Buildings that already do this

via Wikimedia Commons

Lacol's 6-story, 28-home timber cooperative on 75-year leased public land. Cession-of-use tenure, a full-height glazed patio in the corrala tradition, access galleries, shared kitchen-dining at the street. The closest single-building match to this brief.

cooperative · new build · courtyard · 5-7 stories · ground-floor public

Bub37 · CC BY-SA 4.0

A co-op block of roughly 97 apartments and 250 residents built over a working tram depot: shops, a cinema and offices at the street, a raised public garden courtyard of about 2,500 m², mixed incomes, city land leased to the cooperative.

cooperative · new build · courtyard · roof garden · 5-7 stories · ground-floor public

Fridolin freudenfett · CC BY-SA 4.0

Three 7-story passive-house buildings forming a courtyard on the Spree; about 60 homes. The ground floor is kept free of housing — kindergarten, workshops, 'option rooms,' public river access. Cooperative, no speculative developer.

cooperative · new build · courtyard · roof garden · 5-7 stories · ground-floor public

ifau + Jesko Fezer / Heide & von Beckerath. Six stories, 19 apartments, a Baugruppe. A wraparound balcony works as a continuous porch; garden, workshop, laundry, roof terrace. Proof the type works at small scale, inside an ordinary block.

cooperative · new build · 5-7 stories · roof garden

Haeferl · CC BY-SA 3.0

A converted coffin factory: roughly 112 homes and 200 people in a self-managed association. Courtyard pond over a bathhouse; concert hall, restaurant, children's house and roof garden, parts of it open to the neighborhood. The warehouse-reuse model.

cooperative · reuse · courtyard · roof garden · ground-floor public

stekke + fraas. Twenty-nine apartments around a shared garden, ground-floor workspaces, units delivered as shells. The residents acted as their own developer — the margin went into the building.

cooperative · new build · courtyard

Factory reuse housing three cohousing groups around planted courtyard rooms, with a neighborhood health center at the ground floor. Several communities, one shared middle.

cooperative · reuse · courtyard · ground-floor public

Not mid-rise — the American ancestor. Clustered houses, shared productive landscape, walking paths instead of streets. Same instincts, wrong height: the density is too low to make a street wall or pay for a common ground floor.

courtyard

Dreamyshade · CC BY-SA 4.0

A 1917 market hall rebuilt around a courtyard: 20-unit cohousing plus affordable rentals, restaurants and offices. Two blocks from BART, about 15 minutes from Berkeley. The closest local cousin, even if lower-rise.

reuse · courtyard · ground-floor public

via Wikimedia Commons

Not one building but a district of them: mid-rise blocks, a tram in the street, shops, parking pushed to the edge, many Baugruppen. What a whole street of courtyard blocks feels like.

new build · 5-7 stories · ground-floor public

Haller Juliet · CC BY-SA 4.0

Thirteen buildings by a coalition of Zurich co-ops on a former concrete plant — squares, workshops, guest houses, cluster apartments. The proof that the co-op courtyard logic scales to a neighborhood.

cooperative · new build · courtyard · 5-7 stories · ground-floor public

Linie29 · CC BY-SA 4.0

A timber-hybrid Baugruppe in the Sonnwendviertel: media workshop, sauna, event room, library at the ground floor, open to the quarter. Vienna's building-group culture in current form.

cooperative · new build · roof garden · 5-7 stories · ground-floor public

Lacol + LaBoqueria. Twenty homes in cession-of-use on public land in Poblenou — La Borda's sibling, showing the model repeats: same tenure, same galleries, a different lot.

cooperative · new build · courtyard · 5-7 stories