Home, Sweet Home

2023
New Orleans, LA
Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design
Exhibition

Home, Sweet Home is a group exhibition by Tulane School of Architecture faculty that collects work from a special-topics seminar taught by Architecture and Social Innovation Fellow Emmanuel Osorno and a design-research project led by Architecture and Urbanism Fellow Omar Ali and Visiting Assistant Professor Nimet Anwar.

Evolutive Housing, curated by Omar Ali and Nimet Anwar, is a design-research project. The project considers the effects of gentrification and displacement through the lens of housing in the city of Houston. Housing availability in the city is not unlike the typical offerings of a suburb: single-family homes and multi-family apartment complexes of various sizes and scales, but as housing needs grow, Houston is increasingly looking to middle-scale housing types.

Cities across the country deal with housing availability issues due to restrictive zoning laws that hinder the application of multi-family housing at the middle scale. Houston is at the forefront of progressive strategies for filling this absence through its relaxed approach to zoning as well as the excess of spec middle-scale housing projects led by developers. This approach has shown to be useful but is keeping housing ownership out of reach to a large percentage of Houstonians. Houston serves as a critical case study that can be applied to cities throughout the country that are in the midst of addressing a scarcity of affordable housing. Architects can lead this conversation by partnering with Community Land Trusts and producing new strategies for socially-minded housing for not only some but for all.

This exhibit includes contributions from TuSA student Research Assistants – Joey, Tomshe, Jose Varela Castillo, and Olivia Vercruysse – and aerial cinematography from Nicholas LiCausi, TuSA Director of Fabrication. Funding support for this exhibit and project comes from the Tulane School of Architecture, Tulane's CELT Faculty Mentored Undergraduate Research Fund, and Tulane’s Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking and the Michael Sacks Chair in Civic Engagement and Social Entrepreneurship, and is held in collaboration with the Houston Community Land Trust (HCLT), an independent non-profit.

Project Team: Nimet Anwar, Omar Ali, Joey Tomshe, José Varela Castillo, and Olivia Vercruysse

Exhibit Photography: José Cotto

Related Project: Evolutive Housing





















About Us

NO OFFICE is a design and research practice focusing on architecture, urbanism, and everything in between. Much of our work seeks to reevaluate existing policies and conditions and to reframe them in a way that is more equitable and dynamic. Our ethos is to constantly challenge and rethink established systems rather than accept them as they are.
What We Do

NO OFFICE is a full-service architecture firm, licensed to practice architecture in the states of New York, Illinois, and Texas. We design buildings from feasibility and zoning through design and construction. We work on architecture, interiors, urbanism, and objects. We are open to discuss your ideas and bring them to life through drawings, visualizations, and models.