Missing middle housing design contest winners address gap in local housing

The winners of the state’s first missing middle housing (MMH) design competition, New Housing on the Block, have been announced.

Agatha Frisby, AIA, NCARB, of Prairie Centre Architecture & Consulting in Park River was the grand prize winner for her design, Sage House. Honorable mentions went to Rhet Fiskness, AIA, NCARB, and Mitch Abrahamsen of Rhet Architecture in Fargo. The Student Design Competition winner is Noah Boen, a fourth-year Architecture student at NDSU from Olivia, Minn. His design is called Easy Estates.

AARP North Dakota and RL Mace Universal Design Institute worked closely with area design professionals, the NDSU Department of Architecture, and the City of Fargo, to develop the competition in response to the lack of affordable, aging-friendly, and attainable housing for Fargo’s growing population of aging adults.

The competition also was supported by the North Dakota Department of Commerce. A panel of judges from the architecture and construction fields selected the winners. . A $5,000 cash prize was awarded to the winning professional design entry, and the student winner received a scholarship.

The competition was open to students and professionals in architecture, design and construction, as well as builders and developers. Contestants could design a duplex, triplex, or cluster community. Two sites in Fargo were chosen as hypothetical locations for the proposed projects: Site A offered the opportunity for a duplex or triplex to be built, and site B was for a cluster development.

Less costly than a standard, single-family home, missing middle homes range up to 1,500 square feet and offer affordability and ease of maintenance. If designed appropriately, with universal and age-friendly features. MMH also allows safe and independent living for many years, helping avoid moves to expensive care settings.

Boen noted that he was attracted to the competition because it set out to solve a problem, "When a problem is recognized in the design field, it is up to the entirety of the field to submit solutions ... which leads to more iterations and eventually the solution to the problem. This proposed solution if mine is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction."

Local and national experts judged the competition and included former Fargo City Commissioner Arlette Preston; Dr. Susan Schaefer Kliman, a registered architect with 30+ years of industry and academic experience; Dave Flohr, Executive Director of the North Dakota Housing Finance Agency; Dr. Margaret Fitzgerald, a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at NDSU; Kathi Schwan, AARP Regional Volunteer Director of the Central States, and West Fargo Planning & Zoning commissioner; and Paul Gleye, retired NDSU Architecture Department faculty member.

To learn more about the competition go to www.betterlivingdesign.org/nhob-home.

See full displays of the winning designs here:

• NHOB Sage House_AFrisby
• Noah Boen_Design.pdf