Joelho - Journal of Architectural Culture

The Right-to-use Cooperative Housing Model.

Tiago Lopes Dias

This article aims to contribute to a reflection on why the right-to-use cooperative housing model has no expression yet in Portugal. It is based on two visits to buildings raised in Barcelona under this form of public-private promotion, which were part of a process that involved the administration, the architects (Lacol and Celobert) and the users, members of a cooperative. After a brief introduction, Nuno Teotónio Pereira’s ideas on cooperativism are revisited, particularly his defense of tenancy as an alternative to homeownership. Next, some reasons are put forward as to why these ideas were opposed by the dictatorships in Portugal and Spain in the 1960s, a period of social unrest. Finally, some architectural features of La Balma (2017-21) and Cirerers (2018-21) are presented, demonstrating alternative approaches. Combining historical research, project analysis and theoretical inquiry, the aim is to offer a non-simplistic view of an issue that requires a comprehensive and cultural approach.

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).