Housing Is Not a Product

What it means to design housing as a social and spatial system.

Most housing projects begin with a spreadsheet: number of units, net floor area, parking spaces, construction cost and expected return.

We have nothing against spreadsheets. They are brutally honest and occasionally ruin a perfectly good afternoon. The problem begins when the spreadsheet becomes a complete definition of housing.

An apartment may meet every required figure and still be unpleasant to live in. A building may achieve an excellent net-to-gross ratio while producing dark corridors, leftover gardens and an entrance nobody can find. Efficiency is useful. It is simply not the same as quality.

For us, housing is not a collection of units wrapped in a façade. It is a system of relationships: between the apartment and the building, privacy and community, interior and landscape, the individual building and the neighbourhood.

Housing starts before the apartment door and continues well beyond it.

Mind the gap

Home begins in the street. It continues past the entrance, up a stair or along a deck, perhaps through a courtyard, and ends at a door.

Architects tend to call much of this circulation. Residents call it the place where they meet a neighbour, park a bicycle, wait with a pram or negotiate with a wet dog. Between eight and nine in the morning it is the most intensively inhabited part of the building.

So it deserves daylight, an obvious route, and enough width that two people passing do not have to perform a small apology.

At Gratwein am Grünanger, seven compact buildings form a permeable neighbourhood. Their staggered arrangement produces a sequence of outdoor spaces — public play areas and lawns, residents' gardens, raised planting beds, private gardens. The circulation is sheltered and naturally lit. The communal room sits at the centre. The landscape connects the buildings rather than occupying whatever was left once they had been placed.

None of this guarantees that the residents will become friends. That was never the point.

Architecture cannot manufacture community. It can only make sure that isolation is not the only available option.

Together, separately

We are suspicious of housing concepts that treat community as compulsory recreation.

People need contact. They also need privacy, anonymity, and the right to ignore everyone until about ten o'clock. A communal room does not produce communal life any more than a bench produces a good place to sit; both are frequently supplied as evidence that the question was considered.

Shared spaces work best as invitations rather than appointments.

A child should reach a garden without crossing a car park. A resident should be able to sit outside without feeling exhibited. A staircase should allow thirty seconds of conversation without committing either party to a friendship. A shared garden should survive being used enthusiastically, occasionally, or never.

Good housing offers degrees of participation.

Architecture sets these degrees through distance, sightlines, thresholds, level changes and orientation. The decisions are unphotogenic. They decide whether private and collective life can share a site without wearing each other down.

Outside is part of inside

The floor area of an apartment says surprisingly little about how large it feels. Daylight, orientation, room proportion, storage and access to outdoor space matter more than four additional square metres, which tend to end up as corridor anyway.

Which is why a terrace cannot be added after the plan is finished.

At Corte Podvare each apartment opens into a deep perimeter of terraces, planted voids and shaded outdoor rooms. That inhabited edge provides privacy and climatic protection while mediating between interior, shared garden and the wider landscape. In a Mediterranean climate outdoor space is not seasonal; given depth, shade and privacy it becomes another room, and usually the one that gets used.

A 1.2m deep balcony, too shallow for a chair, is not an outdoor room. It is a façade ornament with a drainage problem.

Every square metre has a job

Budget, regulation, structure and construction shape housing. We do not treat them as enemies of design. They are materials, if less flattering ones.

A clear structural grid, compact circulation and repetition make a project affordable. But the useful question is not how many square metres can be sold. It is what each one does. A slightly larger entrance improves orientation, weather protection and casual contact simultaneously. A tighter footprint releases ground for a garden. A window in the right position improves the apartment and the space outside it at once.

The best decisions do several jobs at once.

This matters most in subsidised and affordable housing, where quality cannot be bought back later with expensive surfaces. It has to come from organisation, proportion, material intelligence and the relation between building and open space — all of which are decided in the first three weeks and are close to unrepairable afterwards.

An idea has to survive planning, calculation and the site. Ideas that evaporate on contact with a budget were rarely ideas. They were preferences.

Long after handover

The market likes target groups: the young professional, the growing family, the active senior. Nobody has ever met these people.

Households grow, shrink and rearrange themselves. Children leave, and occasionally return with laundry. Work moves into the living room. Bodies age. The building stays exactly where it was put.

Housing cannot anticipate every future use, but it can avoid making change harder than necessary. Rooms with workable proportions, a legible structure and more than one possible furniture arrangement stay useful far longer than rooms designed around a single ideal household.

Flexibility rarely requires sliding walls or a smart system with a manual; it usually begins with ordinary rooms that are permitted a second life.

The same applies at the scale of the site. Housing affects streets, infrastructure, planting, mobility and the social composition of a neighbourhood, so it cannot be judged from the plot boundary — and certainly not from the apartment plan.

A product is finished when it is delivered.

Housing begins at that moment, usually with bicycles in the wrong place, plants dying on the balconies and someone already unhappy about the hedge.

That is not a defect list.

That is life moving in.