By Nadthachai Kongkhajornkidsuk
One of the first projects I was fortunate enough to work on at The Cohousing Company was co-writing and editing our most recent book Cohousing Communities: Designing High-Functioning Neighborhoods—now published by Wiley.
In all honesty, as a young designer, I was quite overwhelmed by the breadth of information that the book had to offer on my first read. There seem to be so many factors that are crucial to make a cohousing community successful and high-functioning from a design and social point of view—from two-hands clapping philosophy in site design to 0.70 second reverberation in common house's acoustic.
However, as I started editing the book and talked to Chuck about his experience and intention for the book, it became clear to me that while all these design factors are related to one another, there's a logical sense of order and scale in which these design factors play a role in designing cohousing.
I believe we have all heard the saying "You can't see the forest for the tress,” or “The devil is in the details.” And I believe that both of these sayings hold true when it comes to cohousing design and the success of cohousing communities. As you can see in Chapter 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, & 12 of Cohousing Communities: Designing High-Functioning Neighborhoods, we always start off each design workshop with establishing:
Goals
Activities
Places
This order of operation allows us to ensure that both the architect and the future residents understand who the group are, who they want to be, and how their future cohousing community can help them best realize their goals and values. Once the criteria is established, then we can dive into all the design details that will ultimately serve the goals, activities, and places that we established—from party wall detail to reduce sound transmission between the units, to the proportion and acoustic treatment of the common house that reduce the reverberation, so neighbors can enjoy their common meal and have meaningful conversations during and afterwards.
With this understanding of the Macro and Micro of cohousing in mind, I tried my best to make sure that we conveyed this important lesson into the book Cohousing Communities: Designing High-Functioning Neighborhoods, so that it can help other designers who are interested in designing high-functioning cohousing community or anything with community as the emphasis, just like myself.
This book is written with our 30-year experience designing more than 50 cohousing communities in North America, and many more around the world. While we made some mistakes along the way, we learned from them and we can now confidently say what works and what doesn’t when it comes to designing a high functioning community—especially many small details that make all of the difference when it comes to designing cohousing. We also live in cohousing, and we hear from our neighbors what works and doesn’t, and we share that with this book. We hear from the residents who live in all of the 55 cohousing that we have designed—both the good and the bad. We are in contact with them all of the time, so we can ensure that their cohousing communities are sustainably high functioning.
If you’re going to do a cohousing—do it right, and we fully believe that this book gives you the tools.