When you picture a hallway or corridor in an apartment building, what do you see?
Hallways, entrances, and exits are primarily designed with fire safety in mind. As a result, most multi-unit building corridors are long and monotonous, and do not encourage social connection.
Quayside Village Cohousing in North Vancouver shows a different, more social possibility: the exterior walkway (pictured above) is filled with lush hanging vines, gardening areas, and places to sit and chat with neighbours. The open corridor wraps around the building’s exterior courtyard, while windows to private units along the walkway create visual connections between private and semi-public spaces. There is something inherently social and inviting about the exterior walkways. They allow each unit’s entrance to feel personalized, yet still connected to the community.
Building designers and developers are constrained by building codes, site restrictions, and budgets when designing the overall building layout. However, examples from cohousing and co-operative housing show how, with simple interventions, any corridor can be transformed into a social corridor.
In this article, we explore five design and programming strategies that developers, designers and housing operators can use to transform multi-unit building hallways into social corridors.
At Little Mountain Cohousing, units are laid out to minimize the use of circulation corridors. Instead, units are centred around an elevator lobby with a different identity on each floor: for instance, there are different nooks for sewing, crafts, puzzles, or reading. Residents frequently use these spaces in the evenings, and families especially enjoy using the nooks for social, creative activities.