From koldoms to coliving. Shared housing as an architectural phenomenon

The topic of coliving, i.e. shared housing, has experienced a considerable boom in the last decade – while it is a relatively new business opportunity for investors, architects can in many ways build on the work of their interwar colleagues. Projects involving this type of housing, characterised by the occupation of very small private units and the sharing of common spaces within buildings, are currently booming, particularly in large cosmopolitan cities from New York to Amsterdam. In the Czech Republic, modern coliving is still in its infancy, and only the first buildings of this type are being built in the Czech Republic – however, in the coming years it is expected to develop along the lines of other European cities.

A few decades earlier, “coliving” buildings were being built in England, for example. One of the earliest realizations of collective housing in modern times is the Lawn Road Flats (or also Isokon Building) in London from the early 1930s, designed by architect Wells Coates. The project’s ideas were generally drawn from the MARS (Modern Architectural Research Group), the British offshoot of the famous modernist platform CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture). The building offered a communal laundry, bar and large communal roof terrace in addition to a dining room. Today, it is a cultural monument, largely due to the fact that Bauhaus professors Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy resided in the building.

As already mentioned, coliving is nowadays a phenomenon, especially in the world’s big cities, where modern buildings are being built in accordance with current aesthetic trends. Private developers and global coliving providers predominate among the investors, but especially in the Nordic European countries, coliving has traditionally been supported at the state level, so that similar projects are also being developed in smaller cities and their outskirts to meet the needs of, for example, young families and the elderly. Such units are much more civil in character, and may be a group of terraced houses or low-rise apartment buildings, usually with a common green yard. The Danish collective housing boom began in the late 1960s, influenced also by an article by the psychologist Bodil Graae entitled ‘Every child should have 100 parents’.

Around the world, countless coliving projects are currently being completed, ranging from the renovation of urban apartment buildings to new residential complexes. It seems likely that this building typology will continue to evolve and an important challenge for architects will be the ability to provide coliving residents with quality spaces with an emphasis on flexible use, so that they can sustain themselves, particularly in the longer term. And to become a quality part of our cities, both architecturally and urbanistically.