From June 3 to September 10 2017, "Together! The New Architecture of the Collective" host at Vitra Design Museum in Basel, will focus on the global phenomenon of social housing by presenting a broad array of collective building and living projects from Europe, Asia, and the United States. An overview of historical precedents for the current wave of collectives demonstrates that the idea of collectivity has been a recurring theme in the history of architecture, from the reformist ideas of the nineteenth century to the hippies and squatters of the twentieth.
In particular, the exhibition begins with a look at the history of social housing ideals that mostly originated in a protest against the existing conditions. The presentation stresses this and refers to the urgency of the topic: a series of films shows examples of social unrest triggered by housing shortages.
Protest placards provide information about historical attempts to respond to these challenges. These include the Phalanstères invented by Charles Fourier (1772–1837), the late-nineteenth-century Monte Verità colony in the Swiss part of the Ticino, the housing cooperatives of the 1920s, the autonomous community of Christiania in Copenhagen, and the Karthago cooperative in Zurich.
Many of these ideas were closely related to the social shifts of their day; it is therefore no surprise that they are once more gaining currency as more and more people live outside the conventional nuclear family – be it as couples, single parents, singles, or elderly people living alone. For many, the idea of collective living offers an affordable remedy to urban isolation.
The exhibition’s second section uses 21 large-scale models of contemporary housing experiments to create a fictitious city for visitors to explore. In reality these projects by architects including einszueins architektur, Heide & von Beckerath, Michael Maltzan Architecture, ON design partners, pool Architekten, and Ryue Nishizawa may be found in cities as diverse as Berlin, Zurich, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Vienna.
A closer look at the models reveals that the innovative thrust of this new collective architecture also extends to fundamental principles such as volume, façade, and materials: the specific challenges and limited resources confronting the architects give rise to a unique aesthetic. The context of the imaginary city moreover shows that many of these projects blur the boundaries between living space and urban space, between private and public sphere.
This becomes clear in the third section, where a full-scale model of what is known as a »cluster apartment« enables visitors to enter and experience the communal and private spaces that characterise this housing type. Background information – including floor plans – sheds light on the many forms that new collective lifestyles can take.
The installation features a series of photographs by Daniel Burchard made especially for the exhibition. His photographic essays provide an insider’s look at eight projects from a variety of countries, documenting scenes from everyday life in the new collectives. This shows that the new collectives emerge as social laboratories not least because the digitalisation gives rise to new possibilities of life/work organisation.