Sólheimar, Iceland, has the added advantage of village-esque-ness because it prioritizes mixed-use design. On-site, there is a post office, a used bookstore, a café, a grocery store, a theater, workplaces, a woodshop, sports facilities, farming spaces and farm buildings, administration buildings, and housing for the 100-plus people who live there.

This village, however, matured during the advent of cars and suffered the same affliction and addiction of too many towns where the “luxury” of being spread out turned out to be a liability. Inevitably, the day came when they realized that they were too dispersed and there were too many automobiles. Intentionality is an important implementation for organic growth in the modern age.

Sólheimar’s building layout (site plan) is as organic as one might expect for a village that matured over the span of 90 years. The buildings are sporadically dispersed over about 37 acres, which not only results in a confusing site plan but also in a superfluous amount of asphalt, parking lots, and roads that seemingly necessitate driving. For environmental costs, maintenance costs, and water/snow management reasons, The Cohousing Company tries to limit asphalt and gravel drive/parking areas to less than 500 square feet of area per dwelling unit in our community designs. Sólheimar has more than 2,000 square feet of driving area per dwelling, which results in more area being devoted to roads than to buildings. Villages need to be engineered and programmed carefully from the beginning to ultimately culminate in a high-quality way of life. Outdoor areas must have a distinctive sense of place and definition.

Sólheimar, Iceland. Photo courtesy the publisher

If you are going to design a village like Sólheimar today, you want to consciously pursue a physical layout that doesn’t resemble suburban sprawl. Suburbs are too auto-oriented, and this necessitates frequent driving—putting pedestrians in peril, especially when the roads are icy (as they often are in Iceland). A village should not resemble a college campus either, in order to avoid an institutional feel.

When Sólheimar started, Sesselja thought first and foremost that “these kids need space—they need room to roam.” That’s the best they could do to care for children—especially children with mental disabilities. “Let’s create space;” she asked her father to help her find acreage, and he obliged.

The early residents, most of them child orphans when they moved in, are adults now in their 70s and 80s, and the last thing they need is isolation. For the community to foster true independence for its residents and achieve ecological stability, it would need to abandon its reliance on cars.

Energy efficiency is easier to achieve with adjoined walls. Adjoined buildings can also be more interesting, much less costly to build, and leave less residual space. Space with no coherency, definition, or clear use only separates people from one another.

A livable village doesn’t just happen by accident in the 20th and 21st centuries. Instead, it must be created through a deliberate process. For example, an essential aspect of architecture that is often overlooked, especially for the neurodivergent population, is the life between the buildings. A decorated front porch where guests, friends, and family are invited is a much more respectful segue to a private abode than plain asphalt leading to the front door. Therefore, an institution like Sólheimar will have to decide how it wants to, hopes to, and plans to grow. There is enough room between current buildings for new buildings to be constructed as infill and achieve all of the texture and color without adding the extra expense of land costs. All of the buildings now have plenty of character and nuance—the only problem is that they are too spread out and, therefore, don’t have the connected coherency that you’d hope to find in a village.