How to Live Together is the result of both personal obsession and professional curiosity. It does not (and cannot) claim to be an exhaustive overview of communal living practices. Inspired by Communes in the New World by Liselotte and Mathias Oswald Ungers, this an opportunistic and deeply personal collection of case studies and warnings that defy categorization or rigorous accounting. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
How to Live Together is a collection of communal living experiments from around the world and throughout history. From celibate cloisters to free love yurts to sprawling polygamous compounds, it is intended as an encyclopedic survey that treats the architectural floor plan as an expression of radical and disruptive social experimentation.
The question of how to live together—of how best to live together—is the foundation of any society. The last few years have exposed the fault lines in our current system: climatic catastrophe, economic crisis, supply chain collapse, civil unrest, rampant inequality, and a global pandemic. We live in congested cities and in potentially dangerous proximity, yet remain isolated. In light of these mounting pressures, it’s time to revisit the fundamentals. How to Live Together offers alternative ways of being, thinking, dwelling, and living. It calls into question every basic assumption and prevailing social norm: belief, sex, the nuclear family, property ownership, our relationship to land, production, and consumption. It is both a critique and a roadmap.
How to Live Together is inspired by Communes in the New World 1740-1972 by architect O.M. Ungers and sociologist Liselotte Ungers. Published nearly fifty years ago, their book is an optimistic collection of communal living experiments in the United States. How to Live Together updates and expands their work for the 21st century; featuring not only these American communes—some of which failed and some of which flourished—but diverse and eclectic examples from around the world.
Equal parts formal analysis and social observation, How to Live Together approaches architecture as a form of ideological expression, highlighting its ability to organize, reflect, exaggerate, and influence the way we live and interact with one another.
How to Live Together is a celebration of photography and architectural drawing. A treasure trove of original photographs and primary source materials, it approaches architecture (specifically the floor plan) as a form of ideological expression. Often overlooked in favor of the spatial section, the floor plan is an eloquent expression of social organization, group priorities, and shared ideology—a profound record of meaning and matter, fully deserving of our attention.
How to Live Together offers a new set of precedents for housing solutions—ones in which public and private, the collective and the individual, are radically reshaped and reorganized.
Architecture is a profession built on precedents; we analyze them, study them in minute details, trace them, and diagram them. All so we can learn from them and redeploy them in new contexts. Housing is a design problem every architecture student will face and an urgent concern for every professional, in every city.
While the details may vary, housing is invariably treated as an accumulation of single family residences. There is a default definition (based on western canon) of what is public and what is private, what is shared and what isn’t—the communal is relegated to circulation, common rooms, and the odd shared kitchen. New precedents will provoke new conversations and inspire new design solutions; ones with the power to reorder space and reorganize society.
This work was supported by at start up grant from the creative industries fund NL.
