The Cohousing Company's Blogs Returned, Featured Articles, Upcoming Presentations, and More | |
Nevada City Cohousing's Annual Spring Artshow: All Art by the Residents! | |
The Return of The Cohousing's Company Blog
Place for thoughtful articles regarding cohousing and community design.
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We are more than excited to announce that after a long hiatus, our Cohousing and Design Blog is now back on our website at:
https://www.cohousingco.com/blog
Here you can find a collection of articles that we've written about cohousing, design, affordable housing, urban planning, and how they affect our issues of the day, including homelessness, global warming, diversity, loneliness, parenting, and growing older.
And to kick us off, we have a writing piece by our architectural designer, Nadthachai Kongkhajornkidsuk, where he talks about the Micro and Macro of Cohousing Design, and his experience co-writing our latest book Cohousing Communites.
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The Micro & Macro of Cohousing Design
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...."
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Other Updates in Cohousing: Table of Contents
May 2023
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- East Van Site Design Recap and Common House Workshop Schedule
- Building Community with Cohousing: ULI Article by Rachel MacCleery
- AIA SF Conference on Architecture Presentation
- New Cohousing Community in Moorehead, KY - Edna O'Schack
- Charles Durrett Return to Denmark/Europe
- New Antioch Continuing Education Course — Designing Community-Enhanced Neighborhoods: The Architecture of Cohousing
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East Van Cohousing Site Design Workshop Recap
& Common House Design Workshop Schedule
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East Van Cohousing's Site Design Workshop was a big success!
On the weekend of May 13th-14th, Charles Durrett, Amisto, and Vancouver Cohousing hosted the Site Design Workshop for the new forming cohousing community—East Van Cohousing, and it was a great success!
This workshop was the first participatory design workshop that the group participated in—following the Getting-It-Built Workshop in February—and they really came together as a group through meaningful brainstorm, discussion and consensus of who they are, who they want to be, and how their future cohousing community can help them best realize their goals and values.
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The weekend was chock-full of amazing and innovative ideas. There were many moments that we were surprised by how socially and environmentally aware this group of residents is, and this was two of those kind of days.
As they brainstorm, discuss, and envision together how they want their future community to be, they prioritize their interactions with their neighbors and the spaces for those interactions to happen organically and comfortably—from sitting and chatting together in a gathering node to having an outdoor area for group stretching and communal gardening.
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The weekend also provided great opportunities for the future residents to not only visit the site of their future cohousing community, but also see the life between buildings of the existing Vancouver Cohousing, the cohousing community that we designed 11 years ago.
We couldn't be more grateful to our host Vancouver Cohousing, especially Cam Dore, who not only helped us with the workshop preparation, but also provide lunch for both days of the workshop.
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The group now has great momentum, and we are extremely excited to get this project rolling and going.
If you too would like to see a new high-functioning neighborhood in Vancouver, then please come and make it happen. We would like to invite you to join us and register for the Common House Design Workshop on June 17–18. This workshop is the most important community-building workshop, as the group together will shape and define the common realm of their future community.
For more information about this workshop, please visit: https://www.eastvancohousing.ca/
or call Jen Mollins at (778) 269 4311
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Building Community with Cohousing
ULI Article by Rachel MacCleery
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I am honored to be featured in this fantastic write up on cohousing by Raxchel MacCleery, co-executive director of ULI Randall Lewis Center. Here's a quick excerpt from the article:
"Cohousing joins coliving, microhousing, accessory dwelling units, and other housing innovations that are meeting the evolving needs of individuals and families. Escalating housing prices, concerns about climate change, and a growing sense of loneliness and isolation are pushing people to reconsider how and where they live."
Rachel MacCleery
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AIA Conference on Architecture
June 7th–10th, San Francisco, CA
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Cohousing Communities: Designing for High-Functioning Neighborhoods
AIA presentation by
Charles Durrett & Nadthachai Kongkhajornkidsuk
Thursday June 8th, 2023, 1:30PM–2:30 PM PDT
In this session, a leading architect and builder of cohousing projects will share what cohousing is, how it’s designed, the unique benefits residents, and how it incorporates participatory design to promote more socially equitable and environmentally sustainable communities.
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New Cohousing Community in Moorehead, KY
Edna O'Schack's initiative
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Edna O'Schack, the sister of Pat Darlington, one of the 2 initiators of Oakcreek Cohousing Community in Stillwater, Oklahoma, is starting a new cohousing community in Moorehead, Kentucky!
Cohousing is headed even more to the heartland—not just a coastal California, Washington, and Massachusetts idea.
We are currently working with Edna O'Schack in planning not just a cohousing community, but also a mixed-use masterplan for her potential 11-acre site. We are so excited to see this project moving forward, and we will continue its progress in our upcoming newsletter.
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Remembering a Visionary in Cohousing
Jan Gudmand-Høyer
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It's been 5 years now since I wrote this obituary for Jan Gudmand-Høyer, and some people might have not had a chance to read this. We believe it's important for us to remember the impact that Jan had to the cohousing movement as a whole.
I'm going back to Denmark to meet with his family in Denmark this September to retrieve more documents about the beginning of cohousing there. I also hope that this obituary serves as a great introduction about Jan Gundman-Høyer's life and accomplishment to many people, including the Danes who love cohousing but have not heard much of him.
Obituary
With vision, endurance, and above all, faith in his fellow citizens, Jan Gudmand-Høyer played an important role in the development of cohousing communities.
The man who started cohousing in Denmark, and therefore the man who started cohousing, died yesterday at 81 years old. Jan came up with the novel idea that to make a neighborhood that truly fits the needs of the the individuals and society—you have to design it to fit true needs and wants. In 1964, Jan gathered together friends and acquaintances to talk about housing. He asked them to imagine a lifestyle and a place that didn't yet exist—a place that could suit the needs of ordinary citizens, an intentional place that was different from what mom and pop, or grandma and grandpa had created for themselves. "what really makes sense for people in late twentieth century, western industrialized societies?" was his query....
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Antioch University 4-Part Live Online Program
Designing Community-Enhances Neighborhoods: The Architecture of Cohousing
June 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th 2023
With this class, Charles Durrett will impart his knowledge from designing over 55 cohousing communities in North America (and probably more than anyone in the world) to give every cohousing designer a leg up in designing a new high-quality and high-functioning cohousing community.
Register here
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Books have played a major role from the beginning in terms of getting cohousing to this country and built in your town, starting with our first book Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (The European Story). Bookstores normally play a key role in culture change in general, and cohousing is no exception.
Many groups have contacted the publisher (New Society Press and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) directly to get bulk discounts, and I find that successful projects get started when lots of folks do this fun homework. I usually need to give a dozen copies of Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities, Senior Cohousing: A Community Approach to Independent Living and Cohousing Communities: Designing for High-Functioning Neighborhoods away to planners, banks, neighbors, mayors, new residents, local architects, builders, and so on—to give them context. It saves the group thousands and thousands of hours, dollars, and delays, and most importantly makes for a better project.
Cohousing is more than a sound bite; it is cultural pivot, and it takes folks doing some fun research first. Seattle and the surrounding areas have about a dozen cohousing communities today largely because the bookstores in town have sold more than 1,000 copies of Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities and the San Francisco area has over 20 cohousing communities largely because the book has sold more than 2,000 copies there.
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