In the study Living in Space and Time. In Search of Socio-cultural Trends in Housing (2009), one of the aspects the Council for Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment drew attention to was the increasing interest in living with other like-minded people, in a privately managed residential domain or otherwise. According to the Council, this […]
DASH #08 – Building Together
The Architecture of Collective Private Commissions
Several municipal governments in the Netherlands are looking closely at collective private building commissions. By stimulating private individuals to form commissioning collectives, cities like Almere and Amsterdam hope to relaunch the jammed housing market. In this they are taking a step towards what has been routine in Germany for many years under the name Baugruppen.
In the news coverage about Collective Private Commissioning (CPC), the economic and financial aspects usually take a central position. Often the opportunities that CPC offers for creating new forms of housing, programmes and floor plans that match the requirements of the user receive too little attention. It is precisely this side of the equation that DASH Building Together invests.
Through a number of essays and interviews, DASH shows that CPC collaborations in the Netherlands and abroad have resulted in innovative architecture for decades. With extensive plan documentation charts these programmatic and typological innovations in text and drawings, DASH Building Together provides an architectural slant on the collective private commissioning debate.
CONTENT
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Essays
Collective Private Commissioning in the Netherlands
Collective private commissions (CPC) are not new in the Netherlands. Using historical and contemporary examples, this article investigates the role that CPC has played for Dutch architecture in the past and can play again in the future.
Bakema’s ‘t Hool in Eindhoven
Between 1960 and 1972 an initiative by five Philips employees developed into a unique residential district of more than 1,000 houses. To this day, ’t Hool embodies the ideals, wishes and ambitions of a new post-war middle class.
Germany in general and Berlin in particular have a rich tradition of collective private commissions. This contribution traces the circumstances in which so-called Baugruppen (building groups) could flourish and describes their influence on architectural practice in Germany.
Interviews
Interview with Frank van Beek and Frank Veen, Lingotto
Until a few years ago, it was common practice in the Netherlands for developers to deliver generic products and give most of their attention to production. Of course, there was also a market that accepted this. It made little difference what was produced, for everything sold. Although architects had been expressing an interest in increasing […]
Interview with Hein de Haan, CASA
Since the 1980s, architect Hein de Haan (b. 1943) has been involved in countless housing projects based on collective private commissioning, or CPC. ‘People often ask me how to go about it, and I hand them all sorts of information.’ De Haan is a missionary for CPC. Working out of CASA (Coöperatief Architectenbureau voor de […]
Plan Documentation
The plan documentation of this eighth edition of DASH includes 11 projects that were realized on the basis of collective private commissions. Spread over Europe and North America, the projects provide a panoramic overview of the last 100 years. It shows the results of people’s private initiatives to build their own homes together with associates. […]
The aim of the Dutch Housing Act of 1902 was to relieve the worst failings in the public housing situation, particularly among the poorest section of the population. This did not mean, however, that improvements were not desired for those who were better situated. For this reason the ‘Amster-damsche Coöperatieve Woonvereeniging “Samenwerking”’ (‘collaboration’) was founded […]
In the 1940s, David and Priscilla Henken, two young professionals who lived and worked in Manhattan, took the initiative to found a cooperative community in the countryside together with like-minded people, away from busy and densely populated New York City. Their inspiration stemmed from the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the […]
Residential community ‘Thalmatt 1’ is situated on the same wooded ridge of hills north of Bern as the 15-years-older, much better-known Siedlung Halen, and can be considered as a direct sequel to Halen. Both projects were designed by the Swiss architecture collective Atelier 5, whose aim was to develop ‘prototypes for new forms of housing’. […]
Architect/engineer Ricardo Aroca from Madrid realized a number of unusual apartment buildings in the 1970s. The underlying principle was the idea of a vertical shelving rack on which made-to-measure houses could be placed, indepen-dently of each other. Each storey provides a free floor slab where every layout is possible. To achieve this, Aroca developed a […]
Hidden deep between the pedestrian priority zones in Leusden, there is a cluster of 11 houses in two rows grouped round a green courtyard. The sober exterior, executed in concrete blocks, has an expressive form due to the recessed house entrances and similarly set-back balconies on the first floor. It provides hardly any indication of […]
The project WindSong Cohousing, in a suburb of the town of Langley in the Canadian province of British Columbia, will remind many people of communes from the 1970s. The residents of WindSong collectively work in the vegetable garden, often cook together, are intensely occupied with personal growth and spend at least three hours a month […]
The Viennese housing project Miss Sargfabrik (2000) is the sequel to a project located nearby (1996), named Sargfabrik. They have a lot in common: bright-orange façades with an unusual programme that includes room, alongside housing, for collective, and in the case of Sargfabrik, public functions. In addition they have the same client: a collective named […]
The ‘Egebakken’ complex for senior citizens was initiated around 2000 by five retired couples and friends from the small village of Nødebo, to the north of Copenhagen. They had reached a point where their domestic wishes and requirements had changed significantly: their children had left home so the living space had often become too big, […]
In 2000 the City of Amsterdam held a competition for a collective residential building on the south-western point of Steigereiland. Steigereiland is part of the expansion district of IJburg that consists of a series of artificially constructed islands in the IJmeer. The city council had cleared the way for the experiment on Steigereiland, including the […]
Berlin bureau Zanderroth Architekten has realized 45 town-houses in the Prenzlauerberg district for a Baugruppe (building group), arranged in two strips along each side of a communal city garden. The size of the plot in the Zelter-strasse is limited: the south side is protected by a blank fire wall 22 m high and almost 100 […]
In early 2012, two buildings that at first sight look like individual houses were realized on Elandsstraat in Amster-dam. Behind the façades, there is a collective project in which six families combined forces to realize their individual housing requirements. One of the initiators is Bastiaan Jongerius. Together with neighbours from a previous collective project (a […]