File:Vandkunsten, architects- jystrup savværk cohousing community, jystrup, denmark 1982-1984 (6352477805).jpg

jystrup savværk cohousing community, jystrup, denmark 1982-1984. architects: tegnestuen vandkunsten, copenhagen.

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shortly after trudeslund, another group of families approached vandkunsten for a cohousing community. their greater ambition and smaller budget made the resulting building the quintessential vandkunsten project of the period: a romantic, left-wing dream of togetherness realized in cheap, off-the-shelf materials. and black!

in jystrup, vandkunsten took the trudeslund plan one step further and developed it into a single house for all the families by covering the internal street in glass, a move which effectively disconnected the project from its small-scale village context. responding only to the contours of the landscape, jystrup looks like some giant D.I.Y. spacecraft crash-landed on the site, digging its wings into the soft soil.

arriving there on a sunny september day, we found the place seemingly abandoned, with all doors left open and plants taking over. the crisp blue interior I knew from old photos was completely overgrown. it felt as if we were entering a deserted space station, and I remembered the scene from stefano benni's great sci-fi spoof TERRA! in which the protagonists discover an ancient soviet space capsule ...with strands of vine and strange mushrooms flowing in space like long, unkept hair.

the anti-heroes of benni's TERRA! find a 300 year old hippie inside the overgrown space capsule. surprisingly, we found no such thing. perhaps jystrup is a time capsule of sorts, but only in terms of ideas. most of the original crew has left, young families have taken their place.

and the residents were simply at work, their children at school. the doors were open out of trust, that rare commodity, and soon enough a few people turned up, surprisingly relaxed and welcoming at the sight of strangers in their home. we were even allowed into one of the private houses. my photo, an autostich, was taken from their roof terrace, a fine place to take a break from the demands of collectivity.

while the shared facilites make up a staggering 40% of the built area - the covered street, the workshops, main kitchen, extra rooms for guests and troubled teenagers, not to mention the refurbished buildings of the old saw mill that used to take up the site - it was the care taken to protect your need for privacy that struck me the most. in courtyards and roof terraces and even subtle changes of floor level, the individual can always escape to priviliged postitions above or beyond the reach of others.

in looking at housing, I find that what we might call the scale of privacy, running from perfect isolation to inescapable social exposure, is one of the most important and interesting aspects to chart. the past decade or two has seen an almost aggressive move towards the isolation of the individual or, at the very least, the family.

I recall a meeting with a Danish architect, partner in a major office here, and their otherwise brilliant collaborator from baumschlager & eberle. they were promoting the idea to the client that lifts or elevators should open into the individual flats, so you would never have to deal with your neighbours. a perfect nightmare to my mind, but on a more objective note, we could say that their project existed exclusively on isolation end of the privacy scale.

this, to the architects, was a luxury, and one which came at little or no cost to the client, the kind of luxury developers prefer. what the cost might turn out to be for future residents is a point worth considering, though. there are no easy answers here, our need for privacy varies from person to person and changes throughout our lives too, but once we take the social space, even the potential social space, out of our houses, our neighbourhoods, our towns, how will we ever regain it? on-line?

in that regard, the real beauty of jystrup - a project so dedicated to the social life of its inhabitants - lies in the care taken to cover the full scale of privacy, to include protecting the privacy of the very people it intends to bring together. sitting in the autumn sun on a roof terrace above the covered street brought that point home in the form of an epiphany: I could live here! it is a rare feeling, as I am sure you will agree, and only the impossible communte from copenhagen is keeping my family from jystrup even now.

regardless of ideology, jystrup remains a viable alternative to how most of us live today. of course, it is a child of its time, but it was a time before the idea of changing the world yourself had degenerated into just changing yourself, with all the ensuing horrors of self-help literature and positive thinking. the people behind jystrup were changing the world for themselves. when did we lose that ambition, that ability?

the vandkunsten set.