The Olympic Village: High-Performance Housing Illegal to Build in the U.S.
Paris’ low carbon eco-district shines light on an outdated, fundamental shortcoming in US building codes
After American athletes arrive at their temporary Olympic Village lodging in Paris this summer, they may quickly forget about their portable air conditioners as they experience a level of urban living they most likely have never experienced back home. In fact, dating back to the first permanent Olympic Village at the 1952 Summer Olympic Games in Helsinki, athletes typically experience quality, high-performance housing when visiting host cities abroad, which illustrates major shortfalls in the housing options when building in the U.S.
The secret is not that American architects, builders, and developers lack the ability or interest to construct quality multifamily housing. The reason is tied to an overly restrictive building code in the U.S. Our outdated code has resulted in multifamily housing that is fundamentally different than the rest of the world and offers less daylight, ventilation, efficiency, and is more dependent on mechanical systems for heating and cooling because the building code in the United States is among the world’s most restrictive in limiting the height of single-stair housing, also known as point access blocks.
Modern Olympic Villages, also known as Athlete Villages, offer lessons on development because they strive to create high-quality walkable, pedestrian-friendly districts full of amenities, welcoming athletes, coaches, trainers, and officials to a new home away from home. Ever since the successful redevelopment of Barcelona’s harbor front for the 1992 Olympics, host cities have also used Olympic Villages as investment opportunities to create new mixed-use districts. Because point access blocks are the most common urban building blocks used around the globe, naturally, point access blocks are the most common housing typology used in Olympic Villages. Host cities through the decades, including Helsinki, Athens, London, Torin, Seoul, Barcelona, and most recently, Paris, have all used point access block housing that would be illegal to build in the U.S. When studying mixed-use Olympic Villages as a model for successful pedestrian-oriented development in the U.S., it becomes abundantly clear that major discrepancies exist between housing options in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
French planners envisioned the new Olympic Village district as a sustainable, permanent housing solution. The aerial photo of Paris’ Olympic Village includes building forms that have very different footprints from typical housing in the U.S. The point access blocks in Paris are a series of small footprint towers that are not typical of apartments in the U.S. That is because each tower, varying from 6 to 11-stories in height, is a point access block organized with units clustered around a central circulation core (containing a stair and elevator). This makes the buildings not compliant with the consensus building code restrictions embedded in the International Building Code (IBC) in the U.S. The IBC requires multifamily apartments taller than 3-stories to contain multiple exit stairs, resulting in longer and wider footprints, with units typically located on both sides of a central corridor connecting multiple egress stairs in what is known as a double-loaded corridor.
The efficient floor plate of Paris’ Olympic Village’s point access block housing boasts a range of benefits over North American double loaded corridors, which the athlete tenants will experience, including:
•Daylight, Cross-Ventilation, and Views:
With apartments designed to encourage airflow for passive cooling in the summer, all housing units in the Olympic Village are dual-aspect with windows on multiple sides allowing for cross-ventilation and ample daylight. During the day, the windows and ample daylight provided by windows on multiple walls will provide residents with city views and minimal lighting demand that will reduce energy use. Natural light has proven to reduce stress and anxiety, while the connection to nature helps with sleep quality, mood, and energy levels. When Paris cools down during the evening, this will allow residents to open windows and cross-ventilate units with the outside air because the average Parisian low in August is only 58 degrees F. Should residents sleep with the windows open, allowing breezes through the units, studies have shown that sleep quality is significantly better than with doors and windows closed, which results in higher CO2 levels.
•Urban Activation:
On a large scale, the Olympic Village is envisioned as a pedestrian-friendly district welcoming athletes, coaches, trainers, and officials to a new home away from home. Consistent with centuries of dense, walkable urbanism in Paris and around the globe, the use of mid-rise point access block housing with a small footprint was a natural choice for the housing typology of the village. The small footprint prioritizes the landscape, and efficient floor plates minimize the dead-space of long corridors commonplace in American apartments.
Large American apartment buildings can contain hundreds of units and will commonly stretch an entire city block with a single primary entrance and a second fire exit. The result is a street-front that is devoid of activity. Alternatively, multiple point access blocks housing the same number of residents distribute pedestrian activity more evenly through a street-front or greenway and create more access points, which eliminates dead zones of inactivity at ground level. To use the words of Jane Jacobs, point access blocks keep movement and security in the pedestrian realm intact with the concept of “eyes on the street” by spreading out activity across the site.
•Adaptability:
Planners of Paris’ Olympic Village envisioned the long-term life of the new neighborhood, so, in addition to the experiential benefits that the athletes living in the new housing will experience, architects designed spacious units that will be adaptable, so after the games, the Olympic Village housing will change into condominiums, rental apartments, and student housing. The Olympic Village is designed to house about 15,000 visitors for the Games, and after the event, the neighborhood will transition to its “Legacy Phase” and house about 6,000 residents. The unit plans above show how partitions will be removed from units so they can be adapted from being occupied by 4 to 8 athletes for the Games (red) to one and two-bedroom apartments with living and office spaces for permanent residents (blue). This type of unit variety and adaptability is rare in the U.S. where apartments are primarily single-bedroom and offer little adaptability, which shows the long-term vision of the planners of the games who designed the Olympic Village housing to have a long life.
Convergence
The North American divergence from a more European style egress method of only requiring a single-exit has its roots in conflagrations in the 19th century in cities built primarily using wood construction. Early building codes established requirements for multiple egress routes for people to escape fires in wood buildings at a time when few preventative safety measures existed, and while most components of the building code have evolved over the past 150 years, the egress requirements have essentially been trapped, unchanged in amber. Europe’s traditional use of noncombustible materials like brick and concrete for multifamily housing has created high levels of life-safety for single-stair mid-rise and high-rise buildings, and over the last decade, carbon reduction efforts and the rise of mass timber construction have seen a boom in the construction of single-stair mid-rise and high-rise housing projects. As fire prevention strategies have evolved and new technology has improved the efficiency of timber construction, France has made a push away from the use of noncombustible materials and adopted strict requirements for the use of timber, with all towers required to be constructed of mass timber for the first 8 floors before being supplemented with steel for upper levels.
The result on display at the Olympic Village in France, somewhat ironically, is that technology and building code evolution have resulted in single-stair apartments constructed of timber, the same building material that resulted in the U.S. originally requiring the use of multiple egress routes in apartments.
As the U.S. navigates dual housing and climate crises, we must examine strategies to improve urban living options and meet ambitious climate goals, and building code officials and policymakers must be compelled to evolve their respective building codes to create climate-friendly, high-performance housing. Reforming the building code and allowing for taller point access blocks, similar to Paris’ Olympic Village, is a great first step in unlocking high-performance housing, and beyond addressing fundamental egress requirements, the American building community needs to also seek out strategies to encourage other high-performance techniques like found in the Olympic Village including passive shading, geothermal cooling systems, and insulation strategies found in the housing that will make the athletes temporarily residing in Paris forget all about their portable air conditioning units they brought from home.
References:
Eliason, Michael 2020 Point Access Block Policy Brief — https://www.larchlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Larch-Lab-PAB_Policy-Brief.pdf
Hill, John, 2020 Frances Timber Mandate — https://www.world-architects.com/en/architecture-news/headlines/frances-timber-mandate
Logan, Chloe 2024 The building design that could crack the code on climate adaptation — https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/06/24/news/building-design-could-crack-code-climate-adaptation
Majeed, M.N., Mustafa, F.A., Husein, H.A. 2019 Impact of Building Typology on Daylight Optimization Using Building Information Modeling: Apartments in Erbil City as a Case Study — https://solarlits.com/jd/6-187#f1
Mendoza, Eduardo and Smith, Stephen Point 2024 Access Block Building Design: Options for Building More Single-Stair Apartment Buildings in North America — https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscape/vol26num1/ch25.pdf
Ross, Jason 2024 Paris Olympics: Forget Steel, for 2024 the Story Is Wood! — https://woodcentral.com.au/paris-leads-way-in-low-carbon-timber-venues-for-2024-olympics/
Smith, Stephen 2023 Why We Can’t Build Family-Sized Apartments in North America — https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america
