Collective Living and The Architectural Imaginary

In an era defined by housing precarity, social fragmentation, and environmental urgency, Collective Living and the Architectural Imaginary examines how architects have reimagined—and can continue to reimagine—the way in which we live together.

Tracing a lineage of collective housing projects from early twentieth-century experiments to contemporary proposals that challenge dominant market-driven paradigms, the book presents sixty projects from across the globe, redrawn by the authors and organized into ten distinct approaches to housing design. Bridging past and future, built form and experimental drawings, the book summons readers to reconsider housing not only as shelter, but as a critical framework for rethinking domesticity, civic identity, and urban life.

This volume invites architects, urbanists, and scholars to embrace collective housing as a critical arena for the design of the contemporary city—and to reexamine the terms of how we can dwell together.