USING DESIGN TO HELP MARGINALIZED VOICES
Casa Marianella’s Posada campus serves immigrant women and children who arrived alone in Austin, many from South America or Africa, without connections or resources. Casa is a nonprofit that offers them a home for 3-6 months along with services to place children in school, find jobs, complete paperwork, and adjust to living in a new culture after often-traumatic experiences and journeys. Low Design Office is working pro bono with Casa to design a new community home that centers a gathering space able to accommodate residents, with new bedrooms upstairs that will enable Casa to house more families. The project weaves multi-cultural sensibilities into a cost-effective new building that over time will represent “home” for diverse groups of women and children.
Designed while at Low Design Office
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Location
Austin, TXGround
ExurbanProgram
HousingIntervention
New ConstructionServices
Architectural Design, Workshopping, Exploration & Preliminary Design -
Design Architect / General Contractor
Low Design OfficeLandscape Architect
FORGE -
renders by LowDo
The LowDO team, in collaboration with Forge Landscape Architects, have worked to develop a method to address the needs of Casa in a way that does not require them to pay design fees, as every dollar they raise will be necessary to support the construction of the new community building itself.
The photos to the right and below are from LowDO’s first engagement session with the current residents of the Posada homes, something orchestrated at the beginning of the design process. The project team felt it was important to gain an understanding of the people who will actually be using the spaces and to hear their voices directly. The leaders of Casa were initially hesitant to expose their residents in this way, but with respectful and thoughtful planning and the help of several interpreters, the workshop resulted in excitement and almost surprisingly clear directives for the project.