Community Living

Throughout the 20th century, many architects contributed architectural solutions to house the broad spectrum of experiences that can fall into the category of community living. From the typological point of view, there are four areas that encompass a large part of these models: the suburban colonies associated with productive and industrial activities; “communes” and their translation into residential and multi-family grouping models; religious communities; and, finally, temporary residences. To a greater or lesser extent, all of them have been the focus of attention for the modern movement in architecture, with countless examples of buildings that house communities that do not rely exclusively on the traditional family as the fundamental unit of cohabitation.

In recent years, forms and formulas of community living ─ what has been called “cohousing” ─ have been tried out in Spain, in which the concepts of community and cohabitation have been translated into new programmes and formal solutions associated with collective housing, proposing residential options that offer alternatives to traditional housing models. In this context, it is worth revisiting the 20th-century research that has contributed solutions for housing the broad spectrum of experiences that can fall into the category of community living.

Productive Communities

Industrialization led to the emergence of new communities associated with new forms of production and the exploitation of resources. In the late 19th century, industrial colonies were built in places with direct access to water. Similarly, the mining towns on the Cantabrian coast and in Andalusia constituted new forms of social grouping resulting from the construction of accommodations adjacent to production sites. These communities, built ex novo, needed to provide not only accommodation but all the necessary associated services. In the second half of the 20th century, “new towns” were built as socially homogeneous communities, in which a series of shared services were provided; they took the form of rural towns in keeping with a larger, comprehensive project. Later, the towns built for workers at electrical plants concentrated workers in communities with abundant services for those workers and their families.

Communes: Research and Utopia in Collective Housing (1960-1970)

Certain multi-family architectures took a “romanticized” view of the commune as synonymous with a rejection of bourgeois social stereotypes. In the social and philosophical framework of the 1960s and 1970s, idealism and utopia permeated architecture that believed it was possible to advance towards a freer society through the creation of new architectural and urban forms. This translated into new forms of spatial groupings and typologies derived from investigations of new ways of living. Solutions were also tested in workers’ housing, in this case made necessary by the scarcity of public resources, which demanded maximizing and pooling shared services.

New Religious Communities

The contemplative life of religious communities is, by its very definition, a type of community life. Religious communities are organized based on a series of norms that constitute the “rule”; these norms often have consequences when it comes to the organization of living spaces and the relationships between the public and private spheres. In Spain, the architecture of religious communities in the late 20th century produced a large number of buildings that are characterized by a radical modernity: the airs of renewal laid out by the Second Vatican Council meant that the new ecclesiastical and convent architectures also expressed the desire to rethink architectural and aesthetic models, and rationalist architecture offered the simplicity and evocative capabilities they hoped to express. Miguel Fisac, Antonio Fernández Alba and Fray Coello de Portugal, among others, were able to lend this new religious architecture the sobriety and modernity heralded by the Council.

Temporary Housing

Among the different residential types, university housing has a long history in the architecture of the modern movement. In Spain, the promotion of higher education, starting in the 1920s, sought to incorporate students from different social classes into the university institution. Residential colleges and halls of residence facilitated this task. The centre of the University City of Madrid offers an unparalleled collection of design solutions created for this typology, with works authored by great names in Spanish architecture from the late 20th century. In typological terms, the residential colleges and halls of residence in Madrid were often characterized by their large size and by offering a wide variety of services in their facilities, – for sports or cultural activities or spaces for socialization. In parallel, the Labor Universities also gave rise to interesting spatial groupings.

Conclusion: Research on Collective Housing

In Spain, the 2008 crisis revealed the enormous dysfunctions of the residential market, with a stock of rental public housing that was almost non-existent. The right to housing joined together politicians and legislators with architects in the search for imaginative solutions. In these solutions, community living and collective housing revisited longstanding research and historical typologies, in which attention was focused on the relationship and the balance between private spaces and spaces for common uses in buildings and residential environments. Without a doubt, in the coming years the study of historical models of community living will further stoke the revolution we are currently seeing in the typology of collective housing.

• In depth Community Living