House Of Commons
Exhibition
Date: Spring/Summer 2022
Principal Investigators: Neeraj Bhatia, Antje Steinmuller
Location: The David Ireland House,500 Capp St
San Francisco-Toronto architecture firm THE OPEN WORKSHOP, led by UWA director Neeraj Bhatia, presented House of Commons, an exhibition of five speculative designs informed by over thirty-five case studies of past and present collective housing projects ––research conducted by Antje Steinmuller and Neeraj Bhatia. These case studies are primarily located in San Francisco and the Bay Area and are represented through physical models and drawings. A prior iteration of the exhibition was featured at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.
House of Commons explores the opportunities and considerations of collective living at a time when cities are struggling to meet the demand for affordable housing, and urban dwellers find themselves starved for low-cost options that allow them to create meaningful social units that provide an alternative to the nuclear family. Nowhere is this more acute than the Bay Area. For the San Francisco architecture firm, THE OPEN WORKSHOP, one solution lies in collective living.
Bhatia and Steinmuller noticed a preponderance of solutions focused on increasingly tiny, private micro-units that embraced the isolation of the individual. Instead, they looked to the wealth of past and present collective living experiments in the region, which offer people access to a bigger range and higher quality of resources and amenities as well as new social possibilities that increase the resilience of communities. Their research was aimed at examining a host of considerations including the spatial structure and organization of shared households, the ways that sharing operates (what is shared, how much and by whom), and the mechanisms of collective governance and labor distribution. From Langton Labs, a co-living space inside a former sign factory that doubles as an art, science, and technology hackerspace to Chaortica, part of the Haight Street Commons intentional community network, located in a century-old single-family residence with a garden and greenhouse, and the Granada Hotel, a former SRO hotel, now being converted to permanent supportive housing for the unhoused, the case studies range from rural to urban, and from the 1960’s communes to contemporary experiments.
THE OPEN WORKSHOP’s findings are consolidated in five design proposals represented through models and drawings that are on view at the House as part of the exhibition, the installation of which was also designed by the office. Acknowledging that living together is hard, requiring sacrifice, patience, and flexibility, the architects explore how individuals and collectives can be mediated through architecture and reveal new forms of agency and power that are produced when people live together. The five proposals show a range of techniques on how the private and public realm can be delineated—wherein architecture supports different social formations. Central to the proposals are the building, maintenance, and governance of a domestic commons, offering meaningful social interaction around shared activities, institutions of culture, care, community, and empowerment.
In tandem with the exhibition, The David Ireland House displayed ephemera from its archive that illuminate the architectural concerns of Ireland’s work on his home and additional architecture projects, the focus on everyday life, and how basic forms and materials provide innovative ways to see new possibilities.