When Local is Not Appropriate

When you’re trying to do something special, when it is unique, when it’s sensitive to emerging sensibilities — like a new common house for a new cohousing community, for the new lifestyles and behaviors that you hope to happen there — in these circumstances local is not always best.  Sometimes the appropriate thing to do is to find someone who knows exactly what they are doing.   

It wasn’t until Katie and I visited 185 and  closely analyzed 46 cohousing common houses in Europe some urban, some rural, over 13 months that we figured out in great detail the nuances of why some work and why so many don’t.  We planned to stay only 6 months, but found that we didn’t quite understand it in that short amount of time — so we stayed for 13 months  instead, interviewing banks, architects, and developers in the mornings and residents late into the night.  That is we couldn’t exactly say for sure why a third worked phenomenally well (200 to 500 people hours of use per week) helping 60 or 100 neighbors manifest their aspirations for the place they shared, a kind of place that while they had never experienced before had become an extension of their houses and why a third failed miserably (less than 100 people hours per week) and why a third were mediocre — especially unfortunate given that they all spent comparably the same amounts of money.

By scrutinizing these buildings, these cultural edifices so closely, we’ve been able to consistently design common houses with 250 to 500 people hours of use every week — about as good as the best ones in Denmark, while other common houses that cost the same $300,000 to build garner only 100 or so people hours per week.  I hate seeing this kind of waste, but you see it over and over again in the U.S. — and in Denmark for that matter.  You could immediately tell when you walked into a community — if it was designed by someone who knew what they were doing or a local, perhaps a future resident with a license to practice.  

In Denmark today there are two kinds of cohousing architects:  Those who have designed 15 or more communities and those that have done one.  You could tell the minute you walked on site.  You could see it in the way people relaxed at the common terrace and lingered over tea.  You could tell because people would come to dinner early and stay late after dinner.  The macro feel worked, and the micro point 7 or point 8 second reverberation in the common house acoustics allowing people to have easy comfortable conversations.  People weren’t always asking “what did you say?”  Nor were they too uptight when a kid ran through the common house because the acoustics worked then as well.  The kids room was just right, the guest room was comfortable, the laundry room met their needs, and so on.  Then there was the design of the common house and community by an architect who had never designed a common house before.  And you could immediately tell that one as well.  There was a peep hole between the kitchen and the dining.  The cook looked forlorn and felt like the slave for the day.  The feel was like the church basement, because they did one of those once. And if the terrible acoustics didn’t kill you then the glare from the inappropriately placed windows would.  They just didn’t know, didn’t have the benefit of trial and error, didn’t get to watch and learn how people used their spaces but it was actually the process that really compromised the space.  The thing that made the stellar architects stand out is that they were so organized.  They know how to walk a group through the process so that everyone is heard and that would best assure the group achieve its highest potential.  They were very, very organized because if you set out to design lots of communities you have to be.  And you can walk a group all the way through 400 decisions in due course over a 2 day workshop.  If you weren’t organized, you waded through maybe 30 decisions and everyone wanted to stop long before they were done, “but why didn’t we think of this and 370 other things” haunts the architect and group all through the design process and lingers far too long — as in forever — after moving in.  And those architects never want to do another community — it was too painful, and the group usually doesn’t recommend them much.  At Sunday morning common brunch today in Nevada City Cohousing, a resident described how last year he kayaked down 7 miles of the Yuba and how negotiating the almost 100 rapids took his group over 8 hours because none of them had ever been down that part before.  Then a couple of weeks later he went down with a group where one had been down it many times and it took 2 hours and he had more fun because he was able to kayak and not just fret.  It’s like that with everything; your taxes, mountain climbing or designing a cohousing community.  

How does a new architect break into it.  Our recommendation is that they apprentice with another architect who has done it many times —either participate as a resident, observe like an architect on their project or go and watch a seasoned architect work with another group.  We have had great experience with this method, and architects have left internships in our office to design wonderful common houses or have worked with us and finished the construction documents after attending our initial workshops.  The apprenticeship/mentor learning method is far from dead, and in fact is one of the best ways to learn something new.  For 13 months, day after day, we watched the best masters in the field work with group after group to reach the pinnacles of their potential, make a common house that really fit like a glove and own the building emotionally, and not beat each other up along the way with a process that was too clumsy, and filled with acrimony.  For the apprenticeship approach to work the ego needs to subside — architects need not believe that they can design everything and anything and that they can’t design what they don’t know.  What amazes me most, even if they have not visited nearly 300 communities now, not lived in three over sixteen years, not already designed several dozen, is that they might not have ever even visited one at all — nor even been to the national cohousing conference where they can learn from a large covey of experienced architects.  

So, if you want to hear from those who have designed many, and have figured out how to best facilitate the creation of a wonderful cohousing community in your neighborhood, please seriously consider coming to the Seattle Cohousing Conference in June, and be ready for creative and motivated mentors willing to share so much with you.  It probably won’t mean that you’ll go forward and design your community with confidence.  But it will help you realize what you don’t know, then perhaps you’ll apprentice with someone who does, and then there after go forward and design fantastic common houses from a place of real knowledge and real confidence, and real abilities.  As so many others have in Europe and America.  

While the items at your breakfast, lunch and dinner table travel an average of 1,500 miles — that is a daily occurrence and local therefore does mean a great deal.  But when it comes to making a great common house (which, by the way, does more to encourage local than any other tool I know) then it’s important to make that critical investment work.  They say that to make our emerging local economy work, we have to make our local investments work.  Often, the best local union organizing happens by someone from out of town, the local farmers market has been organized with the help of folks who have successfully organized one elsewhere.  Make it work locally no doubt by first and foremost making it work so that local can work.  

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Cohousing by charlesdurrett