Together! The New Architecture of the Collective at Vitra Design Museum

The Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein presents Together! The New Architecture of the Collective, an exhibition exploring co-housing as a response to urban space scarcity and the dissolution of the nuclear family. Curated by architects Ilka and Andreas Ruby (the latter newly appointed director of the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel), Daniel Niggli, and Mathias Müller of EM2N, the show translates sharing economy principles into collective living architecture. It opens with a historical overview from Charles Fourier's phalanstère to 1980s squatter movements, including the 1884 Boston building by the Cooperative Housekeeping Association (no kitchens to free women from domestic labor), the 1904 Ansonia in New York, and Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation. A second room features 21 large-scale models of contemporary cooperative housing projects from Zurich, Berlin, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Seoul, arranged as an imaginary city. A third space presents a 1:1 scale apartment model and photographs by Daniel Burchard documenting eight realized projects. The final section, styled as a co-working space, details five recent operations: Sargbfabrik in Vienna, Zwicky-Süd in Zurich, La Borda in Barcelona, R50 in Berlin, and Apartments with a Small Restaurant in Tokyo. The exhibition runs until September 10, 2017.