Marmalade Lane Cohousing

 

Marmalade Lane immediately gripped me as a viable communal planning option based on nothing more than it extensive car free infrastructure. It is extremely well designed, a feat that is not super common among other sustainable communities similar to it [for worse or for better]. Its design has garnered it a litany of awards such as the Mies van der rohe award, civic trust award for sustainability, RICS Social Impact Award, Structural Timber Award, etc.. It includes common feats of the cohousing typology such as communal gardens, shared facility's, and peripheral vehicular accessibility. Of all the cohousing awards that I have personally looked at, the Marmalade projects, this one speaks the most to the design sensibilities that my architectural colleagues probably find uber-enticing.

 

Within the design of the houses, general form and proportions is ubiquitous throughout the rows of residences, with slight variance. I believe that this slight variance is what makes this feel more human than other high design communal endeavors. The housing coalition for the community allows for varied material choices to speak to each tenets personal design sensibilities. This is awesome, as it allows for communal living without forcing total assimilation. The variances also create more interest as visitors stroll down the streets, almost speaking to a Robert Irwin sense of finding the slight variances out of a distance perceived homogeny. 

 

These residences, mixed to serve two to five people per home, line the central greens with a combination of native grasses and edible plantings. This area is programmed to be shared and maintained by the community at large in order to foster more of a sense of connectivity and encounter for the tenets. In this cohousing instance, more shared services are incorporated such as playroom, guest bedrooms, laundry facilities, meeting rooms, as well as a kitchen, where group meals are prepared by the residents. The cohousing tenets all have stakes in these common facilities, so there is more of a sense of pride and community towards their maintenance and use.

Each home is planned to terrace back from the front of existing streets that serve vehicles, and a new road, the namesake marmalade lane, is created at the project's core that services only nonvehicular transit methods. Being so into cycling planning, this is exciting as it starts every cyclist on their daily commute on a devoted, protected, and beautiful cycling lane. The project also has allotted one hundred and forty six cycling parking spots, further enhancing the possibility that the tenets will take up cycling or other multimodal transit options rather than choosing to use their vehicles for every aspect of daily commuting needs.

The common house, further playing on the possible interest of my architectural colleagues in the class, is a mass timber structure consisting of cross laminated timber technology. This is an exciting and innovative sustainable construction method for my non architectural friends. This clt structure covers a tall great hall that encompasses things such as sitting areas and games like table tennis. These all further foster communal connectivity and engagement.

All in all, this cohousing project encompasses all the tenets of other cohousing projects, and in my opinion, does so in the most beautifully designed way that I have seen one of these projects do so. This project is a dream to live in, and is surprisingly affordable given its context in the expensive area of Cambridge. I believe that this investigation will conclude all of the cohousing discussions from this blog, and I sure did enjoy going through them all. Look further down in the blog for more of these examples!

 

Links to consider.

https://www.archdaily.com/918201/marmalade-lane-cohousing-development-mole-architects

https://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2021/04/11/what-happened-to-americas-communes/?sh=54425fb2c577