The Live-Work Unit: Its reinvention

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

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.