Scale
The replication unit is one building. A hundred and fifty people is a social target, not a master plan. Everything larger is just the pattern repeating — which is how Berlin and Vienna were actually made.
Step 1
Twenty-five to sixty homes around one Hof, shops below, roof above. A complete social unit — big enough for a shared kitchen to make sense, small enough that everyone's face is known. This is the whole project; everything after is repetition.
Reference — La Borda · R50
Step 2
A second building beside or across from the first. They can share a larger Hof or face each other over a passage — the courtyard grows faster than the cost. Spreefeld logic: separate houses, one ground.
Reference — Spreefeld
Step 3
A U, or a full court. The gaps between buildings are exactly where the kindergarten, the workshop, the café want to be — rooms that need the courtyard more than they need frontage.
Reference — Spreefeld · Sargfabrik
Step 4
Four street walls, one or two interior courts, a passage through. At this point it stops reading as a project at all — it is simply how the ordinary fabric of Berlin or Vienna is put together.
Reference — Gründerzeit Berlin · Gemeindebau Vienna
Step 5
Blocks facing blocks: a tram or a frequent bus in the middle, wide sidewalks, plane trees, continuous ground-floor commercial. The street becomes the largest shared room of all.
Reference — Vauban · Prenzlauer Berg
Step 6
Not a compound and not a campus — the type dissolves into an existing American grid, lot by lot. Berkeley proves the first one; Oakland copies the brief; the next city copies Oakland. The drawing set is open-source; the pattern is the product.
Reference — The whole atlas
Not a compound. The type repeats inside an existing city — Berkeley, then Oakland, then the next — each building complete on its own.
Next
Where else the pattern lands — other American cities →