Date of Submission
Summer 7-27-2023
Degree Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Architecture
Department
Architecture
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Marietta Monaghan
Abstract
The way in which we construct our built environment defines how our community will engage with one another. Social spaces are the key to creating a healthy community. However, today, we are in crisis. In a society which is built on the pillars of freedom and independence, our social spaces are dying out. Social isolation is on the rise, a problem only accelerated by the recent pandemic. Today, many Americans (and much of the world) seek social connection through a screen. Instead of getting to know our neighbors, we spend more time watching videos of or talking to people who live halfway across the world. In this becoming our reality, we are rapidly losing a sense of cultural identity and unity.
To combat this, my thesis develops a typology for designing successful coliving communities through the analysis and application of social spaces in successful cohousing communities of various urban scales and densities to then be applied to a mixed-use urban density coliving community in Midtown, Atlanta. In taking this approach, the vision is to create a system robust enough that developers may use it with confidence in a variety of social conditions in America.
Coliving, while taking heavy inspiration from cohousing, is not the same. Cohousing is as much about building the community as much as it is building for it, whereas coliving purely focuses on designing community architecture, and has as much an obligation to engage the surrounding neighborhood as it does to foster those social spaces for the residents inside.
The outcome of my research is to prove it is easily possible to incorporate spaces that will maximize opportunities for neighbors to engage one another.