Now, however, various concepts of community living seem to be gaining greater acceptance. At the height of urbanization, especially after the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, numerous cooperative organizations were formed that pursued various goals. In the housing developments that arose from these, many communal facilities were incorporated such as laundry rooms, reading rooms and spaces for meetings and festivities (ill. 1).
The 1920s was a time of collective housing projects. These included local government developments as well as the work of the many cooperatives that were founded at that time. The Swiss and the Viennese were particularly successful in providing communal spaces and social facilities in their housing schemes (ill. 2).
In German housing developments, too, amenities of this kind played an important programmatic role, even if they could not be implemented in many cases for economic reasons. With the general increase in wealth in West Germany after the Second World War, structures of this kind that had survived the years of National Socialism declined. The social housing economy concentrated largely on meeting people’s needs quantitatively. New ideas relating to community dwelling came solely from the environmental movement in the 1970s and 80s, with the formulation of alternative forms of living.
After the Second World War, quality did not play a central role in publicly assisted housing, and this sector has undergone a profound structural crisis since the 1970s. Schemes like the rehabilitation of the Lörrach estate “Im Salzert” nevertheless show what contribution communal measures can make to the quality of housing. In this case, a newly erected community building plays a key role. Projects in Munich, and the Holzstrasse in Linz reveal interesting attempts within existing publicly assisted housing to create areas for play and communication for children through the use of air-conditioned skins (ill. 7).
In recent years, former welfare and local government developers have been more active in the field of housing for senior citizens and mixed age groups. The GWG organization in Munich, for example, is currently developing three new community housing schemes with service facilities, as well as a group project for people suffering from dementia. Many circumstances indicate that, in the realm of housing, there is a great potential for the creation of communal and service facilities to improve the quality of life of older people – a group with remarkably heterogeneous needs. Model projects like those in Ravensburg (ill. 4) and Kaltental, Stuttgart, are evidence of this.
In creating new forms of community housing, however, the lead has been taken by so-called “new developers” – private building groups in many cases. If new community housing projects are flourishing at the moment, this may be seen as a response to the ongoing processes of individualization and a reaction to the nondescript housing on the market that no longer reflects people’s different needs and modern lifestyles. Prototypical of this is the Rieselfeld housing project for women in Freiburg. Through the creation of different communal spaces and habitable access balconies, this scheme specifically addresses the needs of women and single mothers. New group housing thus differs fundamentally from traditional cooperative proj-ects. Important today is not just the provision of housing space, but the right of the individual to determine his or her own life within the community. Since the 1980s in Hamburg, for example – the city with the greatest cooperative housing tradition in Germany – numerous schemes have been developed that have their roots in the alternative or squatter scene. Projects such as “Olga Rabiata” in Hamburg, and the Zeisewiesen development in Otten-sen, Hamburg, belong to this tradition.
New cooperative housing schemes have experimented with owner-occupied forms and with the constructional and architectural articulation of communal attributes. In Darmstadt, for example, the Wohnsinn cooperative is developing forms with permanent rights of residence, exploring a combination of joint ownership and individual disposition. In contrast, the Zurich housing project Karthago experiments with flexible layouts. The strong group orientation of this scheme is accentuated by a large, communal, professional kitchen.
The growth of building cooperatives has also helped to promote joint forms of living. The first groups to build without a developer date back to the early 1990s in Freiburg and Tübingen, where conversion schemes were undertaken. The concept has since been adopted in many other cities. Freed of inflexible organizational structures, of traditions and ideology, new cooperative forms of housing have been able to develop. One of the most important achievements has been to overcome the stultifying duality of individual private ownership on the one hand and communal attitudes on the other. New projects often place the pro-cess of joint construction in the foreground and less the subsequent existence of a communal realm as a token of the cooperative experience. Schemes of this kind differ fundamentally in the significance they place on project-related communal spaces and semi-private spaces for communication, such as courtyards, broader access balconies and roof terraces. In this respect, one could differentiate between introverted and extroverted group housing projects.
The former might be seen as an island for the group in the midst of a basically alien environment. Courtyard projects would be an example of this – a typology found in many different cultures. Remarkably enough, “nieuwe hofjes” are being created again in the Netherlands, as in Pijnacker-Nootdorp. In contrast to this type, there are developments, like the street-block scheme in Tubingen, where semi-private internal courtyards are not entirely screened off, but allow a defined use by neighbouring housing groups, thereby reflecting the cultural diversity of the district.
Outstanding examples of extroverted group housing projects can be seen in the Viennese “Sargfabrik” (Coffin Factory) and Miss Sargfabrik” by the Association for an Integrative Design for Living. Not only do they explore a new form of building culture with different layout types and unusual spatial forms; new models of group and integrated housing have also been tried. The facilities range from a library and a house for children (open to all families in the neighbourhood) to a communal roof terrace and swimming hall, and a restaurant and cafe (ill. 3). The Sargfabrik has now established itself as a cultural point of attraction for the whole of western Vienna.
A less colourful, but equally influential housing scheme is the “Wagnis” (Venture) in Munich. In the first of three projects of this type to date, integrative localities were created in the form of an “exchange” for neighbours and the Café Rigoletto. In addition, the architecture itself supports the process of communication – through the boxes along the access balcony, for example, and the creation of qualitative locations to relax externally.
Communal housing today reveals a new bid to achieve a balance between private and public interests, private and communal property, individual dwelling culture and public space. Joint housing projects are a direct response to social change and to the reduction of design ambitions on the part of a social state. The many different forms in which this type of housing manifests itself open new perspectives and means of social self-regulation and self-determination in building.
