Housing As a Process, Not a Product.
Exhibition
Lincoln Ruiz-Truong & Nick Grosh
April - September
During December 2024 - January 2025, two students—Lincoln Ruiz-Truong (BA, Architecture ’26) and Nick Grosh (BA, Urban Studies ’24; currently pursuing an MArch at the University of Michigan)—traveled across Europe to study cooperative housing design and development.
With support from the Judith Lee Stronach Undergraduate Traveling Scholarship, their research took them to Berlin, Zürich, and Barcelona, where they met with architects, planners, and city officials to better understand how architecture, policy, economics, and social frameworks shape successful cooperative housing models.
As an extension of this research, they’ve curated a new exhibition in the Bauer Wurster Gallery. Housing as a Process, Not a Product repositions housing as an evolving system—one that adapts over time and reflects the lived experiences of its residents.
Additional support for this exhibition was provided by Dean Renee Y. Chow and Thomas R. Chastain.
Project Brief
The design of housing, beyond the physical construction of space, is the creation of social, financial, and political systems that change how our environment is manifested and used. With a specific interest in cooperatives and the de-commodification of housing, research conducted in Berlin, Zürich, and Barcelona looked at three different approaches to housing development. This exhibition positions housing as a process, as space that is constantly changing, as a place where residents’ lives can be reflected.
The exhibition’s title, Housing As A Process, Not a Product, addresses the issues of homogeneity and rigidity that result from current market-driven housing. With the intended audience of peers and fellow designers, we explore how housing is an effort in collaboration, one that stretches both horizontally and vertically, and redefines the role of the architect.
Accommodating change
or in other words, planning for uncertainty is about embracing adaptability rather than finality. The notion that a structure is complete once it is constructed ignores our rapidly changing social and technological needs. Rather, a building’s true life begins after construction ends, and with equity and sustainability concerns surrounding housing, inflexible designs are not just wasteful, but irresponsible. Anticipating the future life of a space is an architectural framework rooted in democratizing the built environment, enabling
rather than determining human activity. The work below outlines two design tools that can accommodate change in the residential and urban context.
Support / Infill
Discussed by Dutch architect John Habraken in his book Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, supports and infill are an architecture where the external and permanent form of a building is independent from its interiors, where flexibility and change is facilitated. In the context of housing, this framework reconsiders the role of the architect and the relationship that inhabitants have with their dwellings. This equips buildings with the necessary framework to accommodate for future uses. Units can grow or shrink depending on households, as well as unique spatial configurations to account for different domestic needs. Many of these case studies and their architects are influenced by Habraken and employ this design approach through non-structural wall partitions and modularity. In case of cooperative development, designing with the inhabitants is intrinsic, and therefore infill is dynamic and decided upon collectively between architects and residents to fit the framework of the ‘support’.
Depth of Access
When entering a traditional market rate apartment building in the United States you go through the front, and are usually met with either a lobby, which leads to a corridor, a stair or elevator, that leads to a corridor, or are sent directly into, … a corridor. This minimal ‘depth of access’ forces one path of entry, one path of movement, and limits the capacity for architectural variety. A deeper point of access instead, where participants enter the space into the center of movement and activity can, in large scales become a point of public, shared, or communal activity and in small scale enables efficient circulation and larger possibilities in floor plans.
Public Threshold
In these examples of deep access points, there is an initial entry and threshold that takes people from the street into a secondary space. This secondary space can be as communal as a public park or as private as a collective atrium, but represents a transition from the street that is intermediate to the space of living. This collective foyer provides its own programmable communal space while allowing all parts of the building to be accessed.
Collective Resources
In any housing project there are many uses that are non-daily, whether it is a large dinner party, family in town for the weekend, or a task as mundane as doing the laundry. These are spaces that exist, ideally, within the confines and comfort of your own home but often go underutilized. As a result many of these necessary but non-regular spaces are duplicated in every home or apartment. While some apartments include a shared laundry, it is usually dinghy and a decision made for the landlord’s bottom line.
Imagine however a different scenario. Collective spaces taken beyond laundry to include communal kitchens, guesthouses, flexible satellite rooms, and much more. All made for the benefit of the tenant rather than the landlord. By combining these non-regular spaces not only can the density of housing units be increased, making it more affordable, but higher quality spaces for collective and non-regular use can be provided. These spaces can surpass necessary guest rooms and laundry to include meeting spaces, game rooms, playgrounds and other spaces that can not exist and scale of an individual unit.
Sharing like this is amplified in a space of co-living, where collective spaces like a laundry room don’t exist apart from your day to day life but instead are enveloped by your home. When ownership is also collective, these shared spaces take new form, as each resident owns a stake in the space; it results in mutual respect and collective care.
Below are examples of different types of collective resources and different levels of sharing from the case studies.
Satellite Spaces
Satellite Spaces refer to an umbrella category of “floating” rooms in collective and co-housing arrangements. These include satellite rooms in Spain, joker rooms in Switzerland, guest houses, and public commons spaces. While these spaces are collectively owned by all residents, they aren’t meant for regular communal use. Instead, they “float” from resident to resident based on changing needs. These versatile spaces operate across different time scales. In the long term, a satellite space might serve as a bedroom for a teenager who’s outgrown shared accommodations but hasn’t moved out yet, or provide temporary housing for a friend or in-law needing accommodation for a month. In the short term, these same spaces can function as guest rooms for visitors or commons that residents can reserve for video calls, work meetings, social gatherings, or game nights. What makes satellite spaces particularly adaptable is their connection to general shared circulation areas rather than private ones. This strategic positioning allows them to accommodate both long and short-term uses, though communities often designate specific satellite spaces for different timeframes and purposes.
Unit Diversity
Another tool to accommodate the changing life of a building is by offering an extensive range of units. Contrary to support and infill, the inclusion of fixed but varying unit types can support the inevitable change of an apartment building. Kalkbreite, for example, contains a range of apartment types that fulfill the needs of their diverse residents. These include units with 1-10 bedrooms, lofted space, multigenerational apartments, and co-living apartment spaces. This supports the growth or degrowth of households since residents can switch between units during vacancy. Once again, cooperative ownership enables this tool further, and as a private organization, the cooperative handles decisions internally to eliminate the legal bureaucracy that comes with traditional landlord tenant dynamics.
Point-Access-Block (PAB)
PABs are a housing building typology that are defined by compact, single-stair buildings centered around a stair and elevator core. Created by the positioning of circulation and egress, PABs have a ‘deep’ access that prevents the need for long corridors and enables access to greater diversity of space. Not a unique typology, PABs are prevalent all across the world and make up much of the mid-rise housing stock. However, in most cases in the US, PABs are only legal up to three stories. Increasing this limit can unlock mid-rise development sites for densification, affordable housing, more climate adaptive housing, more multigenerational and family-sized housing.
Cluster Living
In cluster living, the sharing of collective resources is taken to its most extreme form, where all space except for sleeping areas is made common to a group of people, detaching residents from traditional household dynamics and hierarchies. While each person maintains a small private kitchenette and bathroom, all other spaces become shared, allowing them to be larger and of higher quality than would be possible in conventional housing. These arrangements typically necessitate both a cooperative ownership structure and a carefully selected group of compatible residents. Despite the intensive nature of sharing required, wherever these types of arrangements exist, there is consistently greater demand than supply, indicating their appeal to certain segments of the housing market seeking both community and enhanced living spaces.