“I don’t know how to pronounce that, to be honest,” Portland State University School of Architecture Assistant Professor Anna Weichsel says with a laugh as we begin discussing the traveling Danish housing exhibition Boliglaboratorium. “We had a Danish scholar here who tried to teach us, but I’m not even going to attempt it.”

If its title is a mouthful, Boliglaboratorium, on view at PSU’s Shattuck Hall through March 21 and translated simply as “The Housing Lab,” rests on a universal, easy-to-understand idea: that nearly all countries grapple with how to house their populations. It’s not just a matter of housing the houseless and maintaining affordability, important as those may be: Where we live also directly impacts our health and social well-being.

While Denmark is known for many things — modern furniture and LEGO, Hans Christen Andersen and Prince Hamlet — it’s also where the term “co-housing” was coined and where the concept first proliferated. The term denotes a community-oriented multifamily housing model in which residents live in private dwellings but share larger communal living spaces such as kitchens, gathering spaces and greenspace.

Though fewer than one percent of Americans live in co-housing, the concept is gaining attention here. Co-housing units tend to be more affordable than single-family houses, and these intentional communities have been found to curb loneliness, now identified as a health epidemic (including by then-U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy in 2023), increasing the risk of heart disease, stroke, suicide and dementia.

There are many examples of successful co-housing projects in Portland. “We also have some of the earliest activism engaging this topic,” Weichsel explains. That’s why instead of just hosting the Boliglaboratorium exhibit, “I said, ‘We should have a program accompanying it, so we can actually have a discussion of what co-housing is, what the future of housing is, and how we think about it in Portland.” Indeed, the best part of Boliglaboratorium may be PSU’s accompanying series of presentations and conversations.

Danish Roots

Boliglaboratorium, produced by the Danish Arts Foundation and the philanthropic association Realdania, features seven contemporary Danish co-housing projects, each of which is based on a different approach and together representing a variety of urban, suburban and rural locations. They’re not just hypothetical designs: Nearly all are actually being built. On display at Shattuck Hall are six architectural models behind Plexiglass, and corresponding presentation boards elucidating their central idea (with an enthusiastic exclamation-point).

“Apartment buildings often lack good meeting places,” says the board for a 135-unit apartment project set to be built in Copenhagen this year called Vertical Courtyards. “Let’s use stairwell and landing areas to promote community and social life among residents!” Another project, in the Musicon neighborhood of Roskilde (just over 20 miles west of Copenhagen), is devoted to self-building, “so more people can shape their own living space!” But perhaps unsurprisingly, it won’t be realized until 2030.

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Perhaps more practically, a project called Stangarden (18 miles northwest of the capitol), completed last year, is about converting disused rural properties, in this case providing a home for 9-11 adults across two dwellings. And the Symbiotic Houses, in the Copenhagen suburb of Herlev, builds housing from a disused commercial structure.

Two other projects tackle familiar social needs and trends. Co-housing of the Future, set to begin construction later this year (location undisclosed), is focused on providing for people with disabilities, amidst a diverse mix of residents. And The Multi-generational Wooden Building, currently under construction in Copenhagen, is a 200-unit mixed-housing community made from timber.

Boliglaboratorium, whose Northwest appearances are funded and coordinated by the Scan Design Foundation, opened at PSU on February 7 not only with an opening reception for the models exhibit, but also with a presentation called “Co-housing in Denmark” from Michael Asgaard Andersen, an associate professor and researcher at the Royal Danish Academy.

As Andersen explained, the term co-housing dates to the early 1970s, when Danish architect Jan Gudmand-Høyer advocated a new form of housing with relatively small private housing units and large, social communal areas: workshops, guest rooms and communal kitchens. “This was clearly counter culture phenomenon,” Andersen said. “These were people who wanted to live in a different way than the majority of Danes did. Residents that were helping each other, making everyday life work.”

The collective housing model actually goes back much farther, to the late 19^th century, with what was known as the communal house, where residents paid for canteen dinners and sometimes childcare. Many were created to help women enter the workforce. “There were kids rooms, and rooms for adults where they could have discussions or meet socially,” Andersen explained, “pointing to a sense of the community, but also a way to make everyday life work with long work hours.”

Portland Examples

Since 2019, when the Oregon Legislature voted to essentially ban single-family zoning in most neighborhoods to accelerate housing construction and densification, the state has become a leader in developing housing alternatives.

Co-housing examples in Portland are plentiful, and many of the people behind these projects spoke at various Boliglaboratorium panel discussions and presentations. Perhaps the city’s foremost builder of co-housing, Eli Spevak of development and construction firm Orange Splot LLC (and a former Loeb Fellow at Harvard University), was part of a February 28 panel called “Higher Density + Co-housing Policy” moderated by Weichsel, which examined framework conditions for co-housing projects.

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“I try to use as ingredients for co-housing things that pre-date zoning, because the zoning that the city had when I came here wasn’t very supportive of community-oriented housing projects,” Spevak told the audience, while sharing images of row houses, ADUs, boarding houses, even a covered wagon and tent. In 1927, he told the audience, 20 percent of Portlanders lived in single-family-zoned areas and 33 percent in multifamily-zoned areas. By 2016, it was 44 percent and 10 percent, respectively. Yet recent trends such as the State of Oregon’s elimination of single-family-zoned neighborhoods, as well as the City of Portland clearing the way for accessory dwelling units, has begun to reverse that trend.

Among Spevak’s co-participants was Portland architect Jonathan Bolch of Woofter Bolch Architecture, who has explored how to add density to existing single-family neighborhoods on multiple fronts, including 2023’s H|M Townhouses in North Portland, as well as a 2023 Architecture Foundation of Oregon fellowship that explored how adding housing to Portland’s 76 miles of alleyways could increase density within otherwise single-family neighborhoods.

Spevak’s collaborator on multiple projects, architect Mark Lakeman of Communitecture, was part of a February 21 panel discussion called “Rooting Communities in Portland,” also moderated by Weichsel, focused on building urban communities through a lens of justice, equity, and inclusion. Lakeman has spent his entire multi-career building housing that encourages community. Two other panelists have played key roles in such efforts: Ernesto Fonseca, CEO of Hacienda CDC, the state’s largest Latino housing developer, as well as artist, activist and designer Cleo Davis, who (among many other roles) serves in a history and storytelling capacity for the Albina Vision Trust, which is in the process or restoring the historically Black neighborhood of Albina.

There are also many Portland projects that, while not officially recognized as co-housing, possess this same spirit of shared spaces and resources. These projects were spotlighted in the February 14 panel discussion “Co-housing Design in Portland,” including Kim Olson from Mahlum, Dustin Furseth from Holst, and Keith Alnwick from Waechter Architecture featuring design processes and strategies for housing types centering on community and sharing space. Waechter’s Rockwood Village, completed in 2020, is built around a new park and includes numerous community rooms as well as a shared vegetable garden. Holst’s Argyle Gardens, completed in 2020, offered a new take on classic single-room-occupancy housing of the past, by expanding common outdoor areas.

An International Constellation

Though the Boliglaboratorium exhibit is Danish (as are co-housing’s origins), and many of the discussions have an appropriately local focus, this is a borderless movement. A case in point is this Friday, March 7’s, panel discussion beginning at 12:30 p.m., “Co-housing Projects in Berlin,” moderated by Weichsel: a look at her hometown. While Danish co-housing tends to be relatively low-rise, semi-detached dwellings occupying a middle level of density, baugruppen (“building groups”), the German brand of shared housing, tends to be comprised of higher-density towers. This talk features three Berlin-based experts: Verena von Beckerath from Heide & von Beckerath, Florian Koehl from Fatkoehl Architekten, and Gudrun Sack from Nägeli Architekten.

“It’s a completely different discussion,” Weichsel says, “because Berlin has an even more pressurized environment for affordable housing and housing needs in general. It’s a different way architects are understanding and engaging with financial models, changing policies. When I became an architect we were still in the midst of growing East and West Berlin together: code changes, policy-making, thinking about what the city actually should be. What are the driving forces for city development and neighborhood development?”

“What I realized talking to the German group in comparison to the Portland group I engaged with, is it’s really an extremely localized question of how co-housing emerges,” Weichsel adds. “And even from group to group to group, it’s a completely different animal.”

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Learning from Students

When PSU School of Architecture Director Juan Manuel Heredia was offered the chance for Shattuck Hall to host the traveling Boliglaboratorium exhibition (which previously had been on view at the University of Washington and next travels to Portland’s Nordic Northwest, he specifically asked for it to come this winter. “Because at both the grad and especially the undergrad level, we have a lot of housing studios,” Heredia explains. “One of them is related to converting commercial buildings into housing. The other one is full co-housing.”

Weichsel, who teaches some of those housing studios along with fellow professor Barbara Sestak and others, has seen student interest in co-housing grow due to its community-building possibility. When she began teaching housing design last year, “I said, ‘I want you to understand the extension of dwelling, which is not just shelter, and actually understand there’s an urban environment associated, there’s society associated,” Weichsel recalls. Before assigning a housing-design projects to students, “I said, ‘Because of that, I want all of you to think of some additional element that fosters community and engagement of the people in that apartment house that you are going to design.’ I left it quite open of what that could be, because I wanted to know what students would have as their focus. I would say, 90 percent came up with co-housing projects.”

That may be in part because many students already lived in situations that resemble co-housing, where individual dorm and apartment bedrooms give way to shared communal areas. “They say, ‘I don’t mind living with other people. We have a shared space, and I have my own little nook.’ There is a natural wish for it [co-housing],” Weichsel says, “and I think it comes a little bit from, yes, their future financial insecurity, which is tremendous: The scrabbling and the tension around the American dream of the single-family house. They know they probably don’t have the financial background to ever get there. But I think it goes both ways. At the same time they also question it: ‘Is that really how I wish to live?’”

Ultimately Boliglaboratorium’s success parallels co-housing itself. The architectural models on display and the projects they represent are merely a jumping-off point: to engage both local builders and architects exploring co-housing, or to connect with a broader international movement. Architecture, of course, is not simply physical structures and the materials they’re comprised of, but how they engender and enable humans to connect and thrive.