Iyer Workshop exists because Indianapolis stopped building duplexes in 1962 and most of us still treat that as the natural order of things. It isn't. The block I grew up on in Mapleton-Fall Creek had eight duplexes on it, and the families who lived in them raised children, paid mortgages, and aged out of homeownership with their financial dignity intact. The missing middle is not a policy phrase. It's housing that this city has built before and can build again, and what's missing is mainly the architectural vocabulary that says yes to it.
Our work is mostly two-unit and stacked-flat infill on narrow Near Eastside lots — 30 to 40 feet wide, the same lots that neighbourhood preservationists have been told are too narrow for duplex use. They aren't. They are the right width if you accept that two front doors can share one street wall, that the rear yard can be private without being big, that the second household does not have to enter from the alley like a service entrance. We refuse the visual code that says renter-occupied units must be back-loaded or fenced off. Both addresses front the block.
We work like a workshop in the literal sense. Three architects, one long table, samples and detail mock-ups in the same room as the drawings. Our clients tend to be CDCs and mission-aligned small developers who are trying to add density without violating the existing street wall. We have spent a lot of time learning how to disguise a duplex as a single-family house from the curb, and equal time learning when not to — sometimes the right move is to celebrate the two front doors and trust the neighbourhood to recognise the typology.
“Two front doors can share a street wall. The missing middle is missing because we forgot how to draw it.”
The city's most urgent infill question is not 'what should a single-family house look like.' It is 'can a 30-foot lot carry two households without breaking the block.' We think the answer is yes, demonstrably, and we are building the evidence.
Beyond the drawings, we spend an unusual amount of practice time in front of zoning committees and neighbourhood associations, because the design argument and the policy argument are the same argument. Every Beville Twin we build is, intentionally, a piece of evidence we can hand to the next council member who is weighing a duplex amendment for an Indianapolis neighbourhood. We have testified eleven times in the last three years. We will do it eleven more. A practice whose work is the missing middle owes the missing-middle policy fight more than just drawings.