The corner of Germantown Avenue and Coulter Street in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood is currently occupied by a small parking lot behind a short row of shops on the campus of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. But through a nascent partnership between the church and the Northwest Community Land Trust, the site could someday be transformed into a mixed-use apartment building with affordable housing units serving neighborhood families.
Last fall, a group of fourth-year students in the undergraduate architecture program had a chance to run with that concept as part of a community design workshop called Germantown Housing Justice. The studio, led by Presidential Associate Professor of Architecture Rashida Ng at Weitzman and chair of the undergraduate architecture program, and co-taught by Brian Szymanik, principal of Studio 6mm and a lecturer at Weitzman, directed students to “consider opportunities to redress historic racial inequities in housing while promoting resilience, supporting climate adaptation, and fostering healthy communities.”
The seed of the studio was planted when Ng was contacted by John Elliott Churchville, who founded the Northwest CLT in 2021 along with Rev. David Morris, the rector at St. Luke’s. Like other community land trusts, the Northwest CLT is designed to acquire property and sell or lease it to lower-income families in the neighborhood, with the goal of keeping housing permanently affordable. While the site on St. Luke’s campus isn’t ready to be developed just yet, Churchville thought a visioning exercise could help build some momentum for the CLT’s work. A developer and student himself—Churchville is enrolled in Thomas Jefferson University’s MS in Real Estate Development program—he also wanted to give students free reign to explore their own style.
“I wanted the students to be able to do what they wanted to do, take advantage of the space, and be bold enough to think about their own ideas,” Churchville says.
The partnership between Weitzman and the CLT actually began before the semester started. Last summer, Anastasia Osorio, a PennPraxis fellow and graduate student in City and Regional Planning spent several months researching Germantown demographics to build data that the CLT could use to support its work. In August, the undergraduate architecture program and the CLT signed a memorandum of understanding outlining a few responsibilities for each. As part of the MOU, the school promised to provide “three to six hypothetical design proposals for multifamily housing and mixed-use development on the site.” Students spent the fall semester creating those proposals.
Read more at Weitzman News.
