Archinect - News

An installation at the Chicago Architecture Biennial challenges private property through a decentralized commons

2021-12-15T15:21:00-05:00

In an effort to tackle the physical inequity caused by an epidemic of vacant lots in the South Side of Chicago, a new design-research project creates a series of new decentralized “urban commons” spread out across different spaces in the city’s Bronzeville neighborhood.

The Center Won't Hold, 2021. Image © Neeraj Bhatia.

The project is part of this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial, which culminates on Saturday, and is the brainchild of THE OPEN WORKSHOP, who conceived of it as an alternative to the commune system that can be tailored to meet individual community needs surrounding core areas of food, making, ecology, and care.

With support from the University of New Mexico and the Canadian Council for the Arts, the team worked to install a prototype in the Overton Grounds site that will serve first as a meeting space for various community members. Titled The Center Won’t Hold in an apparent allusion to the oft-quoted William Butler Yeates poem, the intervention offers a malleable s...

Architensions prioritizes outdoor space with speculative cooperative fourplex proposal in Los Angeles

2021-06-08T19:30:00-04:00

New York and Rome-based architecture firm Architensions and architect and design educator, Andrew Bruno, have designed a speculative, cooperative fourplex sitting in the Vermont Knolls neighborhood of south Los Angeles.

Called Knolls Co-Living, the project is a proposal for the Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles competition. The $100,000 design challenge tasks architects and landscape architects to envision appealing and sustainable models for low-rise, multi-unit housing. The project also expands, as stated by the firm, “...Architensions’ interest in reimagining contemporary housing as multi-generational and deeply communal.”

Previously on Archinect: Winning designs for the City of LA's Low-Rise Design Challenge explore new opportunities for housing through research and community engagement

This project follows other cooperative housing proposals by Architensions, such as Big Ideas Small Lots in New York and Ex-Galateo social housing in Italy. Knolls Co-Living challenges tradit...

Multigenerational and communal, but not a commune

2018-03-06T18:26:00-05:00

The heart of each community is the common house, or a space, where group meals are offered once or twice a week, together with activities and events. Houses are connected by pathways. Instead of a lawn mower in every garage, there often are no attached garages. Cars are exiled to peripheral parking areas, while a single, shared lawn mower suits the needs of everyone.

Tom Verde covers a new trend in retiring, not communes but cohousing communities. From Denver and Boulder, CO to Amherst MA or Davis CA, currently there are only 165 communities nationwide, but another 140 in the planning stages.

What residents have to say about living in WeWork's housing community on Wall Street

2017-11-07T15:56:00-05:00

“It’s a great place to be if you’re just moving to the city, and you want to meet people, or you need a place for a couple months before you find your real apartment.”

Bloomberg writer Ellen Huet books a room in WeWork's communal housing project, WeLive, on Wall Street in New York. Huet talks with both current and former WeLive residents, who share different opinions about living in the building. In regards to WeLive's slow growth, the article also brings up other business options that WeWork is currently exploring, including plans to open a 36-story tower in Seattle by 2020. WeWork also recently appointed Bjarke Ingels to design their new WeGrow private elementary school.

Also, Archinect previously wrote about privacy in co-living. You can read the feature here: Strange bedfellows: exploring shades of privacy in co-living

Matter Design's Five Fields Play Structure Reinvents the Purpose of Play

2017-02-21T21:01:00-05:00

The intent is to not ask what the structure does, but how it imagines new possibilities

It has been said that play is the exultation of the possible. The Five Fields Play Structure then, is the fullest realization of this theory on play. Matter Design, an interdisciplinary design practice founded in 2008 by Brandon Clifford and Wes McGee, collaborated with FR|SCH, an architecture and design studio founded by Michael Schanbacher and Kerri Frick, to design this structure that proudly has no purpose. Instead, the form becomes a blank canvas meant for childish exploration and the cultivation of their imagination.

The design resists any directive and rejects specified, singular usage. Twenty-foot tall vertical elements seem to contribute to the structure at one moment, but then extend into the landscape. Doors and stairs, while standard architectural elements, are rethought to lead to nowhere and color is used as a suggestive rather than a clear label on entries and key moments. Another prominent design strategy was to provide multiple means of access to any location. These ...

The kibbutz, rebranded for Silicon Valley

2016-05-09T17:37:00-04:00

[Common is] a version of communal living that suggests tech utopia in its ultimate test case: with Nest thermometers, and Casper mattresses, and a house Slack channel, so you can see whether anyone else wants Seamless without having to yell down the hall. [...] As a business proposition, rental real estate wouldn’t necessarily seem like it has much to do with tech; but as a mentality, co-living is pure Silicon Valley — it is life rendered frictionless.

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