We are thrilled to share the news of an exciting project underway, co-lead by MWA Founder Nancy Kleppel! For nearly 5 years Nancy has been working on her first real estate development project as a co-founder of the ownership group, Live|Give|Play. The project, a 70-unit mass timber, Passive House rental apartment building in Northampton, MA, is through design development and entering the construction documents phase, planning for a spring 2023 groundbreaking.

Live|Give|Play was founded to transform how older Americans live with new buildings in walkable connected communities.

The challenge:

·      40 million baby boomers will turn 65 between now and 2030

·      30 million of them cannot afford to age in place due to insufficient post-retirement financial resources

The L|G|P solution:

·   Apartments in walkable neighborhoods of small cities

 ·  More vibrant lifestyles, lower costs, and greater sense of purpose than car-centric suburbs

The Live|Give|Play mission as carried out in the Northampton, MA development project concept has been lauded as a sustainable solution to a housing crisis for baby boomers by a number of publications, including Treehugger in this recent article, titled This Mass Timber Passivhaus Rental Building Is Perfect for Active Adults.

BKSK

With her strong professional background as a trained architect, with deep experience in business development, marketing and operations consulting, Nancy serves as serves as LGP’s architectural and design interface. In this role she recommended the architect for the project, BKSK Architects*, and has advised on team members and project participants throughout. As a project owner and sponsor Nancy participates in all design meetings and provides diverse advisory, moving the project forward on all fronts alongside partners David Fox and Patrick McDarrah.

At present L|G|P is pursuing equity investors and construction funding, learning about the twists and turns of the global economy along the way.

As Nancy says, “A career can take you to unexpected places where the thread connecting everywhere you’ve been to where you are currently going becomes apparent. Along the way you tie up all loose ends, bringing the pieces together, culminating in your life’s work. The feeling of pride and accomplishment and deep respect for all the people who played roles along the way is satisfying, humbling and awesome!”

*BKSK Partner, Julie Nelson will lead an MWA seminar alongside Nina Kinoti-Metz in January.

In case you missed it, The Architect’s Newspaper recently sat down with Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, co-founders of Grafton Architects to discuss their winning design for the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Material Innovation at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas. Farrell and McNamara won the competition in 2020, the same year they won the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

At a time when the AEC industry is buzzing about mass timber as the only renewable building construction material, the recent article takes a deeper dive into the design of the building, calling it “the first building designed in North America to be a masterclass in timber”.

Grafton Architect’s design is a response to the challenge to provide a building that is “redolent of the qualities of the forest, one that imagines anew timber and wood as materials” and is “hewn, carved, jointed, woven, and assembled, layered, laminated”.

Learn more about the design by reading the complete article titled, How Do You Hang an Auditorium From a Queen Post Truss?