Southern Hills Housing Complex

Re-designing Southern Hills Housing Complex with Enhancing Environmental Sustainability.

By: Jabina Shrestha 

                                               

      Southern Hills Housing is the university housing provided by the Southern Illinois University- Carbondale, located at southeast of the campus. The housing provides accommodation for the single graduate students only. The housing consists of 22 buildings, which about 50 years old are providing efficiency, one bed room and two bedroom apartments. Most of the buildings are not n function, so for now they have left only 6 building out of 22 for the graduate students. By 2013, university of housing is planning to vacant the whole building of Southern Hills Housing Complex.

      The problems with the housing are many. As mentioned by Tom Woolf in 2004 SIU news, the major problem in Southern Hills housing is maintenance costs which is a significant economic drain. The buildings are out dated, thus they do not meet basic requirements of modern amenities. In addition to this, the buildings are not energy efficient due to aged materials and leakages. From building safety point of view, most of the buildings are not structurally safe. Materials and building components have started to deteriorate.  Apart from safety, the design and layouts of the housings/buildings are not convenient for disabled people. Although the buildings have outdoor spaces, the problems with these are that they are not well designed and well maintained. The spaces left in between the buildings are supplied only with few outdoor seating areas, which do not attract residents to spend their leisure time outdoors. Furthermore, others problems are lack of community space, recreational area, and improper transportation facilities.

      Although University’s plan is to phase out Southern Hills Housing (Woolf, 2004), the location, safety measures and quality of the housing sites are still appealing for graduate students housing at that place.  The thesis proposes re- design of Southern Hills Housing complex, in addition to address the fore mentioned problems.

      Housing, an important component of the built environment has a crucial role to play in the sustainable development of cities. The sustainability of housing development embraces the environmental, social, cultural and economic aspects of housing, which interconnects with one another. So the design will follow Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria to achieve true sustainability for present and future generation’s need. Furthermore, the design will emphasize sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy & atmosphere, material & resources, indoor environmental quality, location & linkages, awareness & education, innovative in design and regional priority.

In addition, the work will be informed through case studies as well as research in LEED certified building, to understand and clarify the green designing process.