2024 China Fellowship
Re-Inhabit the “Invisible Room”

In collective housing, the fundamental unit is the room: bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms. All those functional rooms together create the scene of residents’ lives. Residents pay a certain amount to obtain temporary or long-term ownership of these spaces, securing a home in the city. However, beyond these visible, clearly defined rooms, residents also pay for “invisible rooms” within the housing complex. The space between the outer walls of one building and another defines the collective resources: the quality of natural light, air, and views from the indoor spaces; residents in the community share those things together. Invisible rooms are key to these resources; therefore, they play a vital role in securing residents’ rights of wellbeing.

Building invisible rooms is often in conflict with what is typically an essential goal of collective housing, which is maximizing profit. The earliest examples of collective housing appeared in ancient Egypt and Rome. These residences were often rudimentary, densely packed to accommodate as many pyramid workers as possible or to maximize profits from the influx of residents into Rome. This reveals the inherent nature of collective housing: to leverage minimal investment for maximum benefit. Creating invisible rooms requires enough “blank space” on the drawing board, increasing the distance between buildings and reducing the depth, thus decreasing the saleable area and the number of residents accommodated, leading to lower profits.

This conflict has existed since the birth of collective housing. Despite residents’ persistent demands for better living environments and more invisible rooms, developers—backed by government or large land speculators—often hold overwhelming advantages in this struggle. Since the Industrial Revolution catalyzed the modern collective housing type, from the back-to-back housing in England to Parisian apartments and American “dumbbell” tenements, developers have squeezed as many rooms as possible into every piece of land within zone boundaries to maximize profits. Unsurprisingly, the living conditions in these crowded, filthy environments were terrible.

Architects have made significant efforts to improve collective housing and protect residents’ wellbeing and rights, including the industrial city of Tony Garnier, Gropius’s studies on building spacing, and eventually Le Corbusier’s ambitious Ville Radieuse, which introduced the principle that sufficient outdoor space around collective housing is necessary to ensure residents’ rights to natural light, ventilation, and other health benefits. This model influenced the construction of new collective housing areas in many cities, fundamentally changing urban textures and landscapes, including in China.

However, this model has critical flaws. Modernism’s static, dichotomous view of different urban functions and entities ignored the complexity and variability of the real world, making these idealistic visions vulnerable. Ville Radieuse emphasized residents’ rights to large areas of green space between buildings but failed to consider the impact of large blocks on urban texture and economic ecology, as well as the rationality of the traditional high-density model of collective housing. At this point, the invisible rooms were solely based on residents’ rights and demands, lacking upper-level support, making them precarious.

Consequently, due to a lack of support from a macro perspective, collective housing built on this model often failed miserably. For instance, in the Bijlmermeer complex in the Netherlands, the invisible rooms were initially designed to serve public interests and provide residents with ample natural light, air, and recreational space. However, it fell into decline and disrepair within two decades, becoming a breeding ground for crime and decay.

Similar issues arose in collective housing constructed during China’s Reform and Opening-up period. In that era of rapid social and economic transformation, the surging urban population’s demand for more and larger housing, along with the transition of urban housing systems from welfare distribution to commodity sales, severely impacted collective housing. The conflict between limited funds and construction experience and the leap in housing quantity and size left invisible rooms insufficient in these complexes. Over the next thirty years, with frequent changes in real estate policies, management voids, lax legal standards, and ambiguous ownership and maintenance responsibilities, the collapse of the traditional “work-place collective” concept led to encroachments and neglect in these communities’ invisible rooms, exacerbating the scarcity of resources like natural light.

How to quell this fight over invisible rooms? In other words, can we provide a new model that turns antagonism into mutual benefit and symbiosis?

Purpose

In the early days when the housing market was unsaturated and economic development was lacking, residents’ primary demand was sufficient interior space, making the lack of invisible rooms less significant. However, now that many areas in China have entered the latter stages of urbanization, residents’ demand for a comfortable living environment is growing. We should perhaps focus on creating invisible rooms anew. Like tree rings, collective housing built between 1980 and 2000 have become old urban areas, characterized by high density, poor environments, and mismanagement, yet bustling and conveniently located. How can we reshape the invisible rooms here without large-scale demolitions, defending residents’ wellbeing rights?

This study aims to create a new pattern for restructuring invisible rooms in the earlier built collective housing, achieving a balance between residents’ wellbeing rights and macroeconomic interests, making the invisible rooms emerge rather than fading into the narrow gaps between rows of buildings. This should be a sustainable and resilient new type of collective housing, reestablishing the connection between residents and invisible rooms. With this change, eventually, we could achieve a more thriving and healthy community.

France, Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland