Description

There is a lack of adequate housing, and especially housing that is affordable and is able to respond to the needs of a changing society. In many aspects of life, the concept of sharing would appear to obviate the need to own material goods oneself and to promote the emergence of immaterial values such as mutual assistance. In the realm of housing, similar concepts have existed for many years, and can be traced back to the beginning of the 19th century, albeit motivated by quite different reasons. Community-oriented projects respond to changes in society and often arise in times of economic crises and social upheaval. Selected key buildings and their architectural concepts continue to influence developments in housing to this day.

Lines of development

The first projects built with a community focus arose in the cities of the industrial age. Robert Owen’s “Industrial Village” in New Lanark, Scotland (1818) is commonly seen as the origin of community-oriented housing.[1] The reformation of a cotton mill and its extension to include a variety of communal facilities culminated in the development of an early utopian socialist vision for cooperative living structures.[2] Although not all his ideas were realised, his models envisaged dense housing structures with additional functions for communal use that were meant to improve the daily lives of the inhabitants through mutual support and therefore to bring about a long-term improvement of the living conditions of the workers’ families.

“Palaces for the workers”

In the early 20th century, inner-city housing blocks and garden city settlements arose around similar principles as cooperatively organized housing projects. By contributing their own savings, workers and civil servants became shareholders of these projects and took an active part in the development and management of the residential buildings.[3] These cooperative buildings also signalled the first involvement of architects in the building of workers’ housing, and also marked a shift away from the former class-specific design of housing, as the official client was now the cooperative. Protagonists such as Alfred Messel, Hermann Muthesius and Bruno Taut developed architectural designs that signalled a new, democratic housing principle and aimed to create a sense of identity. Communal spaces for recreation, and educational facilities as well as meeting places, were incorporated into the settlements. In most cases, the buildings were part of an overall design concept that gave aesthetic expression to the social qualities. The reformers’ ideas were translated into a corresponding built form, asserting their presence as “palaces for the workers” in their urban surroundings.[4]

Minimum – maximum

The increase in the numbers of “modern city dwellers” during this period gave rise to architectural concepts that proposed the sharing of certain residential functions. As part of the emancipation movement and the ideas of the women’s rights activist Lily Braun, houses with communal kitchens sprung up in cities throughout Europe, which replaced the individual kitchens in the apartments with a communal kitchen for everyone. The intention was to reform the traditional family unit and customary distribution of roles in the household.[5] In 1928, the “Narkomfin” building in Moscow, designed by the architects Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis, reflected these new ideas on equality and collective living in a kind of communal house. In both the above, the individual space of the apartments was minimised while the communal space was maximised. Another experimental vision of collective housing was the “Isokon Building” built by the architect Wells Coates in London in 1934. Here the minimalist apartments were serviced and supplied by a series of collectively commissioned suppliers. This early modernist boarding house of sorts has been home to numerous famous personages including Marcel Breuer, Agatha Christie, Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and James Stirling.[6]

Co-housing settlements

Owen’s original idea of combining the neighbourly qualities of the village with urban life were resurrected in the 1960s in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and later also in the USA.[7] Settlements were built as own initiatives that were financed and run by the residents. As a collection of several private and various communally used buildings and spaces, they neither adhered to the typology of the single-family home, nor that of the multistorey apartment building. Their architecture was designed expressly to promote a sense of community. The settlements have a modest size, varying degrees of privacy in the public areas and a moderate degree of urban density. They are often perceived as closed settlements because their design and structure rarely relate to their spatial surroundings.

Collective custom build projects and local neighbourhoods

Collective custom build projects first began to form in the 1970s, also in Germany, as a means of collectively financing, planning and building homes without employing the services of professional building developers.[8] They also arose as an alternative to mainstream forms of living in society. Often founded by groups of friends, they are frequently centred around a specific ideal, for example ecological building principles and ways of living or alternative social living constellations.[9] For a long time, this form of project development was regarded as lacking a professional basis and it took time for its relevance for living in the city to be acknowledged. Pioneering cities such as Tübingen and Freiburg in Germany have experimented since the 1990s with different methods of developing local neighbourhoods through private building collectives. This period was especially valuable in Germany as many fundamental aspects were identified that have since helped subsequent building collectives.[10] Today, collective custom build projects have grown out of their niche existence and are now recognised as making a contribution to sustainable urban development. Such projects are often to be found as part of inner-city redensification measures, the conversion of buildings or wasteland sites, and neighbourhood development and revitalization programmes. In Germany – and elsewhere – ambitious projects and innovative architectural concepts are being developed that offer new answers to the current problems of housing production.

Learning from …

The underlying economic, legal and social concepts in all of the different lines of development outlined here still apply today and have become more important as the housing market becomes more liberalised. While the fundamental principles of sharing – both of space and social responsibility – are being transferred into the current context, many of the ideas share fundamental conceptual principles with the examples from the past. The development of a wider range of spaces and functions and integrative planning processes are central aspects that can be found in most projects. The architectural expression and design qualities of contemporary projects, however, borrow less from the qualities of past projects. Instead, the relationship between the individual and the community, between personal space and the shared environment, is something that is determined anew in each individual situation.

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a+t research group (Ed.): 10 stories of collective housing. Graphical analysis of inspiring masterpieces, Vitoria-Gasteiz 2013

Seen in this respect, the idea of sharing can be seen not only as a social but also an architectural challenge.

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Originally published in: Annette Becker, Laura Kienbaum, Kristien Ring, Peter Cachola Schmal, Bauen und Wohnen in Gemeinschaft / Building and Living in Communities, Birkhäuser, 2015.