Description
The Stacken Collective House in Gothenburg, Sweden is indicative of the shifting social values of its period. Built on the outskirts of town in the boom of the 1960s, the conventional nine-story apartment building with a central stairwell stood virtually empty in the 1970s. An initiative by architecture professor Lars Agren gave the Stacken building new direction as a selfmanaged Collective Residence, now considered one of the first conversion projects of collective living, together with the Jernstoberiet Cohousing Settlement.[1] The previously identical three-room apartments were converted into 33 two- to fourroom apartments housing a total of approximately 100 people and supplemented with extensive collective living spaces.[2] The ground floor includes, for example, a café, various workshops, a photo lab, a laundry room, and a sauna. Additional shared facilities were located on the fifth floor, as the existing statics allowed scant room for creating the necessary openings.[3] However, the floor was not designed as an open-use floor, as in the projects of the Community Settlement housing model, but was instead giving a specific function through equipment and facilities. The most important common room was the large kitchen, designed to supply the entire Collective Residence as well as its cafeteria. In addition to a daycare, open to the entire neighborhood, there were several other recreational spaces, including, for example, a sewing room.
The Stacken Collective House was managed by a tenant association, which took care of not only maintenance and facilities work but also administrative tasks and kitchen services. Various self-organized working groups voluntarily undertook the necessary tasks. With the exception of the daycare, all collectively organized spaces were paid for through the residents’ rent. This constructional and organizational outcome came about through a participatory process in which the architects and future residents developed the conversion concept over the course of two years. Financing for the conversion had also been clarified in advance by the owner, a non-profit housing association, and the City of Utrecht, which bore the project’s planning costs. The co-determination by future residents was extensive, from outlining redesign plans to preparing detailed house rules. By increasing the apartments’ quality of life, also achieved thanks to the shared living spaces, it was possible to reduce turnover among residents.[4] However, according to a 1989 study, after eight years of operation, only 20 percent of residents still ate their meals in the communal dining room. The study also mentions that a great deal of ideological ballast had to be chipped away during the initial years of operation, and a few early residents of the Stacken Collective House ended up leaving.[5]
Selected project data
Existing high-rise into which Stacken Collective House was integrated
Communal kitchen on the fifth floor
Public daycare on the fifth floor
Footnotes
Schuh (1989): Kollektives Wohnen, Eine vergleichende Untersuchung in- und ausländischer Beispiele, p. 111.
Jürgen Schuh writes of 50 children and 47 adults, while Mühlestein notes 77. See Zurich Museum of Design (ed.) (1986): Das andere Neue Wohnen, Neue Wohn(bau)formen, p. 92.
Schuh (1989): Kollektives Wohnen, Eine vergleichende Untersuchung in- und ausländischer Beispiele, p. 112.
Zurich Museum of Design (ed.) (1986): Das andere Neue Wohnen, Neue Wohn(bau)formen, p. 92.
Schuh (1989): Kollektives Wohnen, Eine vergleichende Untersuchung in- und ausländischer Beispiele, p. 112 f.
Originally published in: Susanne Schmid, Dietmar Eberle, Margrit Hugentobler (eds.), A History of Collective Living. Forms of Shared Housing, Birkhäuser, 2019. Translation by Word Up!, LLC, edited for Building Types Online.