, Hercules and Benicia, California, Flagstaff, Arizona, and Columbia, South Carolina.
On a day-to-day level Opticos practices what they preach. They have created one of the thirty B Corporations (www.bcorporation.net) in California, and they are committed to the triple bottom line. Their offices are located in a mixed-use neighborhood center that is easily accessible by transit and bicycle. Over 80% of the staff take transit, walk, bike or use a combination of the above to get to work.
Since 2004, Opticos has played an important role in the ongoing evolu¬tion of the town of Seaside, Florida a community that Time Magazine described as "…the most astonishing design achievement of its era and one might hope, the most influential." They are currently at work on macro projects in the Lake Tahoe Region and Livermore, California, Flagstaff, Arizona, and Steamboat Springs, Colorado as well as individual buildings in Hercules, California, Seaside, Florida, and Buena Vista, Colorado. For Opticos, the dynamic balance between overall planning and architecture is essential to create livable communities on a human scale.
Opticos Design, Inc.
