About This Book
Shared housing is usually discussed as though it were a recent invention, a response to unaffordable cities and shrinking households. This book takes the longer view, tracing communal living in Europe from around 1850 to the present and showing that almost every arrangement now presented as novel has been tried, refined or abandoned before.
The organising move is to sort projects not by date or country but by motive. Some collectives formed for economic reasons, some political, some social — and that distinction turns out to explain far more about how a building works than its style or period does. From this material the editors identify nine distinct development phases, and set more than 30 case studies against each other: typologies, floor plans, and interviews with both residents and experts. The result reads as much like a reference work as an argument, which is precisely its value.
Key Features
- Second edition of a standard reference on collective living, substantially revised
- 320 pages with 208 colour illustrations and 183 colour line drawings
- More than 30 case studies of European housing projects from around 1850 onwards
- Projects classified by economic, political and social motives for sharing across nine development phases
What You'll Discover
- Why the motive behind a collective — economic necessity, political conviction or social preference — shapes its built form more decisively than period or style
- How degrees of privacy are calibrated in European shared housing, and where the threshold between private and communal is actually drawn
- Comparative floor plan studies and typological analysis across three decades of projects
- What residents and experts say about living in these buildings, gathered through interviews rather than inferred from plans
About the Author
Susanne Schmid studied interior design at the Lucerne School of Engineering and Architecture and completed the MAS in Housing at ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE in Zurich, where her research addressed communal living and its sociological and architectural implications. A long-standing partner at Bürgi Schärer Architekten in Bern, she became managing director at Baumschlager Eberle Architekten in Zurich in 2024, and has lectured at the Institute of Interior Architecture in Lucerne since 2022. She edited this volume with Dietmar Eberle and Margit Hugentobler.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Dimensions: 188 x 276 mm
- Pages: 320
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783035628005
- Publisher: Birkhäuser
- Publication Date: 18 November 2024 (first edition)
Perfect For
Architects and housing researchers working on cohousing and multi-unit residential projects, students of residential typology, and anyone weighing collective models against the assumption that housing means a household of one.