The Dwelling Complex

I. The Ancillary Unit: E. The Live-Work Unit: Layout and material preconditions There are reasons beyond developer inertia that true live-work units have not proliferated as society's need for them has expanded. Live-work production has not advanced as it should have, at a pace inversely corresponding to the recessional of the industrial age in North America. In good part, the market’s failure to respond to social and economic change is attributable to stifling codes and standards, and to an entrenched regime that never envisioned the workplace and the dwelling coexisting within the same building. Usually such codes do not actually outlaw the live-work unit. In their received form, intended to control an earlier world, they merely make it in practice inefficient and expensive to build live-works. The principal constraints fall into three categories: first, disability standards; second, fire separation and egress codes; and third, of course, the perennial bugbear of parking requirements. Together and separately, these act counterproductively to answering market demand. The constraints are certainly well-intentioned but often maladapted. They are not so much wrong as rigid, with little capacity to recognize that conjunctions of living and work may vary enormously in their effects, depending upon both the absolute and the relative size of each component, and upon the contextual impact of different work activities. The latter, the impact, must include both the potential danger of activities being pursued and the number of people, beyond the unit’s residents, envisioned as coming and going. Different kinds of live-work units can be designed for different situations across the entire Transect. But, absent good arguments for their safety and reasonableness, let alone for general coding reforms, such ingenuity will inevitably be frustrated. Better, then, that those concerned with providing live-work units equip themselves properly even before beginning the financing and design, permitting, and construction process. This Technical Page and the following one will lay out a form and some detail for such arguments, then advance to case studies in design and urban assembly of live-works. limited, restricted or open? To begin with, it is essential to categorize different mixes of live-work intensities and impacts, and allocate a proper measure of coding to each. A simple classification, based on degree of hazard and intensity of impact, could be Limited, Restricted and Open use combinations. Limited would describe uses that are not inherently dangerous and have a low intensity of human occupation. Where little or no hazard is involved with the work being done, and where there are few (if any) employees and a small number of visiting clients, then little or nothing beyond normal residential should be mandated. The ubiquitous knowledge worker designing a website is the classic manifestation of a Limited use; outside of sci-fi movies, few computers explode. At the other extreme, Open use is exemplified by the equally ubiquitous restaurant, which is heavily patronized and subject to fire in the kitchen, and rightly should be subject to more stringent separation and exiting standards. Restricted use is midway between. It is exemplified by a doctor's home office, of the sort once standard across the country, with a small stream of patients usually coming by appointment, and no real fire hazard beyond that of a dwelling. The issue of where, in relationship to each other, live-work units of different use combinations are to be placed is extrmely complex. It must suffice for now to note that the internal mixed-use intensity of a live-work unit — Limited, Restricted, or Open — should not be decided independently of either its external location or the mix of neighboring live-work types. If broad categories such as these could be made the conceptual basis for well-considered access, construction, egress and parking legal standards, it would open the door to spending more appropriate quantities of time, money and talent on the specifics of individual kinds of mix and context. The next Technical Page will look at some of the more difficult problems within existing standards, addressing how solutions could reasonably vary by Limited, Restricted, and Open use mixes. u