BREAKING UP WITH THE DOUBLE LOADED CORRIDOR A STUDY OF PROGRESSIVE HOUSING DESIGN AND IT’S INFLUENCE ON SOCIAL NETWORKS BY FRANK ZIMMERMAN
BREAKING UP WITH THE DOUBLE LOADED CORRIDOR A STUDY OF PROGRESSIVE HOUSING DESIGN AND IT’S INFLUENCE ON SOCIAL NETWORKS BY FRANK ZIMMERMAN
Abstract
Over the past half a century, as towers for human dwelling have grown taller; limited thought has been spared to the space that connects private units to public streets. Tower development has fixated wholly on Efficiency: How to maximize the percentage of rentable area. In a similar fashion to how sustainability concerns have drastically shifted tower designs, so too social concerns are in the process of doing the same. People are coming to expect more from their buildings than lifeless elevators and endless corridors that connect their homes to the city. And architects are beginning to respond by building places that nurture community by providing natural avenues for socialization. Following new research in Germany and Denmark, this paper will explore ways that community enabling design can permeate into mid and high rise residential architecture. On three scales [macro, micro, and human] this research will delve into potential design solutions that can make social space.
TEXT - GRAPHICS - PHOTOS CREATED BY FRANK ZIMMERMAN
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TOOLKIT MACRO
INWARD FOCUS | PAGE 22
OUTWARD FOCUS | PAGE 28
HUMAN
INTERMEDIATE SPACES |PAGE 52
SAVE THE BEST FOR THE PUBLIC | PAGE 59
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BALCONY AS CONNECTOR |PAGE 56
BREAKING UP WITH THE DOUBLE LOADED CORRIDOR
MICRO
TIE PRIVATE AND PUBLIC | PAGE 38
VISUAL CLUSTERING | PAGE 41
BOOKEND ACTIVITY CENTERS | PAGE 44
SUBDIVIDE LARGE STRUCTURES | PAGE 47
STRUCTURAL FLEXABILITY | PAGE 49
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01 Life in the Corridor
In dense environments across much of America, urban homes are stacked and tied together by a framework of systems that meet specific functions within tight efficiency requirements. These internal systems allow for humans to make their way from the public street to their dwellings, often hundreds of feet off the ground with ease and comfort. They also allow for mail to be delivered, trash to be removed, and water, air and electricity to service each home. And in all but a few examples, these functions are gauged by their built efficiency: what arrangement allows for the maximum amount of rentable area with the minimum amount of supporting space. In other words, how can a building make apartments as large as possible while meeting the minimum code and engineering standards to support their occupancy. To meet these ends, the connective tissue to access American urban dwellings has leaned heavily on the implementation of the double-loaded corridor. While not initially recognizable by name, the double-loaded corridor is spatially ubiquitous. Uniformly 5 feet wide with two rows of 26-30 foot deep dwellings flanking each side, these arrangements maintain a uniform height, material, and direction. Their often lengthy procession is centered on an elevator core and capped by 2 egress stairs; a case study in anti-human engineering.
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THE DOUBLE LOADED CORRIDOR
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PARKED CAR DIMENSIONS DICTATE HOME LAYOUT
While the corridor design is partially influenced by development canon and conservative calculations, it is predominantly shaped by the demands of car storage. The typical parking space is 9 feet wide and 18 feet deep. When these parking spaces are arranged in two efficient rows they border a 24-26 foot aisle, assigned to move automobiles in and out of parking spaces. In total, 60-65 feet is the floor plate depth required to accommodate two rows of idle cars. It is this dimension that rises up the building and is repeated to fit the completely unrelated demands of human
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occupation. When we warn our children to not let their possessions define who they are, we ignore that our cars already dictate all of our daily movements. The rigid efficiency of the double-loaded corridor has effectively squeezed out the unexpected, the human. Most mid and high rise designs dictate that residents will enter the lobby from the street. Depending on the occupant’s means, the lobby’s surfaces range from spartan to opulent finishes [plastic laminates to elegant stones]; but the space is, with rare exception, are programmatically focused on human movement. Any architectural features that encouraging human delay falls beyond the design scope. Because of the alienating nature of the contemporary building entrance, the upper echelon of buildings employ stewards of the space, lobby attendants, to police the “no-man’s land.” The design of the lobby space is replicated over and over to signal humans to stay away from their home’s front door. Thus, someone has to be
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hired to care for the vacuum that is left behind; a Band-Aid used over and over to deal with a failed architectural trope. In next step across a building’s connective tissue, the resident or visitor reaches the elevator; the single most important instrument in allowing urban structures to grow above the 6th floor. The 7 by 5 foot box rises vertically to connect a range of mobility types between the lobby and upper levels at the fastest possible speed. It is here that the only human interaction occurs in the typical residential tower. It is a common interaction repeated over and over in films across genres: a short, unexpected conversation with a stranger that is cut short by the carriage’s opening doors. The social norms in the elevator are so pervasive that there are strict physical norms by which to abide: humans are expected to enter as far into the elevator carriage as possible then turn to face the door. It is in the elevator, the rare community held space in contemporary mid and high-rise buildings, that residents are given a minute to meet their neighbors. While this “common space” provides a limited social good, it also creates one of the most challenging barriers to building social ties within high density housing. How can two strangers meet when a metal box conceals and ferry’s them from the street to their homes in under a minute? And why do these few interactions not flow into the corridor or prescribed amenity spaces? This is the question this paper will attempt to answer.
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02 A Case For The Social While the alienating qualities of our current double-loaded housing stock is evident, we should address the importance of social interactions and why our homes should play a role in cultivating instead of baring its maturation. Socialization’s central role in individual health and human evolution is why in the U.N.’s 2005 World Summit the 193 partner nations agreed on “social development” as one of the three components of sustainability.1
Individual Needs Humans depend on socialization for their physical and emotional wellbeing. As far back as Aristotle who stated in Politics: “Man is by nature a social animal… Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to….is either a beast or a god”2 humans have recognized the importance of their connection. More recently, psychologists and neuroscientists such as Matthew Lieberman, author of Social: Why our Brains Are Wired to Connect, have found that
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COURTYARD | KASTANIENALLEE 85
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“Social connections are as important to our survival and flourishing as the need for food, safety, and shelter.�3 If our homes have been tuned over time best meet our needs for food, safety, and shelter; why have these buildings done so little to meet our social needs? From what we now know, without resorting to hyperbole, this lack of attention stands to dramatically constrain human evolution.
Society Needs Society depend on high rates of socialization for its existence. Writing on the importance of human connection, physicist Leonard Mlodiow wrote:
COMMUNITY DINNER | COOP HOUSING RIVER SPEEFELD
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COMMUNITY LIVING SPACE | COOP HOUSING RIVER SPEEFELD
“When we think about the difference between human and monkey we usually assume what distinguishes us is our I.Q. But instead our social IQ is the principal quality that differentiates us from other animals”4
While humans are individually capable, it is their ability to communicate and build on each other’s ideas that has made us survive and become the dominant force in our ecosystem. It is how the invention of the simple integrated circuit in 1959 rapidly lead, in just 60 years, to the digitally integrated society in which we now live.
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Our individual efforts are exponentially multiplied through social connection. Our ability to communicate with and process as a collective is what allows us to grow and evolve to meet our circumstance. Similar to an individual’s brain, the growth and diversity of social connections across society and the amount of each connection’s use will advance our collective intelligence. As our collective rate of connection declines, so does our societal framework and progress.
Social in Decline
The challenge that we have been facing in America in the last 50 years, as first observed by political scientist and author Robert Putnam, are declining rates of “social
COMMUNITY LIVING SPACE | COOP HOUSING RIVER SPEEFELD
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PEDESTRIAN PATH |UFAFABRIK
capital” and “civic engagement”. Putnam famously referred to this trend as “bowling alone.”5 And while a portion of these communities have shifted to other formats, including to the Internet, there is still a shortfall that needs to be better met. One way to absorb a part of this shortfall is to make homes that bring us together.
Architecture’s Role
Architecture touches every minute of every day of our life. Architecture critic and author Sarah Goldhagen, with the help of decades of cognitive research, argues in her recent book, “Welcome to Your World: How the Build Environment Shapes Our Lives.” that the sweeping influence that architecture has on humans bestows designers with an immense power.6 Just as the buildings we design have a role in heightening social
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isolation, so too they can play role in repairing and building new social ties. And just such an example has played out before in the transformation of our public spaces. Since the late 1960’s theorists and designers including Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl, and William H. Whyte have recognized the essential role that urban public space has in building a socially prosperous community. Through a data focused analysis they proved that public spaces could be designed to incubate human interaction. Gehl and Whyte examined a wide range of parameters to determine what design elements most often attract human use and lobbied for their implementation. It was these metrics that led the New York City Planning commission to transform how it approved privately owned public space; a guideline that is still maturing.7 A similar moment is needed in our homes. Architects and designers need to analyze and quantify the benefits that come from interior, socially constructive spaces. Then, when confronted with empirical evidence, owners, occupants, and public officials can better understand the value in social design. In a similar fashion to how The United States Green Building Council’s LEED Certification transformed how the building community thought about sustainability, a social metric can change what we value in multi-family architecture.
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03 Macro Scale Interventions Just as in public spaces, educated design choices can cultivate human interaction and build community in mid and high-rise housing. Using built examples from Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and the United States; the following design guide outlines potential solutions on three scales; macro, micro, and human to give designers a range of options when creating community focused living environments. The architectural solutions outlined below have been amassed through observation, research, and interviews; future measured analysis is needed to conclusively validate their effectiveness.
Cophahagen – Inward Focus
I met Anton over a community meal at his home, Ibsgaarden. Ibsgaarden shares 6 dinners a week, with a break on Mondays, by splitting cooking obligations among its 30 adult members. Anton, 17, approached my table after dinner and immediately wanted to know what I thought of his unconventional home. His
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COPENHAGEN HOUSING
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COMMUNITY HOUSE | IBSGAARDEN
unencumbered honestly and gregarious nature struck me as a young man with a social acuity beyond his years. He had just returned from his first semester at university in Copenhagen. It was the longest he had been away from Ibsgaarden since he could remember and he remarked how strange it felt. Making new friends and operating in a much more individual-focused city had made him nostalgic for his life when daily tasks where performed as a community and his best friends where always a flight of stairs away. Growing up in Ibsgaarden had shaped how he saw himself, which moving to university had thrown into stark relief, as a member of a tribe with the evolved social tools to excel within its parameters. Established in 1983, Ibsgaarden was built on the grounds of a farm in Roskilde, Denmark. The residences for its 40 community members where constructed in as a 2 story apartment block that form a tight “U� around an existing farm house. The lower units are accessed from the central community green space while the upper units from exterior stairs that spilled out into the same area. The farm house, updated
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COPENHAGEN HOUSING
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multiple times over the course of Ibsgaarden’s history, was renovated to support all of the community spaces. It contained a library, child and teenage play rooms, laundry and woodworking space, and the kitchen and dining room. On the rear side of the common house, lesser used spaces such as the community garden and laundry drying area rounded out the enclave’s perimeter. When entering Ibsgaarden for the first time, visitors are struck by how all of the homes shy away from the street. The only away to enter the 20 unit complex is through a single breach on the parking lot side of the community’s shell. Its design has social roots. As residents make the trip between their homes and cars, they follow the same route as their neighbors and are spatially more likely to make informal connections. Beyond informal interactions this inward focus with limited route options encourages a range of beneficial social habits such as a feeling of common ownership, communal parenting and improved security outcomes. 8
COURTYARD | IBSGAARDEN
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INWARD FACING | IBSGAARDEN
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STAGGERED HOMES | ABSALON’S HAVE
In hand with a well maintained community structure, Ibsgaarden has been able to sustain six common meals a week along with an array of social benefits because the architecture physically reinforces their social glue every minute of every day. But, there is a danger that such a walled in site with a flourishing community will lose prospective of the broader neighborhood. As Anton put it, “when I was younger my teachers worried about me not having friends at school. But that was because I didn’t take the time to bond with other kids outside of Ibsgaarden until I was older.”9 His focus inward caused him to lose out on social activity elsewhere. While this is a challenge, when kept in check, it is a small price to pay for a socially vibrant home.
BERLIN – OUTWARD FOCUS Born and educated in the United States, Dr. Michael LaFond is a community developer in Berlin who specializes in creating and nurturing community focused
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BERLIN HOUSING
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housing projects. I met Michael on cold Saturday morning at the grounds of his first introduction into community based housing in the 1980s, ufaFabrik. What began as an informal squat on the grounds of an abandoned film studio in the late 70’s, ufaFabrik had expanded into an intentional community with a bakery, theatre, and neighborhood center by the time Michael arrived. Given his status as an outside researcher, Michael lived in a trailer on the grounds for years to study the key elements that enable an intentional community to flourish. And at the conclusion of his research, with an ambition to build his own, formalized, cohousing community, he moved on in 2002 and founded Coop Housing at River Spreefeld. His meticulous research had paid off. Coop Housing at River Spreefeld is cohousing on an uncommonly large scale. Build on the banks of the Spree River, less than a mile from Alexanderplatz
RIVER FRONTAGE | COOP HOUSING RIVER SPEEFELD
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BERLIN HOUSING
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COURTYARD | COOP HOUSING RIVER SPEEFELD
and on the border between East and West Berlin, the coop is home to 150 residents spread across 3 buildings. The living spaces are raised so that spaces to serve the neighborhood could occupy the ground level. Such ammentities include an event and catering room, dance studio, day care, fabrication shop, and office spaces for 70+ workers. The landscaping and architecture is placed to encourage those from outside the community wander in and make their way to the riverfront. While the community is a self-organized, formal cooperative, its roots are not far from Teepee Land, a neighboring squatting community to which it lends infrastructural and civic support. In its short history, the squatting movement has had a profound impact on Berlin’s housing environment. On both sides of the Berlin Wall in the 1960s and 1970s, housing shortages and government renewal practices that emphasized tenement eviction led to a surge in illegal squats. Squatting in the city “came to represent both a struggle against housing precarity as well as a series of practices aimed at building a different type of city.”10 Individuals whom illegally took control of
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OUTWARD FACING | COOP HOUSING RIVER SPEEFELD
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abandoned structures build communities and began piecemeal renovations to make substandard buildings, habitable. This process also set into motion the unceasing “tug of war” between the interests of these newly formed communities and those of city officials. The two key factors that ensured a squat’s long term survival in the face of growing development markets was 1) its value as a community asset and 2)its ability to encourage other squatter to take up residence in neighboring buildings. In Berlin, successful squats such as ufaFabrik and Kastanienallee 85 early on built community centers, cafes, libraries, and theatres to serve the neighborhood. They enshrined themselves as community goods worth protecting even in the face of growing market pressures. And, when the time came, local community groups and politicians did just that. But for short term protection, Berlin squatters depended on strength in numbers. Squatter communities depended on establishing a positive outside face in order to attract others to occupy neighboring buildings. As squatting evictions swept through Berlin, on the tails of rising property values, politicians and police tended to act more on small scale squats, avoiding large-scale, high publicity community evictions. It is these two traits that still resonate in Berlin’s co-housing DNA. On a macro scale, Berlin’s cohousing architecture is sited in diametric opposition to Denmark’s typical form. Their housing is focused outward, with a community face that is open and inviting to the general public. Ground levels with ample space encourage people to walk around them and those on limited sites open wide front doors for the public to move inside. These spaces are actively programed and sun filled with elongated vistas. These indicators mixed with signage and commerce signal to those entering that this is a space for all to enjoy, a community good. From an overall social organization, inward and outward social focus has benefits and drawbacks. Inwardly focused communities nurture tight relationships that can lead to an overly sequestered mindset when taken to the extreme. While outwardly focused housing can sacrifice the social vibrancy of residents in favor of benefiting the broader public. Before designing a home, it is important to first stake out the role a community will play in this macro vision.
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04 Micro Scale Interventions
Once the overall social vision for a community is considered, a step smaller architectural considerations can be taken into account to make socially vibrant housing. These “micro� design gestures work to encourage both formal and informal social interaction to germinate within community focused organizations. In contrast to the macro section, these theoretical solutions can be swapped and combined to meet the intended result.
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WALKING PATH | ABSALON’S HAVE
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TIE PRIVATE AND PUBLIC | LANGE ENG
TIE PRIVATE AND PUBLIC Designed by high profile Danish architect Dorte Mandrup, Lange Eng is a rectilinear-donut shaped cohousing community located on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The donut is kinked and elongated North to South with entrances to the central courtyard limited to those two sides. A majority of the communitie’s 210 residents live on the taller, two level west side where units range from 750 SF to 1,200 SF On the opposite twin level, townhouse style units fill up the row at around
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DUPLEX UNITS | LANGE ENG
1,400 SF each. While the units vary to attract different family arrangements, they all connect with the central green through broad windows. In a similar fashion to Ibsgaarden, as one enters the court they pass a torched wood cladding with narrow widows to the outside into a middle that is wrapped with open translucent polycarbonate. The large interior facing fenestration from each unit mixed with the translucent façade system makes intruders feel as though they are surrounded by a crowd of spectators. This arrangement of public and private through space and visibility is finely tuned to not only clearly demarcate public and private, but also accomplishes a long list of social goals. This architectural choreography begins in each unit’s kitchen. The homes are arranged so that the most used spaces in the house, the kitchen and living rooms, are given unimpeded views to the central lawn; while the home’s most private spaces, bedrooms, are hidden on the outside of the donut where the windows are most narrow. This layout encourages residents to shift their gaze outside all while they accomplish life’s daily tasks. Cooking, eating, socializing, even viewing television all encourage the community to collectively watch out for one another, and their children,
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without making a conscious effort. And on the other side of the glass, Lange Eng’s children feel as though they are performing in an amphitheater. In the balancing act of encouraging neighbors to interact, architects must also protect resident’s private lives. In addition to moving the private spaces to the back of the home, Lang Eng’s designers buffered each home with a private deck and a substantial planters to further demarcate semi-private and private areas. Community members feel as though they have control of their homes and also know how far to keep away to respect other’s privacy. While it is important to balance community connection with privacy concerns, in most western nations, privacy almost always drowns out any social benefits. Tall fences are preferred to collectively policed green spaces. This imbalance is one of the most persistent battles that designers face as socially conscious spaces become more prevalent.
COMMUNITY DINING ROOM| LANGE ENG
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VISUAL CLUSTERING | TIETGEN DORMITORY
VISUAL CLUSTERING In major cities across the world, as incomes rise, amenity laden buildings have soared in popularity. Gyms, libraries, roof decks, and pools are some of the many and varied frills that upper end homes employ to attract tenants. But, what is quickly apparent, that that these “public” spaces do not build community, or even attract users, through their mere existence. But, instead, these amenity spaces need to work in concert with the building’s pedestrian traffic flows and with one another. Why does
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THE COMMUNITY LEVEL | TIETGEN DORMITORY
a smaller common room attract more use when it is on the ground floor over a larger basement level space? Why do the addition of laundry and mail facilities to other amenity spaces bring strangers together? This section and the next - “Bookend Activity Centers� - will attempt to answer these questions. The Tietgen Dormitory at Copenhagen University is laid out in a perfect circle with the middle removed to accommodate an interior courtyard. Its architects, Lundgaard & Tranberg divided the building into 5 parts using stair and elevator columns. The dormitory is further subdivided by balconies and common rooms that inset and protrude from the building face. Finally, the 360 dorm rooms are lifted into the air and placed on a transparent podium with regular openings to the courtyard. Contained in this glass podium is a vast array of student oriented programing that overlaps and interacts with few, if any, floor-to-ceiling divider walls. In one ground floor zone, post office boxes line up next to laundry machines; which both border the game room and gym space. Entertainment spaces border music practice rooms. Design studios bleed into group study spaces while administrative offices share a kitchen area. While some of these program overlaps are designed so spaces are used
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all day; i.e. people practice music during the day and then party at night, but other programmatic clustering moves excel at multiplying social interaction. In the Tietgen Dormitory, when a student goes to pick-up his mail, it is likely he will run into a familiar face doing laundry or watching a sporting event on the television. When the student lingers to briefly talk, so too the chance of someone going to the gym will recognize a friend. The social impact of these dormitory spaces is infectious and it has a multiplying effect that resonates across the building’s community. I refer to this architectural arrangement of differing but compatible programing as “visual clustering.� Give users a range of different reasons to use a space and then situate them in visual proximity so their chances of interaction are heighted. A single use mail room in the back of a building will only attract users for a brief moment once a day and never give them an excuse to linger. It is the lack of excuse to linger that even in the heat of an animated conversation, everyone leaves the elevator immediately when it reaches their floor. But in a programmatically overlapping space, community members can come for their mail and end up participating in a completely divergent activity. While visual clustering is an effective tool for fostering informal socialization, it often requires wide floor plates to accommodate a spectrum of programs in close proximity. This spatial limitation leads to an alternative tool for social magnetism: the bookending of activity centers.
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BOOKEND ACTIVITY CENTERS | IBSGAARDEN
BOOKEND ACTIVITY CENTERS As discussed at the beginning of this paper, occupants in a majority of mid and high-rise housing across the world follow the same linear path multiple times a day: from the street, to the lobby, through the elevator, down a double loaded corridor, and into their homes. Ibsgaarden’s architecture dictates an equally restrictive path, but achieves dramatically more lucrative social outcomes. And while the path of path of travel within Ibsgaarden’s belt may operate on a horizontal plane; its spatially
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COMMUNITY ENTRANCE | IBSGAARDEN
restricted application makes it a ripe test case for vertical housing application. When Isbgaarden was constructed in the early 1980s, the farm house they build around was decidedly rural. Today the outskirts of Roskilde have shifted suburban and community residents depend on personal autos for mobility. In this environment, the parking lot is point from which all residents must enter and exit the community, often multiple times a day. The parking lot is a principal space, one bookended in a line of travel that the community members activity utilize. All of the resident’s parking has been consolidated into one lot which is uncommon for suburban lots where people are more often able to park immediately next to their front door. This exceptional concentration of activity is what makes it a principal space. On the other end of the “bookend” is Ibsgaard’s common dining room and kitchen. This dining room is a second story space with large dormers that fill the room with light. The open kitchen flows unimpeded into eating area. In this room, community members enjoy 6 dinners a week that are prepared on a rotating calendar with their neighbors. This eating space is the heart of Ibsgaarden’s social life as it is with most cohousing communities.11 It is the second principal destination.
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In-between the parking lot and the dining room is a row of auxiliary common spaces that are socially activated because of their positioning on the line of travel. When a resident arrives home at night, they park their car and walk in through the front gate, the community’s only entrance. From there they walk through the main court where they pass children playing in the sand box and their friends having wine on the porch. After sharing a drink with their friends, they make their way into the common house where they pass through the library and pause to speak with a committee planning a birthday party. Then past the library they walk by the childrens’ and teens’ respective spaces and check in with their children. Finally, at the end of eyeing over their child’s report card, one climbs the stairs to the dining room for dinner. The path of travel dictates that community members will pass through 4 ancillary spaces when making their way between principal end points. While principal spaces will always be activated, it is the arrangement of travel that dictates how much, if ever, more whimsical, ancillary spaces will be used. In my experience observing both community and non-community focused housing; is often the lack of visual clustering or bookended activity centers, regardless of the programming, that dooms a public space to obsolescence. And with amenities growing more common in affluent buildings, their organization should take a paramount role in architectural solutions.
DINING ROOM | IBSGAARDEN
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SUBDIVIDE LARGE STRUCTURES | TOWER IN ANTWERP
SUBDIVIDE LARGE STRUCTURES On a bright Friday afternoon in October I found myself wandering Copenhagen’s port with Lone Wiggers, partner in charge of C.F. Moller’s new tower in Antwerp, Belgium, condemning the undersized role that the social has played in the discussion of sustainability. It is from that frustration that Lone and her team entered and won a competition in 2014 to build a 24 story tower that “redefines the multistory block as a social, vertical community.”12 To make vertical life just as lively and diverse as the city’s most active streets.
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INNER CIRCLE | TIETGEN DORMITORY
One of the key impediments to building community in a tower, as Lone pointed out, was the oversized scale that they come in. How can neighbors build a collective trust when there are hundreds and sometimes thousands of them? Their solution: “the vertical village.” The vertical village is a 1 to 3 story block of apartments that vary in size and share a common external and internal identity within the larger Antwerp Tower. On the exterior face of the building these villages are demarcated by fiber cement fins and offset balconies. On the interior they are organized through multiple entry points and visual identifiers. These architectural gestures more concretely defines whom “holds claim” to a previously undefined space.13 While the specific architectural techniques required to subdivide large dwelling towers is beyond the scope of this paper, it is essential to address the need to break these places down into manageable communities. American cohousing pioneers Kathry McCamant and Charles Durrett place the idea community size at 20-50 adults. From their research they advise communities should be big enough so that “every member has 4-5 people they really connect with,” and not so big that individual’s lose accountably to the group as a whole.14 Only when housing groups reach a manageable membership can trust and all of its associated benefits take root.
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BLOCK MASSING PUNCTUATED BY SOCIAL COLUMNS|KURFĂœRSTENSTR. 142
STRUCTURAL FLEXABILIY When a young person moves into their first apartment it is assumed that he or she will move into new, larger units as they change marital status and decide to have children. Conversely as those children move out of the home, it is expected that empty nesters will downsize, move to a smaller unit. In dense urban areas, an apartment, on its own is seen as an inelastic good. We thus have come to depend on the diversity of the real estate market to deal with the elastic nature of life. But all of this moving
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leaves a heavy burden for individuals and communities to bare. Consequently, when facing the emotional weight of leaving a community and life behind, many individuals choose to remain in place, with homes that are too small or too large to effectively meet their needs. This mismatch between home size and resident’s need is especially acute in Berlin cohousing communities where demand far exceeds supply. With this issue in mind, June14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff Architects and their clients Building Group Kurfürstenstraße built flexibility into each apartment. Conceived as 6 overlapping mid-rise blocks that mirror each overlap into the apartment units. The result is that each apartment “shares” a portion of their apartment with their neighbors’ unit. As life circumstances change for members of the building group, neighbors can flexibility recalibrate their unit size according to need. In Kurfürstenstr. 142, creative planning and concrete construction has made it so life changes do not require communities to break, but instead it allows them equitably age in place. And longer term community stability is not the only benefit that this gained from this foresighted design, the act of sharing one’s home can strengthen ties and opens the door to a more diverse community. These benefits where brought to life by my host at Ibsgaarden, Jesper Holck. As his cohousing community was aging there was an acute mismatch between the demand of young families and the number of units in the community large enough to house them. In response, Jesper came to an arrangement with his neighbors to shift his apartment wall so they could annex his surplus bedroom. This structural flexibility, and the good-spirited flexibly of community members, allowed the community to attract a new young family and build on its collective trust.
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“SHARED” SPACE ALLOWS FOR FLEXIBLE APARTMENT ARRANGEMENTS|KURFÜRSTENSTR. 142
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05 Human Scale Interventions
INTERMEDIATE SPACES As you exit the front door of your apartment, stepping across the threshold of the swung in door, you are immediately dropped into the corridor. Within a stretch of 2-4 inches, you transition from the privacy of your home and are dropped into to the public realm. This is the experience shared by almost all people who call a mid or high rise building home. Compare this experience to the exceedingly more gradual progression from private to public realms in a detached home in one of America’s streetcar suburbs. As you exit the home, residents cross their porch over a few strides, then down a series of steps, across a patch of lawn or walkway and it is then when one reaches the sidewalk. The transitional realm between private and public is stretched from 2 inches to 25 and even 50 feet. The value of this intermediate realm has been extolled by public realm theorists from Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman. More recently, American Cohousing gurus’ Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett point out the importance this semipublic space plays in everyday interactions. In this zone neighbors can wait for doors to be answered, can sit and watch the world, or greet one another without breaking
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CIRCULATION | TIETGEN DORMITORY
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INTERMEDIATE SPACES | A-52
social codes of privacy. This often un-programmed space operates in many ways like an elevator, but without a one minute time limitation. Instead people can share a quick greeting or linger in longer conversation, without the looming pressures of the lift reaching its destination. It is why in this realm, McCamant and Durrett place particular emphasis on the design of front porches [to be no less than 6’ 06� in depth] in their community designs.15
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STAIR LANDING |COOP HOUSING RIVER SPEEFELD
Scaling down and implementing these spaces into multi-family housing can have an outsized impact. Creating small insets around doorways or around a collection of doorways at the end of hallways is a straight forward way to create semiprivate space. Further uses of furniture and markings at the periphery of the hallway’s path of travel can create porch-like realms and feelings of community ownership of the corridor. Newman extolled the benefits of these spaces, saying they provide “feelings of identity and control.”16 While these moves come at the expense of maximizing building efficiency and rentable square footage (infringing into the corridor is banned practice in most NYC condos and cooperatives), they offer the promise of radically reshaping the hallway environment. At A-52, a 7 floor building group near the center of Berlin, architects Christoph Roedig and Ulrich Schop strategically widened stair landings at apartment entries. These intermediate spaces left room for neighbors to share. Some landings were outfitted with seating, others with a common book shelf, and others left bare for people in motion to pause and connect. This limited added space transformed a utilitarian stair into a public amenity, scaled not for formal events but for unexpected moments.
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BALCONY AS CONNECTOR | R-50 & TOWER IN ANTWERP
BALCONY AS CONNECTOR As Michael LaFond led a group of cohousing enthusiasts around the community of Spreefeld, I found myself in a conversation dissecting balconies with a young English architect named Thomas. Thomas, whom practices in London, described one of his early projects in which he attempted to persuade the developer for whom he worked to construct open, shared balconies between apartment units. While his suggestion fell beyond his client’s comfort zone, he was able to find a middle
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CONTINUOUS BALCONY | R-50
ground in which the building ended up with balcony dividers that could be easily removed by tenants who where open to sharing space. Thomas theorized that as neighbors got to know one another and they let down emotional boundaries, so too would their physical boundaries, in this case the balcony separators, also fall. As Thomas reported to me in November, his prediction far exceeded his own expectations. When he visited he community a year after move in, most neighboring units had replaced the dividers with grills, tables, and open space. While tenants are reasonably afraid of a stranger sharing the space right outside their apartment, once that person becomes an acquaintance or a friend, that fear is able to melt away. Common outdoor space remains one of the greatest challenges to urban, multi-family housing. With the exception of roof decks, which we will discuss next, homes with space to see the sky are rare in America’s densest environments. This is because land is scarce and economic as well as government realities make the creation of rentable square footage the highest priority. But balconies seem to be an undercapitalized resource for social focused housing. They are public space that can be inexpensively built and maintained. Requiring only a railing and no mechanical
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systems, balconies can serve as interstitial space, fill program, or serve as landmarks. Enter R-50, a Berlin Building Group, who circle all 6 floors of their community with narrow, continuous balconies made from galvanized steel panels and mesh. These “exterior corridors” provide a new route for children to travel between homes and members to share planters, tools, or simply an evening drink.17 The outer webs of R-50 create new, unforeseen, networks for community interaction on each building floor. These connections are multiplied when applied in the “vertical villages” planned for C.F. Moller’s Antwerp Tower. In this example, as discussed earlier, offset community balconies are positioned so occupants are able to connect with neighboring apartments above and below. Similar to the visual connections made across fences found in suburban communities across America, the Antwerp tower turns this relationship vertically. The balconies design creates an avenue for neighbors to say hello, catch up, and potentially make plans for later. At the moment, the use of balconies as a social tool is a largely untapped resource.
BALCONY RELATIONS | TIETGEN DORMITORY
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SAVE THE BEST FOR THE PUBLIC | A-52
SAVE THE BEST FOR THE PUBLIC The tale of two Berlin common areas: The first Kastanienallee 85’s common bar, theatre, and children’s game room that is located in a roughly dug and patched basement. The low ceilings, maze like organization, and damp air make for an eerie scene when vacant. The second common area is located on the top floor of Roedig. Schop Architekten’s Baugruppe A52. The light-filled space features a small kitchen and guest bed that opens, through a glass sliding door onto a 7th floor roof deck. If
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presented with the choice of which space you would choose to occupy, it would be challenging to find a resident whom prefers the former. While it is hard to criticize Kastanienallee 85 commons space given its squatting / adaptive reuse beginnings, it is not difficult to celebrate Baugruppe A52 for its foresight in leaving the most desirable space for the community to share. In Berlin, like many cities, the farther a unit is from the bustling street [and closer to light and air], the more valuable it is. Thus a 7th floor apartment minutes from the center of Berlin would carry a high price tag. In the face of these economic realities the architects and the building group chose to locate a room in which they could accommodate visiting guests [allowing their individual apartments to be a little smaller] and a scenic terrace for them to gather. They valued activated public space, so they located the common area where people would use it. And the community has thus thrived in the space. This final micro-solution can also be seen as the most obvious. By definition the most desirable space in a building is where people want to be. So for common space to meet its most active potential that is where you must locate a community’s heart.
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06 Looking Forward
LOOKING FORWARD In 1998, Bhutan’s prime minister introduced the “gross national happiness.” (GNH) index to the United Nations. It was a revolutionary idea that, while a rudimentary metric at the time, caught the world’s attention as a possible supplement to the gross domestic product (GDP) as a gauge for a population’s wellbeing. GNH made waves in the west because it separated capital accumulation from emotional health and it placed an observable metric behind what was once thought of as an ephemeral quality.18 In much the same way that the United States Green Building Council’s LEED certification quantified a building’s sustainability, so too did the GNH for emotional wellbeing. For tools for social fertilization to gain widespread traction, architects must engage with social scientist and be able to numerically quantify spaces with high levels of social activity output. Once a social benefit is quantified, then developers and consumers will be able to account for any added cost. This careful study and numeric presentation has led to the creation of countless beloved public spaces across the
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world, so too can this model transform where we live. In an attempt to spur further research, this paper has outlined a series of socially incubating architectural tools for mid and high rise housing. The tools operate on a range of scales [macro, micro, and human] and at differing price points. These design strategies are, for the most part, theories base on field study and related research. Further quantitative analysis is required to confirm a list of concrete tools. It is my hope that an adventurous research team will go further to field test these ideas to modify and elaborate on this list. As the world’s living environments become denser, we should not let our homes devolve into warehouses for sleep, but instead we should actively mold them into incubators for life.
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07 Reference
ENDNOTES 1 “Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 16 September 2005: 2005 World Summit Outcome”, United Nations General Assembly. Distr.: General 24 October 2005. 2 Aristotle. Aristotle’s Politics. Oxford :Clarendon Press, 1905. 3 Smith, Emily Esfahani “Social Connection Makes a Better Brain” The Atlantic Magazine. 29 October 2013. 4 Mlodinow, Leonard. Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. Vintage Books, 2013. 5 Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2007. 6 Goldhagen, Sarah Williams. Welcome To Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives. Harper, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2017. 7 Whyte, William H., Jr. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Washington, D.C. :Conservation Foundation, 1980. 8 Newmam, Oscar. Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design. Collier Books, 1978. 9 Rydahl, Anton, Resident at Ibsgaarden. Interview. 17 Oct. 2017 10 Vasudevan, Alex. The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting. Verso, 2017. 11 Maccamant, Kathryn, and Charles Durrett. Creating Cohousing Building Sustainable Communities. New Society Publ., 2014.
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12 “Residential Tower Antwerp.” C.F. Møller, <www.cfmoller.com/p/Residential-Tower-Antwerp-i3160.html.> 13 Newman, Oscar. Creating Defensible Space. Diane Publishing, 1996. 14 Maccamant, Kathryn, and Charles Durrett. Creating Cohousing Building Sustainable Communities. New Society Publ., 2014. 15 Maccamant, Kathryn, and Charles Durrett. Creating Cohousing Building Sustainable Communities. New Society Publ., 2014. 16 Newman, Oscar. Creating Defensible Space. Diane Publishing, 1996. 17 Bridger, Jessica. “What Cohousing Looks Like: Inside Berlin’s Radical R50 Baugruppen Project.” Metropolis, 19 Feb. 2017, <www.metropolismag.com/architecture/ residential-architecture/dont-call-it-a-commune-inside-berlin-radical-cohousing-project/.> 18 Schultz, Kai. “In Bhutan, Happiness Index as Gauge for Social Ills.” The New York Times, 18 January 2017. New York ed.
INTERVIEWS 1, Dr. Michael Lafond, Founder and Director of id22. Interview. 08 Oct. 2017 2. Marta Fernandez, Architects at June 14 Meyer-Grohbrügge&Chermayeff. Interview. 09 Oct. 2017 3. Christoph Roedig Partner at roedig.schop architekten. Interview. 11 Oct. 2017 4. Ulrich Fuchs, Architect at Barkow Leibinger. Interview. 12 Oct. 2017 5. Lone Wiggers, Partner at C.F. Møller Architects. Interview. 13 Oct. 2017 6. Claus Skovsgaard, Resident at Lange Eng. Interview. 15 Oct. 2017 7. Jesper Holck, Resident at Ibsgaarden. Interview. 17 Oct. 2017 8. Thorleif Ravnbak, Resident at Absalons Have. Interview. 17 Oct. 2017
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