Owned by one family and located on a 16.5 acre riverfront site just north of downtown Nashville, Tennessee, the Neu Development planning project is a complex enterprise, with 800 units of loft housing dominating the built program. The ambition of this plan is to create a fluid, synthetic landscape where the mix between built form and open space creates new possibilities of interactivity among the residents and visitors. Based on sustainable logic, micro-ecologies of organized phenomena (car, unit, plant materials, etc) are designed to produce a diversity of conditions that allow for change and development across time.

The existing conditions of the site include a number of buildings constructed in the early 20th C for the Neuhoff Meat Packing Plant. The clients have asked for these buildings to be converted to housing, cultural centers, non-profit schools, and small restaurants that will serve as infrastructure to the new housing to be built over 20 years. Along with this sense of urban conservation, the project will work as a remediator of brownfield land (non-toxic, just left-over) for the purposes of explaining ecological concepts in the landscape.

The housing will work around a variety of typologies including point loaded floor-through lofts, nested walk-ups, point loaded towers, and linear garden apartments ranging in size from 1000 to 2500 sf. The various types propose massing of new blocks that are based on view corridors from Neuhoff to the downtown skyline, on accessibility to the Cumberland River, on scalar diversity, and on the demand for discrete buildings to be developed with different architects - thus creating a coherent set of potential differences to the architecture. Parking will be deployed under and around each building with the ambition to reduce as much on grade parking as possible.

Project team: Neil Denari, Paola Vezzulli, Steven Epley, Duks Koschitz, Joe Willendra, Stefano Paiocchi