Reflections on Live/Work in Past/Present/Future

Creative workers have been a part of society since primordial times, as the masters of craft knowledge, societal entertainment, and cultural illustrators. The distinction between living and working for the artists, as we call them today, wasn’t a consideration, as their work was an extension of themselves and didn’t require a separate place to produce. Since many restructurings of society’s living and working models throughout major events such as the medieval times and the Industrial Revolution, living and working became separate activities and forced creative workers to adapt to the new standards of work. Throughout the years, many artists have been opposed to the standard model of living separately from working and have been designing unique personal spaces adapted to one’s personal needs of privacy and also the production of innovative work. Contemporary living/working models have been emerging in Berlin as an economic model by understanding the past models and adapting to the current society. By valuing one’s personal needs in a collective environment, there’s an opportunity to understand the future states of the live/work model in creative industries.

The Modern Live/Work Model

In the past half-decade, there’s been a large increase in the number of living and working buildings in Berlin. These buildings aim to explore the different organizations, separations, and consolidation between private living spaces, working spaces, and collective atelier studios. The recent constructions are strong examples of different ownership models and design processes that have been successfully accomplished.

1. Lobe Block terraces used for community events.

2. Lobe Block Exterior view.

The idea of the Lobe Block, located in Berlin-Wedding, is to create a venue where art, food, and nature can meet and intertwine. The building serves as an adaptable studio and office space for individuals with creative and sustainable backgrounds/interests. The project’s main vision is to overcome the division from sidewalk to property and fuse life with work and the public with private spaces. The building is a private initiative where the owners wanted to preserve as much of the exterior space as possible and have it accessible for the users and the residents of the surrounding neighborhood. The rising property and construction costs pressed the designers to scale down on the creation of solely social and exhibition spaces, however, they came up with a solution: to build a mixed-use building that maximizes the available area in order to not sacrifice the public spaces. The client’s concept is to preserve exterior space and make it accessible to the renters and to their neighborhood, reinventing the relationship between public and private. The building’s goal is to be a sustainable structure that can be adapted to the neighborhood's needs throughout time, it can be transformed into a fully residential building, be separated into classrooms to form a school, or even remain with independent creative businesses but the form might get covered with vines. Whatever the outcome, this development has been a social experiment and tool to understand that creative individuals residing and working together, lead to an exchange of debates, information, and socialization. The interactions between the individuals may rise from their morning walk up the stairs and meandering their neighbor’s terrace or can be formed in the canteen on the lower level, the collective also hosts events in their terraces and lower level mixed-used spaces: an endless possibility for connection.

3. Wohnregal II Exterior view.

4. Wohnregal II Interior open layout allowing customization of interiors.

The Wohnregal II, located in Berlin-Moabit, houses residences and their ateliers in an open floor plan layout. The intention of this live/work project was to allow flexibility and customization of the units based on the resident’s personal needs, the intent is that the residents can allow their space to operate as both their home and their atelier, choosing their personal degree of transparency between the two activities. The architects, Far Frohn&Rojas, selected pre-cast concrete as the method of construction¹ allowing this Plattenbau² to be low-cost and completed in a short period of time, to address the current high costs of construction. Initially, there are no interior divisions to “counter preconceptions that serial construction automatically implies a standardization of the inhabitable unit itself”³ . To accommodate the open floor plan and each resident's interpretation of the design, the facade has the ability to open up in order to ventilate the space naturally, transforming each floor unit into a loggia. This contemporary construction serves as a symbol of affordable, flexible, fast, and attractive construction: residents can eliminate the borders between their homes and work by designing a method to merge living and working.

Historical Conditions for Creative Practices

Buildings designated for both living and working have been constructed all throughout history, dating from prehistoric times⁴ . The typology nowadays labeled as live/work appears to be progressive in the current era, however, the idea of separating living and working is a recent gesture in society. Creative practices have allowed individuals to live and work in the same location for centuries, both out of necessity and comfort. These societal roles that now are referred to as creative professions, have been understood by the production of cultural artifacts related to the current era, objects made by hand power that were only mastered by a few, or objects not extremely necessary for survival, but appreciated for the craft, and cultural value brought to society. In medieval times these professions included blacksmiths, weavers, winemakers, writers, painters, and sculptures. Post-industrial revolution, the machine replaced many of these handmade crafts, which shifted the category of creative work into fields that may use the machine as a tool but rely on the artist’s ability to innovate the cultural realm and bring value to society through their creations. Nowadays, creative work englobes visual artists (painters, sculptures, photographers, etc.), musicians, liturgies, performers, and englobes many fields that can be worked as a full-time job or a freelance category, such as architecture, fashion and graphic designers, social media managers, and event planners, to name a few. The Workhome⁵ typology combines two functions or programs which may come in conflict: public versus private, dirty versus clean, and noisy versus quiet. The design of such homes has proven to be more successful when the user is involved in the craft to design the space to suit their own levels of functions. Architectural history defaults into describing the physical characteristics of these workhomes, but commonly lack to describe the resident’s personal life and peculiarities that led to the personal adaptation of the workhome in which they spent most of their time. Therefore, these typologies’ investigation in the past has to be analyzed carefully to understand their functionality and how their daily use shaped the physical environment.

5. Interior view of Frida Kahlo’s atelier in Casa Azul

6. Frida Kahlo’s atelier floor plan.

Frida Kahlo, the Mexican painter and provocateur, simplified how one makes the decision to transform their home into an artistic studio and atelier, to reduce the effort of maintaining a home and a place of work. Being physically sick for a large part of her life, the artist chose to move back to her childhood home during her adulthood, as traveling became exhaustive for her due to her physical and psychological illnesses. The house was adapted to fit the artistic studio in what once was a garage, additional property was purchased for the expansion of a garden for Frida’s collection of botany, and the exterior walls were painted blue. Kahlo’s artworks are very clear, they are about her daily life, her experiences, and the pain she went through. The Blue House became a symbol for everyday artwork. The place the artist once grew up, the same place she made most of her artwork, later, was transformed into a museum, to showcase not only her artwork but how she lived her life.

7. St Paul's Studios, Talgarth Road .

8. Interior studio bedroom, window slit on left side.

Martin Travers, an English church interior designer and stained glass artist, resided in St. Paul’s studio 8 from 1926-1948. In the decade prior to moving into the St Paul studios in London, Travers was building his career in a rented studio at the Glass House, a stained-glass atelier and workshop building. With the growth of this career, Travers decided to settle into his own working space, he moved to the studios, which were workhomes for young bachelor artists. Frederick Wheelers designed St. Paul studios in 1890 with the intent of creating a prototype of a studio/home that would suit young artists’ needs, therefore reducing costs by pre-designing the apartments according to the standard needs of artists. The homes weren’t intended to be shared with other artists, each resident had their own townhouse with double-height atelier space (facing North for indirect sun exposure, ideal for visual arts), the atelier had a mezzanine and could be arranged however one preferred. The studios had a window slit for the removal of large canvases, and on the lower level, there was a designated area that served as a reception to welcome potential customers and showcase their work.

9. The poet Valentino Zeichen in his home, Rome, 1991 .

10. Zeichen’s home and studio floorplan.

Valentino Zeichen, the Italian poet and writer, was speculated to have been living solo in a poorly maintained cabin in Rome at the end of his lifetime. In the poet’s upbringing, he was forced to relocate countries, cities, and living arrangements; his early detachment from a fixed residence inspired him to spend most of his youth hitchhiking throughout Europe and Africa. Zeichen’s reality was different from what was portrayed of him in the media, he chose to live in a minuscule house with the only necessities he needed: a room and a bathroom, as he knew that was solely what he needed. By combining his needs into a small area of space, Valentino would be able to spend more time immersed in his writing, rather than allocating so much time to the labor involved with maintaining a large household. In Valentino’s last 50 years, he wanted to preserve his solitude and lived in a small home by Piazza del Popolo. He passed away without any material treasures, but left for society his criticism of the civilization of consumption, leaving his life and words as his legacy. Watchmakers in the 1700s favored living in a traditional home, which in the rear would have personal access to their workshop, exclusively for clients to locate due to security and status concerns. These simple homes would allow the watchmakers to work close to their living quarters, being able to accommodate their business hours to their personal life, and have an additional layer of security to the valuable watches that they worked with. The watch in current society is a cultural icon, centuries ago the knowledge of watchmaking was kept to a selected few, and the purchase of crafted watches was also kept to higher classes of the time. The master-watchmaker shop at 61 Allesley Old Road, Chapelfields, was a large watch business that had the main street entrance for family and customers, and through the rear was located a specific entrance for employees and apprentices, where there was also a shared sleeping quarter. The Industrial Revolution was the societal shift into separating the living quarters from the place of work. As public transportation began to make a significant impact on the worker’s daily life by transporting the factory workers to their large places of work, its impact on the creative workers of all social classes was to adapt their living space in order to maintain their autonomy. This restructuring led to the creation of small manufacturers, by transforming part of one’s home to be used as, for example, a small-scale sewing factory⁶ . The first individual single-room houses as we most commonly see today began their establishment in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the new age of single-room homes, one would sell their labor and disconnect from the idea of a nuclear family, therefore, one would become an individual- focusing on their career rather than accomplishing the nuclear family as the main purpose of their life. The separation of the individual and the work.

The Future of Live/Work

The room is the most obvious and important form of architecture, present in every daily activity, whether the activities take place in the rooms or in the absence of them. Khan’s conviction⁷ was that the room, its space, and its enclosure, are a necessity for one’s personal reflection as a human. When one’s individualized by their own space, the aspect of the collective falls apart for that moment in time, therefore the gradient of programs is highly important for the design of collective housing.

The internal divisions of the programmed rooms came to be when society started classifying spaces according to their usages⁸ . By preventing interferences and disturbances through design tools, and strategically considering circulation and programs throughout the building, design is used as a spatial organizing tool. However, the room has the power to be more than a spatial divider, it’s a tool to shape life in society.

   The condensing pressure to live and work together nowadays stems from the social housing crisis, the underlying effects of coronavirus, and the mindset switch to accepting and embracing work from home as a positive experience to merge career and personal life. Creative professionals working from a location other than the typical office is accepted as a new way to reinvent work and life balance, by allowing more freedom in one’s life and a better way to work around one’s daily priorities. The emergence of freelance work, independent small businesses, and creative work that doesn’t fit the office or factory spatial model has been the moving factor in recent years to bring back this typology in a new sense: rather than living at one’s workplace, or working in one’s home, the new typology brings the promise of combining the two in a custom typology.

   The “creative class”, is a term developed by Richard Florida in his ongoing study of post-industrial American cities to understand the force of the class of creative workers in developing the economy of the city. His research turned to make evident the agglomeration of creative workers in diverse cities with large populations and a variety of residents. The creative workers are seen as having high societal capital as creative engines for the cultural background of a city, however, they are monetarily in a lower class of society. Therefore, the government has invested in the production and value material of creative work but has tightened budgets for public housing and hasn’t guaranteed public safety for the creative class. This causes many social issues, leading to gentrification, housing crisis, and unsafety in large cities.

   In Berlin, the average citizen doesn’t have the financial means to afford to buy property, much less in creative workers' reality. For it to be possible for the population to have the opportunity to afford not only property ownership but a guaranteed form of housing, and to be able to reside in a home that functions based on their personal and work needs, the government has been incentivizing a shared property ownership model. The Baugruppen⁹ economic model increases overall ownership of property by allowing individuals to collectively purchase property. This process is overseen by consultants and aimed to create a layer of accessibility to the public. The efforts of this economic ownership model have been reducing skyrocketing rent prices and decentralizing property ownership from monopoly corporations.

   The Baugruppen model provides the possibility for individuals of creative fields to join other like-minded individuals and form a community based on their principles and lifestyle. By allowing economic incentives to these groups of artists who generally cannot afford to own a home solo, there’s a stimulus to bring one into being part of the urban fabric, as a strong value to the community. Furthermore, having a fixed place in not only the neighborhood or city but to have a role in the direct organization of one’s place of living and working space is to give the individual a direct opportunity to conduct their life and the communities on their own terms based on their values. This model of living not only allows interactions between individuals but promotes collaborations and collective work by living interactions and abilities to form subgroups of specific artistic qualities that feed from each other. As society becomes more divided and digitized, the pressure to connect with other individuals and establish meaningful connections is larger than ever. By analyzing artist ateliers in the past, and cultural shifts that changed society, we can understand how living, working, and social interactions are the main pillars of the life of an individual. These pillars were always the main iterations in the adaptations of creative workers' living models throughout time.

What can the future models of living and working between the creative class incorporate in order to allow collective working, collaborations, socialization, housing security, and value in the community for all?

1 For more on the building construction materials, production and systems access “Wohnregal, Berlin.” Deutsche BauZeitschrift. DBZ, February 2020.
2 The symbol of construction in the GDR era, WBS70 prefab concrete was used in more than half of all of the construction done at this time, resulting in fast-paced assembly and low-cost materials. The design standpoint was the encouragement for individualism by allowing movable interior walls to customize the space.
3 Novakovic, Stefan. “Berlin's Wohnregal Brings Design Flexibility and Style to Prefabricated Housing.” Azure Magazine, December 3, 2020.
4 Aureli, Pier Vittorio, and Martino Tattara (Dogma) Living and Working. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022), 4-45.
5 Frances Holliss, Beyond Live/Work: The Architecture of Home-based Work (New York: Routledge, 2015), 3.
6 Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara (Dogma), Living and Working (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), 41
7 Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara (Dogma), The Room of One's Own: The Architecture of the (Private) Room (Milano, Italia: Black Square, 2017), 4.
8 Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara (Dogma), Living and Working (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2022), 11.
9 Constance Cremer, Monika Nikolaus, Horst Pfander, and Carsten Praum (STATTBAU GmbH), Wohnen in Gemeinschaft: Von der Idee zum gemeinsamen Haus / Living in a Community: From the Idea to the Joint Home, (Berlin: STATTBAU GmbH, Netzwerkagentur GenerationenWohnen, 2015), 74-90.

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Image Credits

Becker, David von. Brandlhuber+ Emde, Burlon with Muck Petzet, terrace house. Photograph. Archplus. September 7, 2018. https://archplus.net/en/archplus-features-78-terrassenhaus-berlin/
Ghinițoiu, Laurian. Photograph. Zeppelin. Accessed December 2, 2022. https://e-zeppelin.ro/en/the-hill-made-of-houses-lobe-block-berlin/
Becker, David von. Photograph. Archdaily. Accessed December 2, 2022. https://www.archdaily.com/928487/wohnregal-apartments-and-ateliers-far-frohn-and-rojas
Becker, David von. Photograph. Archdaily. Accessed December 2, 2022. https://www.archdaily.com/928487/wohnregal-apartments-and-ateliers-far-frohn-and-rojas
Imaz, Bethlehem. Hogar de genios. Photograph. Revista AD. https://www.revistaad.es/decoracion/casas-ad/articulos/la-casa-de-frida-kahlo-en-cayoacan-mexico/17281
Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara (Dogma), The Room of One's Own: The Architecture of the (Private) Room (Milano, Italia: Black Square, 2017), 118.
Jones, Maggie. St Paul's Studios, Talgarth Road. Photograph. Flickr. April 3, 2009. https://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiejones/3409823876
Evans, Sophia. Room with a view: the ‘studio’ bedroom. Photograph. The Guardian. January 24, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/24/inside-st-pauls-studios-a-painters-workroom-home
Lucas, Uliano. The poet Valentino Zeichen in his home, Rome, 1991. Photograph. Uliano Lucas. 1991. https://www.ulianolucas.it/ngg_tag/valentino-zeichen/#gallery/valentino-zeichen/1284
Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara (Dogma), The Room of One's Own: The Architecture of the (Private) Room (Milano, Italia: Black Square, 2017), 112

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