Together - The New Architecture of the Collective

• Trends contributing towards coliving

  • Living space is scarce these day
  • Most industrial nations are experiencing major demographic shifts - more than 50% of households consist of 1 or 2 people. Traditional nuclear family is on the decline.
  • Vague feeling that individualism is leading us down a dead end
  • Sharing economy - why buy a car when you can share?

• The search for new housing typologies is happening on three levels:

  • Individual apartments - emergence of 'cluster apartments' - small studio apartments organised around shared living space
  • Apartment building - apartments supplemented by domestic facilities for all inhabitants. Eg: cooperative housing in Switzerland that has a laundry, library, workshops, collective kitchen to suplement individual kitchens
  • Urban space - apartment buildings offering public programmes for the neighbourhood. Eg: Kalkbreite in Zurich which has 50% of its space dedicated to non-residential functions (like a packaging-free supermarket)

• The new typologies are the critical antidote to the stereotypical monofunctional housing developments of the post-war period - which were suffocated by the modernist dogma of functional separation

[[Social housing]]