Post date: November 9, 2025

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An investment manager, a property developer and an architect walk into a room

full of people wanting to hear what the architects have to say about co-living. Co-living had been a thing around 2016 but, come 2020 and Covid19, everyone shuddered at the thought of touching doorhandles other people might have touched, let alone sharing a living space or an elevator with them. Four years later, the idea of co-living had circled around and was back. The book MVRDV Co-living Design Study was published in February 2024 but now has a snazzy website version here and, as of last month, a free pdf download here. Images are all over the internet but the publication’s colophon states “the contents of this document must not be copied or reproduced in whole or in parts without the written consent of MVRDV, HUB or Bridges Fund“. I’ve a gut feeling that these are the sort of people who will come after me if I copy or reproduce anything to accompany a review anything less than glowing so I’ll refer to images and projects by page number. In fifteen years, I’ve only ever been asked once to remove an image. It was one an interior designer had taken of the interior he’d designed for some oligarch’s yacht. The oligarch’s people contacted me and requested I take it down. I did. I don’t know what happened to the interior designer.

A consortium is an association of parties formed to pool their resources and achieve a common goal. With movies, the producer always gets a credit but with architecture, we never get to know how a project is funded. With housing, it’s sometimes the future occupants who “buy into” a development by purchasing off-plan, sight unseen. We don’t hear much about consortiums in architecture. The second time I heard about them it was with respect to Howard Krantz. [c.f.Architecture Misfit #28: Harold Krantz] The architect was also the developer and many small-scale investors invested money to fund the development in return for a percentage of the anticipated profit upon sale. You can see how off-plan sales can be consortiums but without the transparency or carefully-drafted contracts. The first time I learned of consortiums was when I was working for one. The developments were small conversions in London, but cunningly designed for market appeal. There was usually a glass-roofed extension containing the kitchen and a large table. If it was a few steps lower than the living area, it was an opportunity for a grand staircase of four steps down, flanked each side by large glass vases with decorative branches. People were wowed by the large stainless steel cooker directly before them as they entered the kitchen.. The floor was always Yorkstone. Neighbour objections to a hot tub in the corner of the garden were overcome. New downstairs toilets were installed with macerators to macerate and pump up to the sewer connection. Upstairs, 4” pipes were chased into 8” walls to avoid unsightly boxing. Investors would bring potential buyers to launch parties with Massive Attack or *William Orbit *down low, artful flower arrangements and waiters proffering either champagne or finger food on silver trays …

An investment manager, a property developer and an architect walk into a room. The book begins with some questions and answers such as “What was the inspiration for this study?” and, by the time you finish reading the responses, you’ll wonder like me how anybody could have ever lived any other way. “How can the wider community benefit from having a co-living building in the neighbourhood?” (p.9-11) I was a bit confused by this and the next question “How can co-living deal with the pressure on our cities, which are already quite full?” Both seem like questions looking for an answer and fund manager Celia responds by saying “considerate design and space planning can make a scheme’s facilities and amenities accessible to the community, so they get the benefit of additional communal spaces and an improved local offering” and to the second, she answers “Co-living encourages better use of space, which is really important as urban areas and their population grow.” I’m probably one of those cynics that are mentioned later (on p.9), but it sounds like the living room space I wasn’t going to be able to afford anyway is now accessible to the wider community as amenity space. Some of these amenities (p.41-42) include an outdoor gym, pet bath, grocery shop, arts and crafts room, co-working room, games room, rooftop garden, chess room, neighbourhood house (for community events), a music room and a book club room. This all sounds great, but what does the consortium receive in return? I expect it’s planning permission – the licence to build and sell the thing. So yes, I’m one of those cynics.

Developer Damian explains the advantages of a mix of tenures. What this means is that some units are sold on the market while others are made available as affordable housing (that, in the UK, means 80% of full market value). These units are dispersed throughout the development instead of located in the least attractive aspect and with a separate entrance.* [c.f. More Poor Doors] *Dispersing affordable units is called pepper-potting for some reason, but it’s a good thing. It’s the units for market that are the problem. There’s no mention of controls to stop purchasers from flipping their units, sub-letting them or making them available as airb’n’b accommodation which, in the past two decades, has been the major destroyer of communities that once were. It’s a major oversight when the solution may well worsen the problem it’s intended to solve.

We all know about the fuel + oxygen + heat = Fire triangle. With architecture, it’s developer + investor + architect = $. The developer usually provides the land, the investor the “resources” and the architect the perception management – the “heat” in the equation – in the form of designs/publicity. The investor may have money tied up in land but not necessarily the sites where a co-living development would give a good return. But imagine if they did own property ripe for a co-living development. All they’d need is planning permission and a welcoming neighbourhood. The architects don’t put up any money so don’t get to share the profits. They’re just guns hired at either a flat rate or a fixed sum to promote the idea through their designs and by their name.

MVRDV were a good choice. Their portfolio includes many residential schemes and non-residential schemes that feature some sort of shared space. For anyone interested in housing typologies, pages 59-77 will be the guts of the book.

• Stacked Village (p.60, MVRDV Hanover Expo)
• Vibrant Heart (p.62, Markthal)
• **Lively Courtyard **(p.64, horizontal Markthal)
• Inside Out (p.66, lively deck access)
• Grand Grotto (p.68, Markthal meets Amiraux)
• Super Gallery (p.69, lively deck access with SANAA stairs)
• Building Blocks Stack (p.70, –)
• Intersections (p.71, horizontally intersected Building Blocks Stack)
• **Vertical Neighbourhood **(p.72, more stacked Building Blocks Stack)
• Swiss Cheese (p.74, inevitable)
• Collective Chain (p.76, single-building Linked Hybrid)
• Rooftop Village (p.80, Moriyama Apartments meets MVRDV’s Didden Village – the one with the blue houses on the roof).
• Office Reuse (p.82, with spiral slide to make escaping fires more fun)
• Collective Ribbon (p.84, Holl at MIT)
• In-Between (p.84, Intersections variant)

Typical floor plans are schematic but indicate deep apartments with little window area, mechanically ventilated/illuminated bathrooms and no cross-ventilation. Nothing new there. In principle, I like the idea of Office Reuse and in the past had arrived at the same conclusion that putting modular units into essentially open space is probably the only way it can be made to work. However, the internal space left over is grim. I also like the idea of Rooftop Village but I don’t understand how a rooftop is going to seamlessly connected with the neighborhood.

A friend once lived in a dwelling at the top of a ten-storey building in central London, somewhere in Holborn, possibly on Chancery Lane. The rooms had been designed for the 24-hour security staff, had amazing 4.5 metre high ceilings and a layout not designed according to any residential logic. To visit my friend after office hours I’d have to wave at security to let me in, explain who I was and where I was going and, after a phone call, my friend would come down and we’d reach his place via the elevator and a tall and overly bright corridor. Office building lobbies generally aren’t designed to cater for the additional and multiple, 24-hour comings and goings that residential use brings.

Two pages (p.96,97) float ideas for a Social Corridor as

• Storage Corridor
• Green Corridor
• Library Corridor
• Nursery (as in plants) Corridor
• Artistic Corridor (think Hundertwasserhaus)
• Sport Corridor (running track)
• Shop Window Corridor (advertising space)

Graphic and inventive as all these may be, a corridor is more than a blank canvas to be decorated to disguise the reality that living and community participation occur on opposite side of a door.

• Social Corridor

The last idea was for a Social Corridor and this is the best of the lot because it’s the only one allowing people to be something other than fully private or full-on community participant. The disturbing thing is that it’s only one more idea for a corridor and given no more weight than Storage Corridor, Sport Corridor or Artistic Corridor. It’s no a threshold between anything greater on the outside or anything more on the inside as Yamamoto would have it. Instead, the corridor remains conceptually and physically separate from both the dwelling and the community.

The reality of co-living begins to get real (p.98-111) as the talk turns to the actual space for living.

• Base Home (p.98) is a pencil apartment comparable in size to a Tokyo studio.
• Loft (p.99) has the sleeping space above the bathroom and kitchen. [c.f. Role Model]
• Double Sided (p.100) is good in principle but the relationship with the corridor is vague.
• Storage Wall (p.101) has lots of storage that, accordingly, makes the blank corridor that much longer.
• Double Sided+ (p.101) and Couple’s Home (p.102) have the same problems as the two above.
• **Row House **(p.103) is again good in principle but the relationship with the corridor is vague. [c.f. Role Model]
• Open Space (p.104) is okay if you don’t mind sleeping in a cupboard.
• Moveable Wall (p.106) is curious but makes sense if you live in 25 sq.m and want to invite five others over for dinner.
• Flip-Flop House (p.107) has interlocking plans with mezzanine sleeping spaces [c.f. Akio Yachida, Role Model]
• Facility Zone (p.108) is for people who feel the answer is to have everything fold away.
• **Rotating Wall **(p.109) is ingenious and for people who insist every function needs its own space.
• **Make Your Own Rooms **(p.110) ditto.
• Unfolding Floor (p.111) is Facility Zone meets Storage Wall except the floor-to-floor height is accordingly increased. [ ! ]

Towards the end of this 140-page book are some ideas for the future. The following is envisaged for between 2030 and 2100. You can’t say these MVRDV aren’t forward thinkers.

• Swiss Cheese has grown into Biodiversity Tower (p.128)
• Vertical Neighbourhood has grown into Vertical 15-minute City (p.129)
• Super Gallery has grown into Vertical Farm City (p.130)
• Stacked Village has grown into Autarkic Tower (p.131)* [au·tar·ky = economic independence or self-sufficiency]*
• Rooftop Village has grown/changed/morphed into **Scripted Sculpture **(p.132), a red herring to make the others look more plausible
• Inside-Out has grown into Flying Mobility House (p.133) ditto; flying cars park at your door, effectively recreating traditional suburbia where you only say hello to your neighbors when you see them from your driveway or across the fence

The book wraps up with some more answers and corresponding questions, as well as a summary of what everyone has learned from the experience of researching and compiling the book. (p.137,138)

• The Fund Manager wants “to continue to invest in the co-living sector and bring the lessons and ideas from this booklet into the selection and the design of [their] next projects.”
• **The Developer **would like “in the short term, use the research to help broaden people’s understanding of co-living, including talking to local authorities, funding partners and stake-holders in the sector about what co-living is today and what it could be in the future.”
• The Architect is “interested to see whether co-living can move away from the commercial model that’s most common now.”

Take a moment to read that last one once more.

• • •

**Revisited this week: **

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Some Covered Bridges