Live-Work Planning and Design: Zero-Commute Housing

In Oakland, California In 1988, Thomas Dolan designed what is said to be the first new-construction live-work community in the US since the Great Depression. It was called South Prescott Village, and it struck a blow at the American fixation on separating the workplace from the home.

Not that there hadn’t been other individuals striking similar blows. In the 1970s, artists moved—illegally—into empty or nearly empty manufacturing lofts in New York, turning the buildings’ high-ceilinged, wide-open interiors into spaces where painters and sculptors could both live and work.

But that was an improvisational operation. The artists in the cast-iron-fronted buildings of SoHo tolerated a lot of discomfort in return for gaining cheap, flexible cubic footage.

Tom Dolan has created spaces for artists, but he’s also fashioned live-work structures for all sorts of other people—individuals, couples, and families who saw the practical advantages of being in one location for most of the hours of the day. Live-Work Planning and Design presents what he’s learned from 27 years as an architect of these mixed-use buildings, primarily in California and the southeastern US.

New Urbanism finds virtue in mixed-use at the neighborhood scale; Dolan brings that sensibility down to the individual building. In this generously illustrated

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