Kinship + Hinge House is a co-housing project that re-centers children in the design of collective housing. This project proposes a new collective way to live - one where “meta-families” are created to address the issues of children and housing. It proposes an architecture that generates autonomous and safe spaces for children to explore, learn, and gather while negotiating adult communal areas. Using children as a social hinge, the project positions multiple families around a courtyard to create a meta-family core.
This meta-family shares multiple scales of communal living: a shared kitchen, a communal child play space, an open courtyard, and a ramp that connects these spaces sectionally to meta-families on other floors. Four meta-family cores tangentially branch off to create a closed central courtyard as a space for the separate meta families to come together. The tangential branches hold more normative studio units and other common areas.
