Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Curious about your group's Cohousing Design Programming experience

[R Philip Dowds (rpdowds]

For an architect, experience with the building type and with the client type is 
invaluable.  This is as true for cohousing — multi-family or cluster 
residential, pedestrian-emphasis site plan, and non-hierarchical client, like a 
neighborhood group — as it is for college libraries, shopping malls, or nursing 
homes.  There are many good reasons to find and select an architect with a 
number of successful cohousing designs on his/her resume.

Having said that … there are other good reasons to select a *local* architect.  
Experience with local building and zoning codes, and with local contractors, 
also counts.  But more than that, you (the client) will see more of your 
architect if s/he is within a couple hours drive, max, rather than an elaborate 
and costly plane trip away.  For communal residential design, the weekly (or 
even daily) interactions with the designer are also invaluable — especially if 
and when the project stumbles across unexpected problems.

Finally, keep in mind that architects, as a professional group, tend to be 
amenable to the exploratory and novel.  Even for one who specializes in college 
libraries, every site, every program, and every client represents a unique set 
of challenges; the cookie-cutter approach does not apply.  Good architects 
think they can figure out how to design anything, and there is some truth to 
this (depending on how you define “good”).

If you want to talk, write me back and I’ll send you a phone number.

Thanks,
Philip Dowds RA
Cornerstone Village Cohousing
Cambridge, MA

> On Mar 19, 2016, at 9:29 PM, Carina Young <carinawyoung [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Our group (Harrisonburg Cohousing, in Harrisonburg, VA) is ready to begin
> choosing an architect, and we're planning on considering some architects
> with no cohousing experience. Would anyone on the listserv be willing to
> share with me:
> 
> Did your group choose an architect familiar with cohousing?  If you did, do
> you feel like they facilitated the design program well? If you chose an
> architect who hadn't done cohousing before, did you have someone familiar
> with cohousing design facilitate the design workshops? Or did you just have
> the architect or some other facilitator run the workshop?
> 
> Our group has some conflicting opinions about how to move forward, and
> we're looking for wisdom and insight from your experiences. (Some of us are
> very in favor of having experienced cohousing design facilitators run the
> design workshops, and some of us think a good architect with a good
> non-cohousing facilitator would do a fine job.) Feel free to email me at
> carinawyoung [at] gmail.com if you'd like to share off the listserv, or if 
> you'd
> be willing to talk with me over the phone.
> 
> Carina Young
> carinawyoung [at] gmail.com
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