The Harvest as Resiliency

In today’s rapidly urbanizing world, resilience is no longer just a buzzword but necessary for a thriving community. At Capitol Hill Urban Cohousing (CHUC) in Seattle, resiliency is not an afterthought but an instigator for the community-built project. CHUC is a lived prototype for architects and Schemata Workshop co-founders, Grace Kim and Mike Mariano, who live upstairs and work in the street-level office space. In this 5-story building, nine households create a thriving, interdependent community rooted in shared values, meals, and mutual support. Privacy and the individual are supported by the knowing and understanding of each other. As with any group of people, it’s imperfect and requires commitment and working together. This is not just architecture or just housing, but a vision for urban living that fosters connection and resilience for generations to come.

Ariel Footage from Uytae Lee’s About Here on Youtube

Resilience goes beyond sustainability. Grace and Mike heard an architect at an international conference once describe sustainability like a personal relationship. If I said I had a sustainable relationship with a partner, that doesn’t sound like it’s very positive. If I have a resilient relationship, then we’re able to weather the ups & downs of a relationship, and a community can be resilient during environmental shocks and stresses. Resilience is embedded in every design decision now reflected in the building that nine families have called home for nearly a decade.

A recent post on our whiteboard for the garden reminded us of resiliency in the context of the harvest.

We harvest daylight through our community courtyard at the heart of our community, bringing daylight and cross-ventilation to the homes. There is no enclosed, windowless corridor here; residents move throughout the community on covered outdoor balconies. Resident life is visible in this intimate courtyard space, plants draping over balconies, the sound of resident life coming through open doors and windows, and activity on every level.

We harvest energy from the sun through the photovoltaic panels on our upper roof. We’re a small site, and the payback on solar panels is long due to our (currently) low-cost hydroelectric power provided by one of the cleanest utility providers in the nation.

And, of course, the garden harvest on the lower roof. Photosynthesis generates fresh food that nourishes our community – produce used on site by residents, and an entire bed of produce cared for by one resident family is delivered to the nearby Byrd-Barr Place food bank.

Grace shares her lived experience and work in cohousing in her 2017 TED Talk about how cohousing can make us happy and live longer.

As profiled in the book Ideal Cities, CHUC exemplifies the kind of intentional community that contributes to the neighborhood social fabric while addressing environmental challenges.

CHUC is not just a place to live but a model of what’s possible when architecture, community, and sustainability intersect with intention.

Learn more about CHUC at our monthly Saturday tour!

Click the link and use code RESILIENCE for free tickets until the end of 2025!

Cohousing Patterns: Ceiling Height Variety

“A building in which the ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people comfortable.”

It is all too often that the Common House is designed and built with the least funds (many communities prioritize the money for individual units) and therefore, the overall enclosure of the Common House is constructed with the idea that a future mezzanine or second floor will be added later. The resulting spaces for dining, conversation, and meal preparation all occur under a single ceiling.

Provide a variety of ceiling heights that are appropriate for the functions. The dining room may want to be a grand space with high ceilings, however, the kitchen will be more functional with lower ceilings. In addition, smaller seating groups for conversation are not inviting if they are located in a cavernous room with the same ceiling height as the dining room.

Bakken, a cohousing community in Northern Denmark, is comprised of duplexes, triplexes and a large common house. In the common house, the dining and seating area all occur under the same ceiling. The seating area is not welcoming and did not encourage residents to linger and talk. However, over half of the dining room floor framing had been installed with the idea that the second-floor mezzanine would be extended. While the project was never completed, the major framing elements were left in place creating an implied ceiling. The tables under this “lower” ceiling felt more intimate.

The height of a ceiling can also determine the intimacy of a space. The ceiling must be proportionate to the size of the room - a small room with a tall ceiling will feel equally uncomfortable as a large room with a low ceiling. The original pattern describes rules of thumb for ideal width-to-height ratios. The acoustics of any room are affected by the ceiling height and room proportion and should be given specific attention during design.

Cohousing: A New American Dream

Grace Kim takes the virtual stage at the Seoul Cohousing Symposium to discuss the new American dream home, cohousing.

As loneliness becomes a growing health concern across the globe, people are looking for creative solutions to solve this often overlooked issue. A common cause in America is the lack of community that comes along with the “American Dream Home”. We see this happen in suburbs where, despite proximity, it can be rare for people to get to know their neighbors. Cohousing is centered around community; a place where residents feel support from family and friends, belonging, security, and a sense of wellbeing. Sounds pretty nice, right?

Leadership Tomorrow – Geoff's Reflections on Challenge Day 6: Environment

Schemata Workshop is excited to announce that Principal Geoff Anderson has been selected as a participant in the Leadership Tomorrow (LT) class of 2021.

LT is an intensive civic leadership program focused on interconnections between elements of Seattle Foundation’s “Healthy Community” framework. The program helps participants further develop their leadership skills and practices, focusing on the goal of creating a healthy, just, and inclusive Puget Sound region. In particular, the program has been actively evolving its approach to racial equity, supporting participants’ development as antiracist civic leaders.

Several years ago, I decided to explore Seattle’s Duwamish River on my kayak, wanting to take a closer look at this vital part of Seattle’s history, economy, and environment.  The scarcity of safe access points on the river was certainly an indication of the value our society has placed on this key waterway. This experience was at the top of my mind throughout Leadership Tomorrow’s Environment Challenge Day, as we learned about the Duwamish River, its history, the communities who live on and around it, and the impacts of industrial development and climate change.

In my experience, most people who live in and around Seattle don’t know a lot about the Duwamish:  where it begins, its original route, or how it became what it is today.  For the record, the Duwamish River begins at the confluence of the Green River and the Black River (hardly a river anymore) at Fort Dent in Tukwila. Until the early 1900s, it meandered into an estuary leading out to Elliott Bay and Puget Sound. In 1909, the Duwamish was rechanneled and straightened to accommodate industrial and commercial development. As a result of the industrial contamination caused by this development, the lower Duwamish was declared a Super Fund site by the EPA.

The impacts of this pollution most profoundly affect the Duwamish River Valley and the communities on its banks, such as Georgetown and South Park [1]. This community has long been subject to environmental injustices: disproportionately high health issues caused by pollution, and fewer benefits, such as safeguarding traditions on historic Indian lands along the Duwamish.  These communities will also be most directly impacted by rising sea levels caused by global warming.[2]

In fact, the communities along this river, from the native Duwamish to current day residents, including Black, Latino, and Indigenous people, have long had to bear the burden of environmental pollution, harm, and displacement. I’ve personally been a long-time proponent of ”Save the Planet” idealism. However, I am starting to better understand that how this often comes at the expense of the real-life concerns and needs in these communities. I was surprised, for example, that groups such as Front and Centered are opposed to a Cap-and-Trade policy as typically designed because the “trades” can make pollution in these communities even worse, reinforcing environmental racism by concentrating pollution in already overburdened communities.

I believe our region should lead by example and accelerate the push towards an economy based on innovative renewable resources that benefit the communities in the Duwamish Valley. To do this, we must allow the people most impacted by pollution to lead the conversations and decision-making. The passage of the HEAL Act this past legislative session is a powerful statement for this type of action. It will help reinforce efforts like those of the King County’s Climate Action Plan and the work of the Climate Equity Community Task Force (CECTF) Equity and Social Justice Strategic Plan to continue and even expand on bringing multi-cultural and multi-racial cross-sector experiences to climate-related community building.

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1. See the WA State Department of Health website for more information (https://fortress.wa.gov/doh/wtn/WTNIBL)

2. Horne, Debra. "Two Seattle Neighborhoods Bracing for the effects from Climat Change" for Kiro News. https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/two-seattle-neighborhoods-bracing-for-effects-from-climate-change/879009084/

Leadership Tomorrow – Geoff's Reflections on Challenge Day 5: Education

Schemata Workshop is excited to announce that Principal Geoff Anderson has been selected as a participant in the Leadership Tomorrow (LT) class of 2021.

LT is an intensive civic leadership program focused on interconnections between elements of Seattle Foundation’s “Healthy Community” framework. The program helps participants further develop their leadership skills and practices, focusing on the goal of creating a healthy, just, and inclusive Puget Sound region. In particular, the program has been actively evolving its approach to racial equity, supporting participants’ development as antiracist civic leaders.

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Geoff’s Reflection on Challenge Day 4: Arts + Culture

One of the goals I set for myself at the beginning of this Leadership Tomorrow (LT) year was to become more mindful of the privileges I am afforded as a white male that others, especially in the BIPOC community are not privy to.

March’s Leadership Tomorrow sessions presented  poignant and personally-challenging experiences at a level that I had not experienced yet in this program The first of these  came on Education Challenge Day.

Education Challenge Day

As a jumping-off point, we began our work on this topic by viewing “I Sued the School System”, a viral video in which the artist criticizes the traditional school system for “killing creativity, individuality, and being intellectually abusive” (more here) ”

This Leadership Tomorrow Challenge Day was eye-opening and challenging. For our prework, we delved into the history of Indian Boarding Schools and other racist education policies. Although heartbreaking, this is a part of our country’s violent history and something everyone should all have a better understanding of. We also studied current racial biases in education, and more about the School to Prison Pipeline (See Challenge Day 3)

Beginning the process of understanding the full extent of the privileges I had growing up in a wealthy, predominantly white suburb was challenging. I understood that my family chose where we lived growing up because of the “good schools” but I was ignorant to what this meant for many of our cohorts who were not afforded this privilege. I appreciated the benefits I had due to this privilege, but it was jarring to realize how utterly rare it is to have the resources and teachers I did. I cannot believe how much I took for granted. I wish that everyone could have the same access to great schools with long-term, dedicated teachers, extra-curricular activities, and even the unique programs that are provided by well-intentioned PTSA Boards at schools in wealthy districts.

LT program participants are given the opportunity to meet and interview area leaders in small team groups. My small team met with Michelle Merriweather, President & CEO of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, to learn about her background and the journey that she took to arrive at this point in her career. Our conversation centered on leadership styles and the work that the Urban League does in the Seattle area. The most impactful moment of the interview, for me at least, occurred as we were winding down our talk, and Michelle was asked how she handles being a black woman in leadership, and the challenges inherent in that specific experience.

Michelle described how she uses ‘code-switching’ in professional situations such as conversations with funders or doing advocacy work. She continued by saying that about eight months ago, amidst BLM protests, she made a deliberate decision to no longer code-switch but has a fear of paying for this decision later – “on the other side,” as she put it. As a white man, I never have had to even consider code-switching, or the repercussions thereof, and this was something that I had never realized was a privilege.