Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing-L Digest, Vol 51, Issue 18

[Grace Kim (grace]

SNIP:
We are building a common house soon at Champlain Valley Cohousing in  
Vermont.  We will have 26 households when we're fully established.  I  
was wondering what size other people's common houses are.  How big is  
yours and how many households do you have?
-Per Eisenman


Per - while I think its informative for you to learn the size of other
people's common houses, I think you should be careful in just looking at
square footage per capita.  If you have an architect involved, hopefully
they are emphasizing quality vs. quantity of your programmed space.  As
long as your dining room/kitchen is sized appropriately for your
community (able to seat 2/3 of community for typical meals w/ expansion
capability to accommodate all for special functions) then you could also
take advantage of overlapping uses and minimizing dedicated circulation
routes (aka hallways/corridors) to reduce the overall building square
footage and still have a fabulous Common House of "just the right size"
for your community.

I would encourage your community to take the time upfront with your
architect to properly program your Common House so that it contains
flexible rooms to accommodate your current needs but could easily adapt
to future uses (that you can't even begin to predict at this time).  As
part of my graduate studies, I wrote my architectural thesis on the
"Design of the Common House".  Using Christopher Alexander's Pattern
Language as a guide, I identified the key patterns and developed a few
additional patterns and documented with photographs the elements that I
attribute to successful the most successful Common Houses I visited (30+
in Denmark and 40+ in the US).  I would be glad to share that with your
community as a resource if you want to contact me offline.  


grace h. kim, aia
principal
 
schemata workshop
an architectural collaborative
NEW ADDRESS!
1720 12th Ave, #3
seattle, wa 98122
v.206.285.1589
f.206.285.2701
www.schemataworkshop.com