Brief Biography:
Antonina Ilieva is an architect with an interest in the lively exchange between architectural theory and practice. Currently one quarter of studio dontDIY, since 2012 Antonina Ilieva has been working in parallel on her research on contemporary Japanese architecture as a source of a number of trends in contemporary architecture globally and in this country.
Co-living in the city - a typology of harmonious coexistence |
| From co-working to co-living |
| By the time you read these lines - January, 2018 - the concept of co-working is probably already familiar to everyone. The culture of shared workspaces has been establishing its presence in Bulgaria for over half a decade now, and currently has a significant pool of recognizable and socially active locations in all major cities in the country. The term is now also present in our vocabulary in its transliterated form - coworking - and variously structured information about Bulgarian coworking spaces is now readily available in various paper and online publications. If you are a little more familiar with the evolution of shared workspaces, both around the world and in this country, you will also know that, although widespread as an urban typology, they have their extra-urban dimension in the form of camps for professionals who share not only a working but also a living environment. Conversely, in big cities - Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna - the presence of established and to some extent internationally known co-working spaces has also paved the way for the development of a new residential typology of shared living space. |
| The shared living space in Moriyama House (2005), Tokyo, Japan / architect |
With this we open the theme of co-living. The contemporary form denoted by this particular term currently in the Bulgarian context seems to be more related to co-working spaces and to the aforementioned suburban cohabitation of people working in certain non-territorial professional fields. For those aware of the social mission of architecture, the co-living typology has a significant charge of its own, which, in addition to economically active demographic groups, also concerns groups of children and adults. It also has the potential to offer a solution to many of the social, infrastructural and economic problems of the big city - the city that even today houses over 70% of the world's population, as this curious UNICEF interactive map of urbanization shows. Drawing on personally visited and celebrated examples from Tokyo, one of the world's largest cities and the source of a number of important trends in contemporary architecture, the focus of this paper is to introduce two examples - specific representatives of co-living typologies that emphasize the possibility of achieving harmonious co-existence in dynamic, and sometimes aggressive, urban environments. The selection is visual, as befits the blog format, and focuses sometimes on the projects in their entirety, sometimes on particular interesting aspects of the visited examples, with the aim of becoming a basis for reflection on the place of such new typologies in the contemporary Bulgarian urban environment. |
Co-living at urban levelMoriyama House (2005) / architect: Ryue Nishizawa |
| Shared spaces - inside the property and beyond in the city - Moriyama House (2005), Tokyo, Japan / architect: Ryue Nishizawa / photo: personal archive |
In one of Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa's best-known projects, House Moriyama, shared living takes place within a 290sqm plot for a single-family house, which, in true Tokyo fashion, is a large house. Within this plot, a miniature city within the city is developed - seven individual living units with shared landscaped and service spaces - one for the building owner and the other six for rental. Since its construction in 2005, the project has been the subject of a number of architectural, social, and artistic studies, including the French documentary Moriyama-San (2017), which opens the door to the success of the "shared living" phenomenon in this particular case by placing emphasis on the personality of the owner as a kind of leader of the micro-community that Moriyama House houses. It is interesting to note that Moriyama House has been presented to the Bulgarian audience over the years - in lectures by the author-architect Ryue Nishizawa in 2006 at the Red House in Sofia and later in 2012 at Varna Free University, as well as analyzed in the framework of the travelling Austrian exhibition on contemporary residential architecture Wohnmodelle, which was held at the Sofia Architecture Gallery in 2009 at the invitation of the second edition of Sofia Architecture Week. |
| Moriyama House (2005), Tokyo, Japan / architect |
Probably because of the minimalist aesthetics and the visible to the naked eye avant-garde of the construction and materiality of the buildings, it is easy for the project to be perceived in the Western world, including Bulgaria, as a curious exotica, with ideas not applicable outside its immediate context. But what exactly is this context? On visiting the building, the eye is surprised to discover that the context in question, for example, has much in common, both in terms of historicity and conservatism, with that of the older residential districts of Sofia. Elderly neighbors living across the street know details about the project, are proud that it is in their neighborhood, and comment that although it is unusual for the area, the building is one in which you never feel alone, even if you live alone - which, they add, at their age is a positive thing, as is the easy access to the cottages. When we ask them what they think of the security and apparent vulnerability of the home, some of whose volumes flank the street (which in the Japanese case often has no sidewalk), they assure us, that all the neighbours keep an eye on the jewel-like houses, and if a curious passer-by lingers too long around them or dares to cross the invisible barrier that divides private property from the street, they would immediately call the police, in which regard they encourage us to take a quick look, since we are students, but not to overdo it. Leaving, we all know that we will now always look with new eyes at the curious grandmothers outside our own apartment buildings and that the status quo is what we make of it. The building is respectful of its context and even morphologically derived from it, but inherently intent on revolutionising it. |
Co-living in a buildingLang Boat Kanda |
| Regulated shared spaces - the benefits of co-living in an intense urban environment - shared home Lang Boat Kanda, Tokyo, Japan / photo: personal archive |
Sometimes interesting co-living examples are born out of rethinking an existing building, as is the case with the Lang Boat Kanda shared home. Located in one of the highly urbanised central districts, the home gives new life to a pragmatic five-storey building typical of the central Tokyo landscape, which can accommodate 18 people. The shared use of spaces in the building in this case is more reminiscent of that in co-working locations - the kitchen, living room, video game room are shared. Also shared is the roof terrace, which is used for "home" dinners and gatherings among the landscape of the neighboring high-rise buildings and creates a unique setting for outdoor cinema. Also similar to its co-working brethren, the location is based on an innovative idea of the two owners, which translates into its unique to the medium business model - language training - the building communicates one week in English, one week in Japanese, half of the occupants at any given time are foreigners, half Japanese. The thing that makes the shared building special in this case, again as in the previous project, points to the owners who also live in it and become a kind of leaders of the small community that inhabits it, setting the tone for the maintenance and social life of the house. |
| Natural materials and clean detail of shared living spaces - Lang Boat Kanda shared home, Tokyo, Japan / photo: personal archive |
The benefits in terms of overcoming the social isolation of the contemporary itinerant professional are many and close to mind, however, the mode of shared building management also raises a number of interesting purely architectural questions whose answers could lead to successful and harmonious coexistence in other residential typologies - for example, how the rhyming of shared and private spaces and access to them can regulate collective care for their maintenance as much as it regulates collective participation in them; how the realization that the building always |