The Soft House, a live/work housing project designed by MIT Professor Sheila Kennedy & Team for the International Building Exhibition Hamburg has won the jury’s vote for Residential Low Rise category in the Architizer Design Awards. It was selected from over 1,000 entries in the Multi-Family Residential category.
The Soft House, which began in 2009 with funding from a MITEI Seed Fund, is an innovative work/live row housing project that demonstrates novel concepts in energy and architecture at the IBA in Hamburg, Germany. The four housing units include a responsive energy-harvesting textile façade and movable light-emitting interior curtains that enable occupants to reconfigure their domestic space, creating a flexible new model for carbon-sequestering architecture. Each unit has a terrace space, a PV canopy, and a vertical convection atrium layer that circulates air, brings daylight into the ground floor, and creates vertical views of the sky.