‍Why do we need to rethink architecture and design differently?

Only four years ago, we founded Cutwork because the ways we live, work, and produce have fundamentally changed. There is an increasing gap between the ways we live today, and the ways our habitats are built. We’ve had a striking feeling that architecture and design need to catch up to accompany and better support the ways people are really living today.

There are a lot of points we typically bring up to illustrate the gap, but perhaps the simplest is that we are witnessing the fall of the traditional family. In more and more major cities, mononuclear families have fallen below 15% of households. This industrialised model – that defined architecture of the 20th century – is no longer the standard. We’ve increasingly shifted to live within blended communities or ‘chosen families’ – yet, the majority of investors, real estate developers, and architects continue to build spaces and homes for traditional family structures. This way of thinking is losing its relevance to a troubling degree. How can we realistically expect cities to sustain the influx of 3 billion more people by 2050 if we don’t carefully research and reimagine the ways people can inhabit and share spaces?

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You often talk about the ‘x5 Points of Shared Architecture’. Could you elaborate on that and explain what your vision is on the architecture of shared spaces? How do these principles of yours bring in elements of sustainability, wellbeing and community?

Yes, we developed the ‘x5 Points of Shared Architecture’ in a research project called the Cohabitation Unit. If you look back to the 19th Century of cities, there is always a core block element that defines the city. For example, in 19th Century Paris, this was the Hausmann Block. This came to have a huge impact that defined Paris and the ways people have lived and interacted with the city ever since. In the 20th Century, with the invention of the elevator, we saw the rise of the modern apartment block and the office tower. We wanted to ask: what is today’s equivalent? How can we redefine the core element of today’s cities?

In short, the Cohabitation Unit combines a diversity of different usages into a single unified block, including an open ground floor café, coworking space, floors for coliving, and a public rooftop plaza or garden. The shared ‘co’ spaces, and a facade of shared double-height balconies, are designed to help encourage interactions and foster connections throughout the community of residents. The public ground floor and accessible rooftop, make the block porous to extend these connections into the fabric of the local neighbourhood – an open space for locals and internationals to collide and thrive together.

It’s only possible to live together if there is always the possibility to be alone – however, making space for bonds and relationships between residents to grow is at the core of designing for wellbeing, livelihood, and community.

Regarding sustainability, we believe that cities should be built by people who understand how to activate biodiversity. We like to think that buildings should be planted like trees – they should give back to the ecosystem more than they take out. In the Cohabitation Unit, we introduce the idea of the ‘living facade’ which consists of a carefully tuned mix of plants. Different plants are conducive to different insect populations, and these insects can support bird populations, and so forth across the web of the local ecosystem. To no surprise, alternative versions of the rooftop include community vegetable gardens and solar panel systems.

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Could you explain how your digital manufacturing process works? How does it use innovative technologies and concepts of the circular economy to produce interior design products that are most cost effective and sustainable?

For us, it is important not only to design spaces and objects, but also to craft the industrial processes to create them. We have developed a library of industrial technologies that allow us to produce custom furniture, prefabricated blocks, and low-cost shelter systems. Digital manufacturing frees us from the logic of mass- manufacturing. It perfectly combines the price-point of mass industrial manufacturing with the control and adaptability of small-batch fully-customised products. This simply wasn’t possible before.

Not only does this give us incredible agility to design highly specialised products to fit the dynamics of any given project - but the process dramatically reduces our environmental impact. Digital manufacturing allows us to produce exclusively on-demand. No warehousing, no stock, no excess waste. It allows for distributed manufacturing – to produce locally to the end site rather than having to ship massive distances from a centralised producer. As all our core products are steel, they are effectively circular.

We use 3D laser tube-cutting to produce these products – from furniture to affordable housing to refugee shelters. This is a cutting edge manufacturing process that basically combines what used to take three separate machines into one, saving even more emissions and overhead costs.

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What are some of the projects you are working on that you are the most excited about these days? How do these projects incorporate elements of sustainable design and the shared economy

We can’t say too much just yet, but we are designing the full interior concept and several architectural projects for Bouygues Immobillier’s upcoming coliving brand. This will be a whole new model of coliving space that builds upon several ideas developed in our Cohabitation Unit project. There are a few new doors opening with them to collaborate on whole new residential brands that could completely disrupt the real estate and construction markets. Interaction, sharing, community, and sustainability are always pillars that we work upon.

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Finally, what do you see as the impact of the coliving sector on the way we work, live and play? What innovations do you think are needed to help the coliving sector evolve into its full potential?

For now, coliving is still in a very early phase. We are seeing tons of experiments and new models emerging, but it remains unclear which will be the most impactful socially, economically, culturally, or environmentally. The potential to make cities more liveable and to overcome some of the immense challenges we are facing is clear, but right now, there simply isn’t enough data or measurements available to understand in much depth.

This data is especially critical to better understand the evolution of the market – which is actually what inspired us to partner with organisations like Art of Coliving, Conscious Coliving, and Co-Liv to understand the needs of coliving users and to push the boundaries of the sector even further. Measuring how coliving impacts individuals, communities, and neighbourhoods – and what is actually driving the rising market – will be instrumental to refine and unlock the full potential of the coliving movement.

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