Chinatown GreenLofts: Vertical-Garden Modular Apartment Blocks

My name is Yohan, a high school senior from Boston. I live near this site and work in an architecture firm in Chinatown. I am passionate about architecture, environmental justice, and biophilic design, all of which inform this concept. Thank you for your time, and I hope you enjoy!

Initial Drafting:

1. Paper/Sketchbook
2. Pencil
3. Red Pen
4. Trace Paper

Final Draft:

1. Fusion 3D
2. Sketchup
3. AutoCAD
4. Illustrator & Photoshop
5. Procreate

Boston’s Chinatown is a vibrant cultural district and commercial hub, known for its diverse restaurants, markets, festivals, and institutions. However, many of its residents—primarily low-income immigrants—face higher temperatures, poor air quality, and limited green space. These environmental injustices are deeply rooted in a history of discriminatory planning: redlining classified the neighborhood as "undesirable," preventing investments in parks and infrastructure; urban renewal and highway construction displaced families and divided the neighborhood. Today’s urban heat and air-quality burdens are inseparable from a century of systemic neglect. This history directly informed my design.

In my design, I envisioned a fully modular housing system, composed of interchangeable prefabricated units. These can be expanded, combined, or downsized to suit Chinatown’s multigenerational families, from young children to elders aging in place.

Each unit includes:

1. High-performance reflective cladding
2. Integrated green roofs and vertical gardens
3. Passive ventilation channels and operable garden panels

Communal roof decks and public gallery walls provide flexible cultural and gathering space, which are scarce resources in Chinatown. This design honors the neighborhood’s entrepreneurial, cultural spirit while offering a flexible, climate-conscious housing blueprint. After sketching, I modeled the concept using SketchUp, AutoCAD, and Fusion 360.

My design features 4 main elements.

1. External Trellis
2. Sliding Vertical Garden Panels or Community Art Panels
3. Central Core
4. Modular Units
5. Plaza space

These elements are interventions in

Improving the environment/supporting local sustainability goals, Advancing racial equity, Promoting a community’s economic development.

Specifically, the external trellis structure (1) and sliding vertical garden panels (2) allow for the cooling mist generators and hanging gardens that enable people to inhabit and utilize this open space comfortably by dropping temperatures by almost 10 degrees. That environmental effect stimulates the plaza and balcony spaces in the concept as cool places for the community to gather and engage with storefronts on the bottom floors of the mixed-use building structure, as the modular units can be repurposed for commercial use.

In addition, the Sliding Panels (2), whether garden or art, serve as an engaging facade that passively helps cool the building and surrounding area, while remedying the absence of community art and display spaces in the Chinatown area. They are joined to the modular units by a track that allows residents to adjust the panels to actively control the amount and concentration of sunlight they receive on both sides.

The base of the building is on a reclaimed parking lot, where I chose to repurpose the impervious and heat-retaining asphalt for permeable pavement that is white to reflect sunlight and mitigate the urban heat island effect. I also incorporated significant planting bed spaces to improve the amount of tree cover in the area, which, as of now, is sparse.

In the structure, there are 2 module styles that vary at each level: a studio and a two-bedroom. Chinatown has a high proportion of multigenerational and extended families living together due to cultural norms and economic necessity. Many residents rely on shared housing arrangements to manage high rents, and a one-bedroom option would not serve the community. These modules can stack upon each other and have MEP systems that connect back into the central core. The modules also have varying dimensions depending on the unit, and offer balconies and extended green spaces outdoors in addition to the rooftop garden with a trellis.

The materiality of the Modules is essential in helping to further mitigate the impact of disproportionate heat. The modules consist of white reflective metal cladding that avoids absorbing any additional energy into the area. Otherwise, they are prefabricated units consisting of steel and CLT (cross-laminated timber). The choice of reflective metal cladding in the structure similarly reduces temperatures between 5-10 degrees.

The modules are ADA compliant, and the first floor is open for wheelchairs and accessible. Due to the modular nature of the trellis structure, there is an opportunity for an elevator to be added to the structure, considering the many elderly people of Chinatown.

I was inspired by these two precedents ( that connected water, plants, cooling, and facades all together to help mitigate heat and bad air quality (two things found in Chinatown). The facade/trellis in turn incorporates the Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) extensively due to its ability to grow rapidly, have a high transpiration rate, be able to cover panels to create shade, and be suitable/hardy in Boston's climate. Additionally, the panels can be used by residents and occupants as bases for vertical gardening and give a rare opportunity for green space in an area deprived of it.

All of these issues are solutions to environmental issues, but also further racial equity, because these issues were not created in a vacuum. Chinatown in Boston has a long history of disinvestment due to being a Chinese and Taiwanese community, from redlining, a lack of street trees, green spaces, pavement quality, and parks. My design is similarly at the confluence of these factors, making one distinction in trying to address and remedy them. Injustice is intersectional, and we must find solutions that are equally intersectional in adressing injustice, that is the philosophy and ultimately the thinking that guided my design.

Thanks for reading!