With the 3^rd International Architecture Competition for Sustainable Housing, Living Steel members felt that it was just as important to plan a sustainable community in which housing would be built as it was to plan the housing design itself. So an additional element was added into the competition parameters, a design Charrette tasked with the design of the community master plan.

Team Eero Aarnio (Daniel Jenkins, ECD Architects, United Kingdom; Lourenço Gimenes, FGMF Arquitetos, Brazil; Pekka Pakkanen, Huttenen-Lipasti-Pakkenen Architects, Finland; Philip Wells, Hugh Broughton Architects, United Kingdom; Vimal Jain, ARCHITECTURE PARADIGM, India; Fabio Cibinel, modostudio, Italy) was selected as the winner in the Charrette, by a jury of their peers, that is, the other contestants. Following is a description, in their own words, of how the plan was conceived and what they hope to achieve with it.

We started looking at the original site plan that we were given. We looked at the qualities that it had for things that we wanted to pursue and things that we wanted to dismiss. We started laying out sheets of paper, doing brainstorming exercises throwing down as many ideas to see what sticks and what's best. We looked at trying to balance the site with housing and infrastructure, community facilities, how people would permeate through the site, densities of the site and also how the site structure could be broken down or diffused to allow people to pass through. We looked at the site area that was given as the core of the development but holistically master planned for the growth of the community so that it could be phased up in developments.

First of all, we tried to understand what role the new development might play in the whole city scheme. We have here the central business district (top of image) and this is the new part of town (across river). We assumed that a way the city could grow would be to the southeast because looking at the history of Cherepovets, it seems to tend in that direction. We predicted that we could connect our site (bottom left) with the potential growth of Cherepovets. The site is surrounded by forest and isolated, but we assumed that it is part of a bigger community, and it should be considered as part of an overall growth of the whole scheme rather than an isolated element.

We decided to implement here the basic infrastructure that would not only serve the new area, but would promote and give consistently to the growth taking place in the southeast as well as compliment the existing infrastructure in the city. We planned to put in a recycling plant, combined heat and power systems and extended the existing tram lines to the city and use the lower capacity transport means to connect this area. We don't want everyone to have to drive to their work all the time, and these small buses and the trams could connect the new development with Cherepovets.

So we're looked at the site, and we have this pre-existing fabric and one of the things that we were discussing is that we wanted to create activities that would answer the need of future inhabitants but would promote growth to second and further phases. Mainly those core activities would connect all those areas but would also be continued in a public space or open park to provide passage. We didn't want to take all the amenities from the existing sites so we pulled the space all the way through to create activities for sports and other activities in winter and summer. In this way, there is a way through for those who have their summer houses there already, and we wanted them to feel that they are not being overtaken and cut off by the future neighbourhoods.

We started looking at the primary access from Cherepovets, and we wanted that to be a green space that linked between the existing and new areas. And from there we looked at secondary roads that would be heavily planted coming through the site and linking from the existing area all the way through the park area and on to the lake.

We assumed that almost no house would be able to have direct views to the lake so we tried to keep the those views accessible in the public spaces so that everyone could enjoy that view. We kept the ponds and ditch that runs through the site and created another green buffer zone between the main conglomeration of houses and the lake. Those in red are the tertiary or third-level connections that give access to clusters of six houses each. We specifically did not call them roads because we wanted each cluster to be able to inhabit their own part of their street for kids to play on and other activities.

Green spaces would also be pedestrian paths so that you are not actually tied up in a rigid road grid, but the pedestrians can go all through the area. We also were trying to reduce infrastructure needs, condensing all of the traffic to the main road so that vehicles are not crossing all over, keeping the pedestrian access and permeability all across the site always to this core centre area.

Then we have some specific nodes, the upper ones are circulation nodes which connect roads and streets, and the bottom nodes are activity nodes for sports, leisure and community. We assume that the fiord is a rather interesting spot on the site and it could be considered as noble as the waterfront itself, so condensing leisure and sports activities would be nice there.

We started putting all these ideas on the site plan, and it set the site plan area. We put the green space that runs across the top on the main access road, and then the ditches that run through the site and then the green buffer zone to the bottom of the site.

We looked at the whole community as though it were the hierarchy of a leaf in relation to the tree so we have the main artery, the trunk the branch, the twig and the leaf and the leaf could be the plot of land with the house on it. And we also looked at clusters on how all this might work and how people might work through it.

So we started to design clusters of houses that could work in this way and keep the transparency through the site from the existing settlements above. This slide shows how those that run through the existing areas down through the site are maintained and they sort of filter out towards the bottom with events happening at the bottom. There could be jetties for yachts and a pool or ice hockey rink and these things happen all the way along the coast.

The main circulation area is broken up to allow transparency through the existing areas.

We felt that to maximize the space, the neighbourhoods had to be more compact planning. We cut down the plots to 600 to 800 m2 and the balance of the area was used to create the larger and smaller community spaces that everyone could collectively own and enjoy. This slide shows the relationship between the open areas and the built areas, the allotted plot areas. On the right side we have the denser areas, and on the left, less dense. The reason for that is that the right side has access to the main roads. Our idea was to keep the passage open for these summer houses to use their park and roads that they always use to get to the beach and to create this central park for the housing. Another idea is that this is to be a more urban space.

These images are just some of the first sketches of this urban space, with the public buildings, the shops, schools and the other activities that are needed to support a living, working community.

This image shows the open park that is flowing through the housing fabric. The direction of this movement comes from the existing beach. The existing ditches would be turned into this system of ponds and links of water with mini-parks, trees and playgrounds so that all of this pathway would form this organism that has its own rules but creates these small interesting places.

Then we come to the smallest scale - the clusters for the housing. There is a common courtyard for children to play, small parties or other activities and then behind the central area people can have their own courtyards. Here we are introducing a scheme of duplexes, but the housing design can be flexible, but organized in such a way that each house affects the other, in terms of sunlight and shade, as little as possible.

One of the things we haven't prescribed is to have exact same plot sizes for each plot so that people can determine what size plot they want, adding diversity to the development. The plots also have been designed so that the houses can share common walls or they can be totally independent.

So actually what we try to promote is lots of green and community spaces and a pedestrian-friendly circulation system infrastructure that would be suitable for this site specifically because it is so distant from the urban fabric of the every day city life. People that settle here can enjoy a different type of living-one that is more connected to nature and the natural environment.