Joelho - Journal of Architectural Culture

3 works + 1

Guilherme Machado Vaz — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The aim is to add a reflection on the theme of this edition, based on practical cases, that is, with publications on already-constructed works.

Projects were selected from studios operating in a Mediterranean environment, with one exception that can still be placed within the geographical limits set out in the call for articles, despite its location outside the Mediterranean basin and its harsher climate.

The selection criteria implied a focus on buildings which are unique in character; when published together, they offer a comprehensive and complementary response to the questions raised in this issue of Joelho, namely the urgent need for a move towards sustainable architecture. This response can be found in the architectural language of each case, arising from specific considerations at the stage of designing and building in each setting:

. 6×6 block in Girona, by Bosch+Capdeferro

. 25 Endowed Housing Units in Palma de Mallorca, Mallorca, by Harquitectes

. Six Social Housing Units in Santa Eugènia, Mallorca, by Carles Oliver Barceló & Xim Moyá (IBAVI)

. K.118 in Winterthur, by Baubüro in Situ

Inexact by Nature

Armando Rabaça; Bruno Gil; João Branco, Alexandre Dias — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Women emancipation through cohousing from the 1970s and 1980s in Belgium

Marta Malinverni

In Belgium during the early 1970s, pioneer cohousing projects emerged advocating alternative living arrangements. These initiatives, typically comprising small communities of ten to twenty households, fostered collaborative ways of living and challenged dominant economic and housing paradigms. Beyond redefining residential models, they also played a key role in reshaping gender roles by promoting women's autonomy, redistributing domestic responsibilities, and expanding their role within their households, their communities, and society as a whole.

This study examines the extent to which cohousing initiatives genuinely contributed to women’s emancipation, adopting a two-generation retrospective perspective. A dual methodological approach is employed, combining architectural analysis of selected case studies with ethnographic research. It assesses whether these resident-driven initiatives effectively promoted gender equity and the redistribution of domestic labour. By evaluating both their successes and limitations, this research explores how collective living arrangements restructured family dynamics, supported feminist objectives, and contributed to enduring social transformations.

The findings reveal that cohousing projects enabled women to challenge traditional domestic roles, engage in more equitable communal living, and cultivate independent lives beyond the home through the structural and social dynamics of their dwellings. A feminist analytical lens highlights how shared spaces in Belgian cohousing projects of the 1970s and 1980s fostered a broader cultural shift toward gender equity and collective empowerment. However, sustaining these egalitarian ideals over time posed significant challenges. This study thus offers insights into the long-term impact of cohousing on gender roles and its continued relevance for contemporary debates on alternative living models.

Wasatch Commons: A Collective Question

Steven Chodoriwsky

Wasatch Commons: A Collective Question

Joelho 17 Call For Abstracts

July 28, 2025

This paper proposal focuses on Wasatch Commons Co-Housing Community, a 25-unit experimental residential initiative constructed in 1999 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Nestled within a large urban agricultural plot that is surrounded by suburban development, it features collectively maintained spaces and resources, diverse living arrangements, and—as with any fiercely held space—a negotiation of architecture and behavior, pragmatics and aspirations.

The angle of the text positions the author as a current inhabitant and community member, as design educator and archival researcher. Despite the uniqueness of the co-housing model and the contextual uniqueness of its built form (it is the only one in the State of Utah and one of a handful in the Western United States) Wasatch Commons remains largely unknown in both design and housing circles locally. In the midst of Salt Lake City’s recent economic growth—and subsequent crises in demands for both affordable and community-focused housing—Wasatch Commons presents an eccentric model of alternative collectivity within, and of refuge from, Utah’s dominant political and sociocultural forces: a position it has held since its development and inauguration a quarter century ago. The paper would also like to shed some light on its peculiar origins, in which original investors and initiators were faculty members of University of Utah’s legendary orthodox Marxist economics program—suggesting that this housing experiment’s legacy constitutes a form of collective praxis.

Meanwhile, the text would reckon with how the community’s architectural form—both based on co-housing traditions and spatializations from Denmark and Sweden—has undergone extensive individuations and micro-landscapes due to the intergenerational diversity of its residents, as well as how its surrounding landscape, held in common, has become an evolving site of negotiation through committee work, policies of consensus, and shifts in values.

In this vein the research provides both analysis and a “critical spatial portraiture” of Wasatch Commons’ built environment and the bodies—human and nonhuman—that activate and steward it, reading it alongside (among others) Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of the “inoperative community” [1] and, more recently, performance theorist Ethan Philbrick’s notion of “collective ambivalence.” [2] A description of, and argument for the value of, Wasatch Commons’s social patina—a mixture of collective action and inaction of its maintenance over time—will be central to the text, bookending this in architectural discourse with Kathyrn McCamant’s Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves [3] (with a piquant introduction by Charles Moore) and Atelier Bow-Wow’s concept of “behaviorology” [4] in the production of lively collective space.

Images for the text would include archival images, architectural plans, and photographs of the current context.

Footnotes

[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991)

[2] Ethan Philbrick, Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023)

[3] Kathyrn McCamant, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1994).

[4] Atelier Bow-Wow, The Architectures of Atelier Bow-Wow: Behaviorology (New York: Rizzoli, 2010).

(Pre)Visions of Generative Artificial Intelligence: a lexical analysis of narratives on rural cohabitation in the “alto sertão” of Paraíba, Brazil

FRANCISCO THIAGO MOREIRA CAVALCANTI THIAGO CAVALCANTI, Leticia Teixeira Mendes

This article investigates the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) as an intermediary in architectural conception, based on the analysis of descriptive narratives about cooperative housing projects located in the Brazilian backlands (alto sertão), a semi-arid region with distinct sociocultural dynamics. The study addresses limitations and biases inherent in the reproduction of regional stereotypes by AI models, emphasizing the importance of critical reflection in the face of the increasing adoption of such technologies in the fields of architecture and urbanism. The objective was to experimentally explore the possibilities of architectural imagination mediated by GenAI. Identical descriptive prompts were submitted to five free text-based platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek), using anonymous and non-customized accounts to preserve impartiality and expose model limitations. Identical descriptive prompts were submitted to five textual platforms, each of which was asked to produce a narrative in Brazilian Portuguese (approximately 2,000 words) depicting a cooperative housing project grounded in the physical, social, and cultural dimensions of the alto sertão. The results generated varied significantly in length, ranging from 802 to 1,924 words, which in turn influenced differences in lexical density and narrative construction. Quantitative and qualitative analysis using Voyant Tools revealed both convergences and contrasts between platforms in their representations of collective life, shared spaces, and local construction techniques. The most frequent terms were related to materiality — such as “earth” (terra), “clay” (barro), and “roof tiles” (telhas) — spatial organization — such as “courtyard” (pátio), “shed” (galpão), and “vegetable garden” (horta) — and sociocultural values — such as “community” (comunidade), “sharing” (partilha), and “autonomy” (autonomia). While the term “housing complex” (conjunto) was the most frequent in the corpus, “autonomy” (autonomia) was scarcely present, revealing asymmetries that reflect both semantic limitations and inherited social imaginaries reproduced by GenAI tools, which tend to downplay collective agency and self-management. A significant bias was observed in the high frequency of the word “hope” (Esperança), resulting from one platform’s automated naming of the housing project, reinforcing stereotypical associations of the sertão with dependency or deprivation. The automated analysis proved effective in challenging these narratives and fostering a critical reading of generative technologies as agents in the projection of inhabited space. The study reinforces the importance of incorporating complementary approaches, especially image-based analysis, for a broader evaluation of architectural representations. It contributes to the interdisciplinary debate among architecture, urbanism, and artificial intelligence, highlighting technological biases in specific cultural contexts and their implications for the planning and critical representation of cooperative housing in marginalized sociocultural territories. The methodological limitation of using free platform versions is acknowledged, as well as the opportunity for future research based on multimodal analysis and expanded corpora.