Domestic Mutations in the Age of the Sharing Paradigm

Section model: Pooling—heaps, steps, and hollows

Section model: Pooling—heaps, steps, and hollows

Provocation: In Seven American Utopias, Dolores Hayden traces examples of America’s preoccupation with experimental communities—from the Shakers in the late nineteenth century to Drop City in the late twentieth— that marry utopian social aspirations with pragmatic environmental organization. A common impulse in these experiments was the will to challenge the hegemony of the nuclear family and capitalist mechanisms.1 Themes such as self-sufficiency (agriculture, manufacturing), self-awareness (religion, group identity), and community outreach (publications, good works) laid the groundwork for the current sharing paradigm. Fueled by both the economic crisis in 2008 and the emergence of entrepreneurial collaborative models, communitarian practices have been reimagined where digital platforms promise a new form of engagement between individuals, collectives and the physical environment.

Ronda Kaysen, in her New York Times article “The Millennial Commune,” contends that people have been “pooling resources and talents to create ad hoc communities for generations, and that’s not even taking into account boarding houses and residential hotels.”2 Along with the proliferation of app-enabled opportunities for sharing space and resources— from renting a “hot desk” in common workspaces (The Wing), to dining in stranger’s houses (Feastly), to short-term living arrangements for digital nomads (Roam)— novel collective dwelling and co-production programs are being formed to grow unique social and spatial scenarios. Cooperative strategies for development, management and ownership of shared housing are also gaining attention, offering economic relief from the fluctuations of the speculative real estate market increasingly out of reach to a large percentage of the population.3

Despite these developments, a convincing case has yet to be made for how this new cultural landscape impacts the discipline’s core. Domestic Mutations mines architecture’s agency in addressing its principal tenets of typology, form, and aesthetics as they relate to the contemporary intersection of private property and shared commons. If the dwelling has always been a preoccupation for architecture’s disciplinary research, then current economic and social trends demand we interrogate the single-family house’s autonomy and contest the habits that it has institutionalized in order to discover alternative cooperative models. Most importantly, the design of communal space and its concomitant lifestyle must confront three points of friction defined by Hayden and still relevant today— authority vs. participation, privacy vs. community, and uniqueness vs. replicability.

Precedent Analysis —distribution of shared space

Precedent Analysis —distribution of shared space

Proposal: Domestic Mutations investigates the consequences of the “sharing paradigm” in relation to architectural organization and expression. With the discipline slow to see the potential for rethinking domestic space precipitated by the shifting boundaries between public and private life, the project develops a series of innovative collective typologies to question the hegemony of the single-family house.

Contemporary collaborative models are having a distinctive effect on the domestic realm including co-living, multi-generational homes, food sharing and co-working. Design processes have yet to substantively interrogate the typology of the detached dwelling affected by these sharing programs, contesting the accepted delineations between permanent and transient residents, work and leisure, nuclear family and post-familial life.4 Freelancers, entrepreneurs and writers are increasingly giving up homeownership and living an itinerant lifestyle. These “digital nomads” are dwelling in different cities throughout the year and seeking affordable live/work collectives.5

Section model: Clustering—faces, platforms, and passages

Section model: Clustering—faces, platforms, and passages

In response to this, a series of architectural proposals are investigated that test organizational and formal strategies for hybridizing co-living and co-working programs at the middle scale between house and housing. Developed as four morphologies— clustering, nesting, pooling and looping —each scheme is designed to produce a particular character on one hand (topological relations of space), and on the other encourage scenarios for social interaction (programmatic adjacencies, mixes and separations). For example, pooling organizes degrees of public-to-private access through a sectional landscape, whereas clustering distributes a constellation of personal capsules with gradients of shared space in between.

All the proposals accommodate up to twelve residents with a combination of individual spaces for sleeping and bathing, and multiscale clusters of space for different types of collective activities. The schemes also incorporate a micro-public, co-working arrangement along with other community amenities accessible to the neighborhood such as a charging station, media space, or community kitchen, reintroducing hospitality as part of the domestic sphere. Additionally, prefabricated composite componentry is employed as an expressive tectonic, and together with building integrated solar panels, promote onsite energy production and independence.

Typical divisions between public and private realms are questioned by reimagining devices like the veranda, courtyard and building envelope that blur the boundary between where the exterior world ends, and interior life begins. Improvisational and porous, the four morphologies allow for choice vis-à-vis levels of communal participation, access and personal respite. Thus, redundancy presents itself as a recurrent trait alongside competing forms of collective and individual expression.

Section model: Nesting—matrices, courts, and screens

Section model: Nesting—matrices, courts, and screens

Context: Southern California is chosen to frame the investigation with the particular urban and historical circumstances of Venice Beach, Los Angeles offering the following conditions:

  1. LA’s recently enacted Small Lot Ordinance and Accessory Dwelling Unit Ordinance are attempts to introduce smart growth subdivision strategies for multi-family development in neighborhoods like Venice Beach which typically consists of single-family houses. These ordinances can be productively (mis)interpreted as a provocation for new conceptions of shared space and resources.
  2. Almost 6,000 properties in District 11, of which Venice Beach is part, have been transformed into short term home sharing spaces like AirBnB resulting in rent increases and a tighter market for long term residents. This fact combined with the zoning changes demands rethinking L.A.’s existing housing stock to create alternative typologies.
  3. The subtropical climate of L.A. allows greater freedom for year-round outdoor living and pushes the definition of the enclosure that typically marks the limits of the dwelling. This includes greater porosity at the building lot edges by increasing connectivity between the yards, sidewalk and street.
  4. California and the West Coast have a history of architectural innovation paired with communitarian experiments. In addition, canonical dwellings like the R.M. Schindler and Eames houses pioneered the application of prefabrication technologies towards a new aesthetic.
  5. As opposed to working at the city’s periphery where many intentional communities developed in the 1960-70s, current patterns indicate that peer-to-peer enabled sharing communities are emerging in centrally located urban neighborhoods like Venice Beach by design and economic necessity.8

Looping—circuits, terraces, and switches

Nesting—matrices, courts, and screens

Clustering—faces, platforms, and passages

Pooling—heaps, steps, and hollows

LAWRENCE BLOUGH

Lawrence Blough is Professor at Pratt Institute School of Architecture and Principal of GRAFTWORKS Design Research. Head of Core Design, he also teaches advanced seminars on the theory of architectural program and contemporary collective typologies. Blough has held teaching appointments at Washington University in St Louis, Tulane and Catholic University.

His design work and collaborations have been widely published both in the US and abroad and exhibited at institutions such as Temple University, Museum of Modern Art, Locust Projects in Miami, CAUE 92 in France and Yale University. In 2005 GRAFTWORKS was a finalist in the PS1/MoMA Young Architects Program.

Recipient of multiple funding awards for design research, Blough is the inaugural 2018-19 Structurist Fellow, a juried prize from the University of Saskatchewan. The fellowship was recently established to propagate the legacy of The Structurist, an interdisciplinary journal founded in 1960 by Eli Bornstein that addresses art, architecture, ecology, and culture.

This work was made possible with generous support from the Structurist Fellowship University of Saskatchewan College of Arts & Science and Pratt Institute School of Architecture Dean’s Office

Design Director: Lawrence Blough

Project Team: Alex Elguera, Sawyer Daly, Alexis Dorko, Dina Elfaham, Benjamin Erickson, Jonathan Hamilton, Edward Radev, Daniel Rodriguez, Adin Rimland, Bryce Taylor, Abhishek Thakkar, Cat Wilmes

1 Hayden, Delores. Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790-1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 3-7.

2 Kaysen, Ronda. “The Millennial Commune.” The New York Times, July 31, 2015. [http://nyti.ms/1JVbA3c[2]] (accessed April 11, 2016)

3 Aureli, Pier Vittorio et al. “Promised Land: Housing from Commodification to Cooperation.” E-Flux, November, 2019. [https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/collectivity/304772/promised-land-housing-from-commodification-to-cooperation2] (accessed December 30, 2019)

4 Maak, Niklas. “Post-Familial Communes in Germany.” Harvard Design Magazine, No. 41, Fall/Winter, 2015. [http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/41/post-familial-communes-in-germany3] (accessed April 23, 2019)

5 Chayka, Kyle. “When You’re a ‘Digital Nomad’, the World is Your Office.” The New York Times, February 8, 2018. [http://nyti.ms/2BMKoLC4] (accessed June 6, 2018)

6 Urban Design Studio, Los Angeles Department of City Planning. “Small Lot Design Guidelines”, January, 2014. [http://urbandesignla.com/resources/SmallLotDesignGuidelines.php5] (accessed January 8, 2016)

7 Host Compliance LLC. “Los Angeles: Short Term Market Overview”, October, 2017. [https://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2014/14-1635-S2_rpt_PLAN_10-20-2017.pdf6] (accessed October 14, 2019)

8 Ingalls, Julia. “Strange Bedfellows: Exploring Shades of Privacy in Co-living. Archinect, June 20, 2016. [https://archinect.com/features/article/149948880/strange-bedfellows-exploring-shades-of-privacy-in-co-living7] (accessed June 21, 2016)

Lawrence Blough