Your motivation must always be to do something that is relevant for your time.
What defines the contemporary is that we no longer have a clear idea of how anybody should live. This is very different from an era like the nineteenth century. Back then, there were highly codified systems of power that dictated housing and urban models, and there was little freedom to choose alternatives. In Europe at least, we now govern by democracy. It is no longer a dictatorial model of society, and each minority must have the possibility of realising their own visions for life in our cities.
Peter Märkli, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE TODAY?, Real Review (Issue 3), 2017
The architect — often no longer needed — has been reduced to the one who places ornamental cherries on a finished cake.
Marcus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation, 2009
Contemporary housing design is predicated on the construction of separation. This method utterly dominates housing design. Today, it has become the most sought after model of housing. From isolated grandiose McMansions with their sprawling, endlessly-repetitious rooms to multi-roomed, multi-floored penthouse suites in luxury condominium residences, it is clear that isolating oneself in an excess of rooms—with their hyper-specific functionalities—is a sign of status. Mid-tier residential developments, such as suburban houses and condominiums, sell an attainable simulacra of luxury housing based on a similar lifestyle image on a smaller scale. Ironically, a subdivision of spaces and a case of horror vacui arguably decreases quality of life by obfuscating any other possibility.
Separation is a tool used by capital to amplify and conceal class differences at all scales. In any given city, many public spaces are often privately owned, maintained and secured, even though they appear to be available to be used by anyone. Housing is organized around abstract economic and social divides, ensuring the financial success of their constituents and defining the forms of housing that will be built there. Even individual buildings are segregated by class: lower floors are typically less expensive than top floors. Classism is effectively built into our structures.
Architecture has become a participant in maintaining class divisions by stripping itself of any profound endeavours of change and has instead focused on the act of personalized object-making and ownership. Contemporary architects focus instead on sculptural, stand-alone structures for the financial elite, from oil-rich Middle Eastern nations to Asian metropolises to North American financial institutions. The Bilbao Effect and ‘iconic’ buildings have proven to be attractive models to replicate, but have little social impact. That is to say that architecture has become a complacent agent for economic optimization, rather than an agent of social change. Design innovation must move beyond the realm of aesthetics: the early 20th century proved that good architecture can exist even within a simple apartment block. The facts of our lives our changing: economic conditions, social rituals, concepts of family, yet the structures that house us have failed to progress to suit these changes. What we encounter, then, is architecture that is at odds with people.
The history of housing is at once a story of buildings and of social history, and how these two have interacted. In recent history, however, this interaction has stultified. Housing design has seen few radical notions for design. Instead, the focus has been on variations in styling a very standardized architectural plan.
At its most elemental, housing is a question of shelter: today there are millions of people that are homeless, and many more that struggle to adequately shelter themselves. There are also environmental challenges to be addressed by the building industry both at the level of design and construction. These issues, of course, are intersectional and in no way solvable by design alone. Important to note, however, is that in the next decades, the inevitable influx of city dwellers will require approximately 1 billion new dwellings around the globe, raising questions about what forms will best accommodate them not only in terms of numbers, but with respect to the conditions of their lives.
To move beyond the conception of housing as shelter, there are questions about what sort of housing we should be making if we are to progress as a society – this line of inquiry is the focus of this endeavour. What new forms are possible when notions of privacy and publicness are challenged within our current systems of design? How can design be used as a tool to bring people together within the domestic domain? The house as a foundational force holds the power to shape new lifestyles, curb consumption and ultimately inform newly enlightened conversations about the city.
The media is saturated with images representing the home. The home is one of life’s great efforts: a stable, personalized refuge from the outside world. Yet housing as we know it only services and perpetuates a particular way of life so that any other proposals seem radical. The suburban model has already proven ineffective for urban conditions and their primary method of separation–physical isolation–is having larger political and social implications. Their contemporary counterpart, the condominium, is failing to provide adequate solutions to any of the housing crises we face. Formally referencing existing models cannot be the only way that housing is made in the future: there need to be new, prototypical methods that address the changing nature of the way people live.
If rooms and walls are the primary method of dividing people within a housing complex, then let us explore a method of how limiting spatial division can be used to bring people back together.
For millenia, building complexes were the rule and significantly more than four related people, on average, lived in them together, whether they were farmsteads or palaces or bourgeois townhouses. What seems like an experimental residential commune to us today was for centuries the norm.
Even notions of what being “private” means has changed radically over the course of the history of building. The history of the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, or the children’s room reveals that dwelling is not a static affair. It shows that spaces, furnishings, forms of housing can be rethought. And it also shows that there were frequent attempts to make housing easier, less expensive, to reduce it to its essence...
Nicholas Maak, Living Complex: From Zombie City to the New Communal, 2015
Artists, Production and Reproduction
As automation and income inequality continue to shape the workforce, lack of meaningful work, and the rise of precarious work, will continue to millions. Today’s artist already inhabits this phenomenon: they are most often precariously employed, and most often work to supplement their art. Their goal is usually to get to a point where art may be their sole source of income, though few achieve this stage.
For hundreds of years, the role of the domestic space has been at the forefront of the question of labour, with the household manifesting itself as the site of reproduction and affectivity. It is in this context that capitalism has been able to exploit the domestic space’s ability to produce immaterial labour and reap the benefits of a functioning working population. Although domestic space has been traditionally seen as a refuge from work, the house is essentially the core of production because it maintains one’s life such that one is able to work. Much like the natural environment has been used as a free cost within market capitalism, domestic duties have similarly been a source of exploitation. With the ever-decreasing importance of gender in the discourse of labour, roles that were traditionally confined to the female realm – education, health, service – are now understood as crucial aspects of a healthy society. The role of the domestic space is therefore ripe for questioning, especially now that each member of the household is expected to work. Economic relations have created a schism in society, and it’s yet unknown whether economic forces such as automation will eventually lead to more equality, in the form of Universal Basic Income, for example, or an increasingly drastic class divide. What is for certain is that there will be a rise both in city dwellers, and in precariously employed workers.
The blurring of life and work in the domestic realm is best represented by the precarious nature of the artist. It is a state in which ‘work’ can no longer be reduced to the studio space and cannot be measured solely by material output. This state is entangled in both productivity and reproductivity. In the same way that the artist’s work draws from his or her life, their living space is a physical manifestation of this blurring between working and living.
Mostly out of necessity, artists have forged a new way of living in their homes that may offer new solutions for the way housing operates on a whole. This means finding and exploiting gaps within urbanization that are overlooked. Unfortunately, they are exploited by being used as a tool for real estate speculation. While artists typically create vibrant autonomous neighbourhoods and communities, developers take notice, and choose to develop in these areas of cultural capital.
Though no one knows the true origins, some argue that warehouse spaces were developed from early storage buildings, such as the Roman horrea. The Industrial Revolution pushed countless industries to machine-based manufacturing and architecture responded to accommodate this new type of industry. 19th century innovators and engineers developed the industrial loft space as it is known today with the knowledge that they may be used for other purposes in the future. This is a mark of their surprising ingenuity. The large windows in these spaces were developed at the end of the 19th and turn of the 20th centuries, when electricity was not readily available and to allow the transportation of large goods. Ever since industrial production moved out of city centres, warehouse spaces have been used anywhere from film sets to today’s modern tech offices. Their flexibility and rustic beauty, popularized by artists, is what attracts so many to them.
The nature of artists’ work requires large, luminous spaces. Within the last century, artists have naturally gravitated towards loft spaces for their minimalist interiors that provide uncluttered, expansive spaces, their large windows and their proximity to city centres. Creative communities helped bring back attention to this typology, particularly because they were affordable and unwanted for a long time. This process continues to this day, though it is becoming far more rare due to increasing prices. New construction and office typologies do not offer the same size as these old warehouse buildings do. Industrial lofts and warehouses offer a template for a possibility to create a new standard – their sheer popularity proves that they are indeed in demand.
Industrial loft spaces that have been converted to studios and live/work spaces are usually outfitted with bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms and communal spaces in a myriad of different ways. They also have the possibility of negotiating the exact dimensions of housing/studio units because these buildings typically offer large open floor plates. Due to the height of the ceiling in these spaces, rooms are often half-height and exist within a larger overall space. This forms part of the reasoning to do away with rooms and walls: when multiple inhabitants exist within one space, they are more prone to share that space communally, as there is less construction of isolation. While many artists have opted to occupy large units on their own, with the increasing unaffordability of these spaces, many have had to move into them in groups. It is through economic necessity and social willingness that communality is achieved in industrial loft spaces inhabited by artists.
For Virginia Woolf, the room served as a place of protest against existing patriarchal norms as well as a place of escape. In her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own, she writes that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” to describe how the room serves as a physical and abstract space where a woman may dedicate herself to her work without the interference of the male-dominated landscape of her time. She writes of the importance of education for women (her father believed that only the boys of a family were to be sent to school) while pointing out the dangers of ridicule for one’s gender in society. This example illustrates how one’s own private space holds important practical and psychological consequences, especially for marginalized peoples. For this reason, even open and communal settings, where traditional private barriers dissolve, must include personal space for each individual.
For Louis Kahn, the room serves as the fundamental beginning of architecture, as he outlined in his 1971 speech, The Room, the Street and Human Agreement. Kahn considers the room not only as a physical structure – which he defines as walls, a floor and a ceiling, which is then followed by dimension, structure and light – but also as a sublime place where one may be alone with their own mind, and where an individual ‘proposes and makes a life’. Since humans exist everywhere on a sliding scale of sociality, the room is the only place where one can truly be alone and is thus the ultimate representation of interiority.
The room is therefore the conceptual territory of a single or shared life. It is the absolute minimum requirement that an individual/couple/other(s) need in order to function as a unit in society. For some artists, it is a crucial mental retreat needed to do good work. While most people would likely rather have more space for themselves and their rooms, we often observe a willingness to give up to give up one’s private space in favour of communal space in the artistic community.
We propose to reorganize domestic space around two complementary conditions: on the one hand, the possibility of having an individual space (the room), and on the other, sharing the rest of the Villa. Such reinvention of domestic space is not simply a functional project. Our intention is not to answer to Wohnungsfrage by way of a typological solution, but to use the typological transformation of the villa from family to communal house in order to question the political and economic framework that the “house” has always imposed on its dwellers. Dwelling has never been free of the prevailing political and economic conditions, the habits and conventions of which have defined the architecture of the house through history.
Housing does not only refer to the nuclear family because its purpose has always been to encourage private ownership. This means that housing, above all, is the acceptance of two conditions: the juridical framework of the nuclear family and that of private property as a format for living. This is not a mere economic problem: it is above all a cultural problem. Within our imaginary we need to overcome the idea that in the long-term we will privately own our home, be that a family apartment or a single-family house.
(...)
We have chosen the “artist” as the hypothetical inhabitant of our Villa for a simple reason: the artist as a cognitive/material producer – which includes architects, graphic designers, poets, performers, musicians – is us. In a certain way, this project is for us: it responds to our needs, desires, and ideas of how best to organize ourselves in order to live together.
DOGMA + Realism Working Group, Communal Villa: Production and Reproduction in Artists’ Housing, 2015
Our age of virtualization has seen notions of what is ‘public’ and what is ‘private’ change at an alarming rate. The two concepts can no longer be thought of as binary opposites. The history of the home reveals that the two spheres have in fact often collided or even overlapped when certain socioeconomic conditions are present.
The bed, which only up until the 19th century was not a solitary experience (upper class excluded) is a representation of the shifting forms and functions of essential components of our homes within the last century. In medieval times, for instance, it was not uncommon for more than ten people to sleep together. Until the 1950s, the bed was still advertised as the male domain, until there came a concerted effort to rebrand the bed to a female audience: beds became colourful and comfortable retreats. This shift coincided with the departure of sex from the private bedroom and into the public sphere. Today, the bed is seen as an additional place of work. Work is no longer confined to the office or public spaces, but now takes place in domestic domains, as well.
New Ways of Living
Much of today’s youth have abandoned the previous generation’s dream of home ownership. As young people distance themselves from the goal of home ownership, new ideas are conceived surrounding the dwelling, and new goals can emerge. A growing number of people face precarious labour conditions, which has resulted in the ‘gig economy’. This condition has brought about a general anxiety about economic conditions as the old adage of ‘hard work pays off’ has proven to be a myth – today, people are facing the fact that economic inequality will only worsen. At the same time, there has been emergence of the ‘sharing economy’, whereby individuals’ personal possessions are leased out for a price; eliminating the need for one to own a car, for example. This concept has been extended to office spaces and housing, too.
Communal dwelling, often stereotyped as a product of hippy modernism, has received an enormous amount of criticism and knee-jerk partisan commentary. Neoliberal politics in particular have systematically undermined the legacy of the 60s’ revolutionary autonomy movements and grouped worthwhile ideas with political inclinations. Over the last several decades, particularly in the West, the financialization of all aspects of life has created a society of individuals where independence is seen as the only possible mode of existence. This hyper-individualization, together with precarious labour conditions and the designed physical separation of modern real estate, has created a general sense of purposelessness and isolation for the lower classes. Sharing is just one of the ways that people are fighting back to preserve community and provide purpose.
‘Co-living’, a general term for different types of co-housing, is a relatively new way of addressing the housing crisis. Co-living’s modern reincarnation can be traced back to Danish architect Jan Gudmand-Hoyer’s 1964 proposal of gathering a group of his friends to discuss housing options. After a series of consultations and planning, by the end of 1973 construction had been completed on two collective communities, Saettedammen and Skraplanet. This triggered a wave of new ideas (based on historical and non-Western ways of living) around the world.
Instead of limiting the household to blood-based family networks, co-housing today allows the possibility of living together with family, friends and complete strangers. These spaces generally include private areas such as bedrooms but share amenities such as kitchens and bathrooms. The Fellowship for Intentional Community lists 1,539 co-housing communities in the United States, though this number is likely larger if it’s assumed that many did not register with their database. There are hundreds across Europe and 11 completed communities in Canada (British Columbia has 23 communities forming or already established, according to the Canadian Cohousing Network).
Communal living typically faces a significant amount of backlash, especially among conservative defendants of the nuclear family. Early 19th century experiments were also frequently criticized for reasons of poor hygiene. This is due to propaganda and the fictionalization of the conception of the family unit but also the result of dramatic failures that occurred within many communal experiments. Kommunalkas, the preferred Soviet answer to increased urban populations, were forced communal arrangements that gained prominence in the early 20th century. They are often alluded to as a way to criticize communal living, but that these arrangements were compulsory and essentially forced upon the people means they cannot be looked to as ideal circumstances for communality.
In Stockholm, The Kollektivhuset was a set of fifty apartments designed by Swedish architect Sven Markelius which opened in 1935. The houses included a bare minimum amount of functionalist furniture, including a bed, a desk, a shelf, two chairs, a bath and a toilet. The ground floor contained communal amenities such as a daycare, a communal kitchen and a repair garage. According to its critics, the project failed because of the extreme functionalism that governed all areas of life: food was a necessity, not a source of pleasure, the furniture was cold and practical, and children were hedonistic because of the conditions of the daycare. Depending on one’s point of view, components that are desirable could potentially be spun into a different narrative. The project failed not because of its communality, but because of its uncompromising commitment to functionality, which stripped life of spontaneous occurrences and personal embellishments.
Human Agreement
Even though politics continuously try to dissolve people into their most finite individual identities, the idea of living in a society is inherently social. Communally-oriented lifestyles provide people with purpose.
The most compelling argument for communal living, apart from the economic incentive, is the dynamic nature that is potential in communal spaces as well as the possibility of sharing. Communal spaces offer a pragmatic solution to the increasing loneliness faced by society due to increasing instability and precariousness. In addition, they allow for the cross-pollination of ideas, methods, and work by people who may share goals, social lives, working styles, etc. In other words, it is an area that allows the possibility of friendship and mentorship. This style of working has begun to proliferate in recent years with the emergence of the ‘co-working space’.
In terms of a housing unit, the communal space can be the locus of the intersection between productivity and reproductivity. The communal space offers the potential of the living room/multi-purpose space but is charged with its true potential by adding diverse groups of people. The communal space is organized and acted on through a language that develops through horizontal social structures. There is no higher authority that dictates their function, it is agreed upon through a shared oral agreement. This space acts on the affinities of people and requires a degree of exclusivity in terms of mutual moral and ethical understandings in order to avoid conflict.
The same can be said of a communal bathing space as well as communal cooking and dining areas. There is an invisible social contract that concerns and contains each of the residents to ensure that everything is shared equally and fairly. Utilizing a centralized, communally-paid for cleaning service is a common feature of co-working office spaces and is generally a good idea to placate differing standards of cleanliness and responsibility.
This logic can further be extended to negotiating the allocation of private space. Everyone has different needs and desires, and it is possible to provide a basic framework under which people may negotiate how they want their own private space/nodes to be split up within a larger network.
Absalon’s Living Cells provide a concrete example of how node/pavilion-rooms may be realized. Absalon designed six full-scale prototype units—intended for single-occupancy living—for his own use.
Made from plywood, the units are painted entirely white on the inside and outside. The artist planned to install these living cells with electricity and running water in six major cities around the world, corresponding to his exhibits. He explained that each cell’s architectural expression responded to its urban destination. Each cell was an area of twelve square meters in which a kitchenette, a workspace (which consisted of a table, chair and bookshelf), a closet and a washroom were squeezed in. He designed all of the cells based on his own bodily dimensions.
He was only able to install one fully functioning cell before passing away of AIDS in 1993, at the age of twenty eight.
Housing Without Rooms: An Architecture of Objects
While architecture is unable to create a functioning domain on its own, it has the power to establish an order which can frame new ways of living, ultimately shifting the conversation around issues within a city. The act of setting a limit–the beginning of any settlement–allows architecture to demarcate a new form of dominion within a larger framework. This can be through the adaptation of a pre-existing framework or with a tabula rasa. Architecture needs to withdraw from its continuous search for formal ingenuity and focus on creating prototype forms of living that can defy the logic of contemporary models.
If the room is the target of critique, then a method of deviating from it provides the basis towards communality. An empty, infinitely homogeneous grid, composed of a series of structural columns, each spanning a width of 8 meters and rising 6 meters high, form the underlying base of this critical project. The grid acts as an invisible territory that denotes an infinite variety of uses within each new square in a fluid, horizontal fashion. The homogeneous space acts as a leveling field under which everyone is to live simultaneously.
A series of objects are scattered evenly throughout the space. Each object is either a permanent or temporary autonomous area, and is the site of a private space that cannot be intruded. Each object may be re-arranged within the grid as necessary. Rather than completely severing the space through a series of walls, the objects exist divorced from the structural logic of the homogeneous space, allowing the possibility of the objects to take on any orientation desired. Amenities are shared within centralized areas. All of the other underlying leftover space is negotiable communal territory.
Historically, rooms have been introduced into domestic architecture as a way to systematize a life marked by increasing, often disorienting complexity. They have also been used as a tool to gender the home and separate female services from male entertainment, study and business. In modernity, their logic has been contorted as to sell the possibility of luxury. By avoiding their use altogether, new arrangements can arise spontaneously. The inhabitants can focus on building their lives according to their specific needs.
The dense collection of individual apartments in a condominium tower represent the same logic that early industrial capitalism utilized (in the form of single room occupancies) in order to increase worker productivity, ultimately destroying historic forms of housing and ways of co-habitating. The bedroom, or one’s private space, is the arena in which the notion of the ‘individual’ emerged, and reveals the historical conditions that society has prioritized to make it happen.
With the standardization of housing become ever more predominant and with the size of dwellings shrinking, the idea of housing is being irrevocably damaged. Housing’s accompanying problems become amplified. An Architecture of Objects seeks to ameliorate this accelerating trend by positing a different course, one that does not offer any answers. By avoiding the readymade techniques used to make housing today, a space is created that allows a new communal architecture–an Architecture of Objects–to take place. This isn’t to say that this way of living is better or worse than what is available today, but to say that society needs to allow alternative prototypical forms of housing to exist in order to let new ways of living flourish naturally.
Objects as Space: Three Strategies
Developed in plan-section relationships, the critical project utilizes three different strategies that experimentally form communal spaces without the use of traditional rooms. Whereas rooms are traditionally used as devices to separate tenants in house planning, objects in this project seek to undo those constraints in order to imagine new ways of living together.
The site is divided into three separate buildings, all of which are connected through circulation cores on either side of each building. Their top and ground floors are designed according to communal functions, such as garages, a swimming pool and a patio, while the sandwiched floors in the middle are devoted to live/work spaces. The middle floors contain 16 units experimentally arranged. The top floors of the buildings are outfitted with glazed or open roofs, inspired by warehouse spaces.
The first design strategy provides every individual or group with a minimal private space that allows an offset communal space. This intervention is heavily inspired by DOGMA’s ‘Living Wall’ with some modifications.
The living scheme proposes a reduction of essential biological services – bathroom, kitchen, bedroom – combined with a storage area and a study room constrained to the dimensions of the structural grid into a ‘living wall’. Since the entire ‘living wall’ is divorced from the structure, it can be rearranged in any way desired within the grid. The cavities of the walls are fitted with sound insulation.
The ground floor in this scheme is devoted to parking and workshop space. The site is subdivided into 4m x 8m garage spaces that can fit a car, a workshop space, storage or a combination of the three.
The top floor is dedicated to a communal pool space. It is outfitted with a series of semi-private objects that individuals or groups can use while occupying the pool. Additionally, there are changing rooms, showers and a sauna.
Collapsible Object
The second strategy leaves the potential of the free plan to be defined by the occupants through the use of modular, collapsible objects.
The living space is largely undefined except for a central area dedicated to communal cooking, dining and restrooms intended to be shared amongst all of the inhabitants. This central space is visually porous so as to not completely sever the sight lines. A series of mobile, collapsable objects are deployed such that any occupant can arrange them as they see fit. The furniture consists of a bed unit and table (both collapsible onto themselves), chairs, and a hanging wall that can all be stored within the storage wall and put away when more space is needed. These objects can be combined together to form clustered units within the space.
The ground floor of this scheme is dedicated to a communal commercial kitchen and daycare, each of which can similarly be arranged into any orientation through the use of modular object-furniture.
The top floor of this building is an outdoor patio space. It contains object-furniture that can be used by all occupants of the building and which can similarly be put away when necessary. This space can be used for relaxation or as outdoor workspace. The structural grid extends into the sky to be used for different purposes such as drying laundry or to provide shade.
Object as Undefined
The third scheme allows the residents to define their own objects as they wish.
Rather than designing a standardized ‘room’, inhabitants can create any shape enclosure they want within one square of the grid. In order to facilitate the organization of multiple inhabitants, a series of cross-shaped structures which house collective storage and mechanical systems are introduced to suggest a separation of space. These objects float freely within the grid and are the only sites of privacy within the space; leftover space is to be negotiated communally.
The ground floor of this building is dedicated to an outdoor playground, to be used in conjunction with the communal daycare. A perimeter bench encloses a large sandpit in which a series of playful objects are dispersed and can be re-arranged by children.
The top floor of this building contains a semi-outdoor patio space with an inset event space. The event space contains a series of objects that can be re-arranged by users of this space for any event. The semi-outdoor patio space is filled with plants.
Contemporary housing is an armature of the financial apparatus and separation is its tool of choice. Separation not only of private ownership, but class differences as well. An Architecture of Objects seeks to look beyond class and ameliorate tense modern relations by appealing to commonalities.
Childcare, for instance, has become yet another financial burden on any modern family. Whereas daycares and playgrounds were imperative components of revolutionary housing models in the past, today the issue is expected to be solved through individual means. A successful housing scheme must integrate childcare as a fundamental concern, otherwise life cannot be reproduced. Food, hygiene, shelter and relaxation should be similarly addressed.
An Architecture of Objects accepts the precarious reality of the modern city dweller. It offers the solace of community and shared empathies to achieve the common goal of meaning-making and camaraderie. It seeks to allow everyone to exist on the same social plane. It uses minority demographics as a template for emphatic ways of living and co-existing.
Whereas other radical architectural projections of the city are typically ironic or dystopian, An Architecture of Objects proposes an optimistic outlook that seeks potential and possibility. It builds on the anxieties of our time to create an achievable baseline for replication.
It is a project for today and for tomorrow.
2018