The Overvecht Cooking Collective (OCC)

The OCC (Overvecht Cooking Collective) is a co-housing proposal for Overvecht, Utrecht. It includes a public forum, market, culinary center, cafés and shared kitchens. The design proposal recognizes food and the act of cooking as an opportunity to learn and communicate with new cultures and aims to enhance the passing on of tacit knowledge. It approaches co-housing from a new perspective as it uses a sensitive approach rooted in substantial research of the area, particularly through the senses: hear, see, smell, taste, touch and intuition. The nook also plays a central role in the design as it is often embedded into our homes. In the OCC we recognize that the nook is not limited to an architectural scale, it is also rooted in a larger, urban realm and reveals itself in our social circles.

The design consists of two unique courtyards: one public and one private, which also provides housing to various groups including elderly, families, students and working professionals. Small, medium and large units are intermingled, where small units are catered to first time homeowners and are partly subsidized. The nook emerges in this private courtyard, as it becomes the transition zone between the courtyard oriented gallery and dwelling, thus, the public to private. The nook therefore becomes an informal stage of spontaneous daily life as it is simultaneously a flexible extension to the kitchen, a terrace, entrance and storage space.

The OCC promotes a domestic urbanity, which acknowledges the dependence and interdependence of households through the network of nooks, it also provides a diversity of collective spaces as we think this is a sensitive methodology to the homogeneity of current co-housing projects.