The Dwelling Complex I. The Ancillary Unit: D. The Live-Work Unit: Its reinvention

Nothing better demonstrates the hardened arteries of the conventional American development system than its lag in understanding and producing true live-work units. Largely oblivious to changes in the character and stability of modern work, and to the evolution of household composition, the housing industry for the most part has continued to build, and municipalities to plan and code for, inflexibly residential building types. More than a mere niche market segment, the need for live-work dwellings cuts across the entire range of housing. Knowledgeable readaptation is long overdue. A true live-work unit is a dwelling on its own lot which is designed to accommodate comfortably both living facilities and a work or commercial component within the body of the building and/or its yard. A gradient of live-work types exists, conforming with each Transect segment, from rural to urban core. Uniformly across the Transect, however, the varieties of unit are so ordered that a calibrated relationship between live and work spaces is maintained, ranging from overlap to complete reciprocal privacy, depending on the type of work space and dwelling space. In practice, this means that the two present a common, but neutral, entrance, or two separate entrances, to the public realm. Similarly, it may be desirable that neutral or separated guest toilet facilities be provided. Parking, as always, must be considered critically, but its resolution is more complex. There may be shared “layered” parking in an alley to the rear, but live-works with more intensely commercial allocations certainly must make use of additional onstreet parking; hence, corner lots are a logical location. And when a workplace is a destination (rather than an optional, random drive-by), walking from parking that is some distance from the building becomes more acceptable. These characteristics enable the dwelling to retain, with no compromise of contemporary market and comfort standards, the flexible coexistence of work and living which characterized houses historically. Live-work coexistence was the norm prior to the Industrial Revolution. Contemporary live-works are a reinvention of the broad type, one that recognizes the current reality of continual corporate downsizing, outsourcing, and networking; acknowledges that the “active elderly” often need or want a home business; values stay-at-home parents who wish to work part-time in an acceptably professional setting; and understands that an assembly of live-work units is in practice a new business incubator, essential to ongoing economic renewal. Live-work units are essential, in addition, to a reliable solution to the issue of affordable housing. under one roof It is thus wrong to think of a live-work unit as a specialized type or set of types. Precisely to the contrary, its broad capacity to harbor a dramatically extended variety of lifestyles and functions is in contrast to the specialized-use types of factory, workshop, office, store prevalent since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The overall concept is, however, not a free-for-all. There are gradations having to do with the relative ratios of living or working, and the intensities of the impact of work being performed. These must be allocated through Transect-based zoning to a variety of contexts. It is comparatively easy to devise live-work units for various contexts, and straightforward to classify them by their patterns of separating living and working. It is relatively simple to devise plans in which spaces may comfortably be swung either to living or working. What is difficult are codes which tend to interpret the entire live-work dwelling as conventionally commercial, rendering design and construction more onerous, and consequently making the live-work unit unnecessarily inefficient, awkward, and expensive. Certain types of work clearly require the full standard of egress, fire separation, handicap accessibility, and parking. Others need less, and some (office use, for example) need nothing special. The next few Technical Pages will examine case studies of the variety of true live-work units, consider their assembly into blocks and neighborhoods, and propose codes by which they may be conceptualized and regulated. Such standards encourage the proliferation of live-work units by diminishing confusion caused by their intrinsic complexity, enabling wider understanding and acceptance of them as affording, in fact, great social and economic benefit.