The Common House - The Heart of a Cohousing Community

Design matters. In the design of cohousing, intention also matters. What sets cohousing apart from other types of conventional housing models - whether it is single family neighborhood, condominiums, or apartments - is that in cohousing, there is a physical space that is the heart of the community, and that space is the Common House. It is the stage in which community life (and intention) plays itself out.

While most common houses have the same programmatic elements - a dining room, kitchen, kids play room, and laundry, I would argue that they are not all created equal. The success of a Common House results from the careful juxtaposition of the above programmatic spaces and how they relate to each other. And the intentionality behind the design of each room also lends to the success. After having visited over 80 cohousing communities in the past 8 years my measure of a successful common house is how often its rooms are used by the community. During my visits to cohousing communities I have seen some rooms that were seemingly well designed, but were reported by residents to have received little usage due to poor acoustics, lack of visual connection, uncomfortable furniture, poor lighting, etc.

I have also seen rooms that were clearly designed as a "multi-purpose" space - and therefore, it serves no single purpose well. I acknowledge that space is often a premium in cohousing (either due to physical constraints or budget) and that the Common House needs to support a diversity of programmatic uses – large events, community dinners, canning of summer harvest, a musical combo. I would argue that a well-designed Common House will contain rooms that are well suited for the uses programmed for a given space while still allowing future flexibility for how that space might be adapted for another use.

How is this achieved? Through careful application of patterns - as enumerated by Christopher Alexander in his seminal book A Pattern Language. In 2006, I used Alexander's book as the basis of codifying the essential elements of Common House Design and created some additional patterns that I felt were important to better accommodate the intentionality of cohousing communities as I had observed in Denmark. It was apparent that the Danes had been more concerned about the specific uses of each space and not so much on each space needing to satisfy a litany of multi-purposes. And thus, their Common Houses had an air of hygge that is less frequently found in the Common Houses I have experienced in North America.

Designing the Cohousing Common House is the title of the book I wrote to document my findings of Danish Common Houses. The book includes, in addition to my own, Alexander’s patterns. My book has been requested by architects designing their first cohousing community, students researching cohousing, and residents who are planning for the design of their common house - these requests have come from across the US, as well as from Poland, Australia, Belgium, and England.  It is available for purchase by contacting Schemata Workshop.

In addition to the book, and if you are interested in learning more, I would encourage you to attend my workshop on Common House Design at the National Cohousing Conference in Oakland, CA. 1-5pm on June 15, 2012.

Daybreak Cohousing gets its first art!

[caption id="attachment_3664" align="aligncenter" width="687" caption="Daybreak's mural"][/caption] When we designed Daybreak Cohousing, the residents wanted to incorporate some art on the buildings.  However, as the project progressed, there was neither time or budget to create the pieces prior to move in so it was decided to wait until the residents moved in.  The railing system was designed to allow for replacement of wire mesh with art panels.  A concrete wall at the terrace stood ready to receive a mural or artwork.  Blocking was placed at key points on the building facades to receive large hanging pieces – these were structurally reinforced and fully flashed to integrate with the exterior siding. [Then] Daybreak resident and graphic artist Maura Jess conceived and designed the mural inspired by two pottery pieces created by fellow Daybreak resident and ceramic artist Scot Cameron-Bell. Scot later joined the project and transferred the design outline to the wall and the two artists then worked closely with other residents to paint the image over a 2-week period, Scot applying the final artistic touches.. So, after almost 2 years the first piece has been installed!  Click here to see photos of the process, including the inspiration for the piece.

Create Communities of Opportunity

  On March 23^rd, members of Schemata Workshop attended the Housing Development Consortium (HDC) 4^th Annual Luncheon; HDC is a professional association and advocate for providing affordable housing in King County. Schemata Workshop is a sponsor and member of HDC and we are advocates for their cause. At the luncheon we were fortunate enough to have Angela Glover Blackwell, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of PolicyLink, as the keynote speaker. Her speech was so inspiring that we were compelled to take notes summarizing the key components to create communities of opportunity.

First, Angela described the St. Louis, MO community where she grew up and how the neighborhood children played together in the front yards and streets without fear of danger. A community where her mother anxiously watched, perched out on the front porch, as she made her way to the corner store for the first time. It was an economically diverse community of doctors and lawyers living next to the single parent receiving food stamps. It was a community that fostered opportunity.

However, not all of our society experienced the same upbringing as Angela and members of our society have children that run the risk of not succeeding to their full potential. As Angela said, in these economic times, this is the first time that children are not expected to have the same opportunities as their parents. In addition, she emphasized that one’s housing determines so much more than we think. It determines the type of education and healthcare one can receive; also it determines what types of jobs are available. Those who work on housing and housing policies are indirectly working on health, education and job policies as well.

After painting the picture of an excellent community and emphasizing the need and importance of successful housing, Angela began to identify the key components to create communities of opportunity.

Creating Communities of Opportunities – 5 steps

1. Place matters

• Creating a sense of place contributes to a sense identity for the community

2. Access to reliable transit

• Provides the opportunity to seek better jobs, health care, and education

3. Integrate income levels and promote racial diversity

• Provides richness of life and opportunity

4. Sustainability

• Provide all 3 components of sustainability – environmental, social, economic equity

5. Inclusion

• Integrate yourself in the community to understand their needs

The key components to create communities of opportunity are not new ideas individually, but we often forget that we need to take into account all components to provide successful housing. Angela ended her speech with the statement “Don’t be nostalgic for a time that never was.” However, I think we can use nostalgia to create goals for achieving communities of opportunity.

Seattle Asian Art Musuem -- Art Deco Splendor in Volunteer Park (Part 1 of 2)

The Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park is a splendid building housing a magnificent collection of ancient and contemporary art. Designed by the Seattle firm Bebb and Gould (designers of many noteworthy structures in Seattle, including many prominent homes on Capitol Hill) and built in 1933, it originally housed the entire collection of the Seattle Art Museum. Set within Volunteer Park, SAAM shares its museum-in-the-park setting with other museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose home is in New York City’s Central Park. As private collections predated by centuries those offered for public view, the museum-in-the-park typology finds precedent in that of the manor house in the landscape of either a noble’s estate in Europe or that of the landed elite of the East coast of the United States. Both the museum and the public garden are places of leisure, and their pairing is sensible, for sure, and allows for a full day’s outing both in and out-or-doors. In this tradition, SAAM and Volunteer Park present no less compelling a pairing than their historic or big city predecessors.

Art-deco (approximately the style in which SAAM was designed), to my mind, has always had a somewhat precarious and undervalued place within the history of modernist design. It never garnered the serious attention paid to many other 20th century movements, because it was seen, perhaps, as only a pleasant if not too serious ‘scenic’ detour along the thoroughfare of the more rigorous, international style modernism that eclipsed it. Architects, especially, like to see modernism as the built manifestation of industrialization and of the Enlightenment’s goal of human progress. Modernism’s emphasis on functionality, abstraction, and a machine aesthetic are well known. While modernist, art deco was perhaps too populist an expression of modernism’s machine aesthetic ideology, leading to deco’s being ultimately and sadly dismissed by ‘serious’ practitioners and their academies in favor of more somber fare. Ironically, deco’s embellishment with organic motifs and stylized figures doomed it to a short life even if those embellishments were crafted in the same materials, precision, means of that modernism propounded. Given its rather short life and relatively meager legacy, we are fortunate indeed to have such a building as SAAM, and that it is open to all to relish in.

Among modern materials aluminum figures prominently, including in many art deco designs such as at SAAM.  While not a new material, aluminum’s manufacturing costs had been significantly reduced by the late 19th and early 20th century making it more readily available (until then, it was priced as was silver).  As important to its new, ready availability, was aluminum’s light-weight, corrosion resistance, and excellent casting characteristics -- the perfect combination of qualities for the ornamental metal work sought by art deco architects. Add to that the fact these qualities allowed it to be utilized in its pure and visually uncompromised form (by being either polished or clear anodized – not painted) and you have the almost perfect ‘new’ material for the ‘new’ architecture, with no Seattle example better (art deco or otherwise) than in the spectacular aluminum screens and doors that comprise the entry at SAAM. With its organic motifs, shininess, and casting precision, the entry screen ranks among the best architectural features of any building in our city. And, dare I say, many an architect’s current fetish with screening and de-materializing could learn much from the effectiveness of SAAM’s entry screens in achieving those same qualities, the full effectiveness of which are realized best upon entry into SAAM (so go ahead, go in!).

Upon entering SAAM, one is impressed by a lobby that is of a grandeur befitting not only the institution itself, but also of the powerful design vocabulary offered by art deco. Still in a relatively early stage of modernism, art deco had to resolve many new and modern functional requirements, oftentimes without the off-the-shelf products available to today’s practitioners. Things that are now easily ordered from a vendor’s product line were either unavailable or were sufficiently rare enough that the architect had to design those elements themselves. In the skillful hands of SAAM’s architects, such commonalities as air grills, light fixtures, clocks, or doors became objects d’art in-and-of themselves, and are a testament to a comprehensiveness of design mostly absent from today’s buildings. While it is true that standardization has made such objects much more attainable (and therefore useful), there is something lamentable in this loss of design-in-depth. There is no escaping the observation that despite their adding of flourishes to such functional objects, there is an underlying and guiding reliance on streamlined aesthetic resulting from industrial manufacture – an aesthetic that (is essentially the same and) holds its own against a more ideologically correct modernism.

This being art deco, there is more to see than stylized architectural furnishings in SAAM. Gold foil, polished and richly veined marbles, and of course, curved surfaces abound. Despite this potentially chaotic assemblage of luxurious materials and forms, there is a skill in their assembly at SAAM that creates not only sumptuous spaces, but adds a dignity and refinement befitting of the art contained within -- which is the focus of the next post -- the architecture of the galleries themselves.

Aging Your Way

Last year, Senior Services embarked upon an amazing series of community conversations which culminated in a Summit on Aging Your Way.  Over 250 people assembled to discuss seven themes that were prevalent in those community conversations.  Those themes were: Community Connections.

Transportation.

Housing.

Health, Wellness & Fitness.

Local Economics.

Built Environment.

Lifelong Learning.

Arts and Entertainment.

[caption id="attachment_3560" align="aligncenter" width="687" caption="Jim Diers recounts Stone Soup story"][/caption]

A personal highlight of the Summit was hearing Jim Diers remind us of the story of Stone Soup…how a little “magic stone” helped a village to create something truly delicious, in a time when people couldn’t imagine being generous.  He also reminded us that our society focuses too much on the deficiencies that people have.  And yet when we focus on the gifts and talents that each individual possesses, we can see them as full citizens of the community and the planet.

To me cohousing is the embodiment of celebrating each person’s gifts.  I was proud to present the concept of cohousing to this fantastic group of seniors who were actively engaged with their aging process.  Clearly cohousing was an idea that resonated with many to whom I spoke.

Not only did I host four 5-minute “mini-presentations” (more like a speed date than a presentation), I also facilitated two 20-minute workshops and reported on cohousing at the concluding plenary session.   It was a fast paced day, but one that was fruitful to all of us who participated.  Thanks to Senior Services (particularly Dori, Sabrina, and Joann) for planning such an action-packed agenda.

More information about the community gatherings, including an illustrated report from each one, can be found at the Aging Your Way website.