When Hudson Yards opened in Manhattan in 2019, it promised to create a vibrant new urban neighborhood built from the ground up. The massive development featured 16 towers containing 4,000 residential units, complete with luxurious amenities and expansive public plazas, all designed with the hope of fostering a strong sense of community. Despite these impressive features, residents and visitors alike noticed something was missing – a peculiar emptiness that seemed to pervade the entire complex, making it feel anonymous and disconnected.
This phenomenon speaks to a fundamental challenge in architecture and urban planning: the tension between human cognitive limits and architectural ambition. When projects grow beyond what our minds can comfortably process, the potential for creating intimate, meaningful spaces begins to collapse. Modernist visionaries once dreamed of creating "streets in the sky" that would foster vertical villages, bringing neighbors together in towering residential complexes. However, reality has proven more stubborn than these idealistic visions suggested.
The traditional Japanese concept of roji – intimate in-between spaces that serve as transitional zones where residents naturally form communal bonds – demonstrates how architectural design can successfully nurture community. These carefully crafted spaces work brilliantly when implemented at small scales, creating opportunities for spontaneous interactions and gradual relationship building. The critical question facing today's architects is whether such intimacy can survive when projects are designed to house thousands of people instead of dozens.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar's groundbreaking research provides crucial insight into this dilemma. His studies show that humans can comfortably maintain stable social relationships with approximately 150 people – a number that appears consistently throughout history. Neolithic farming villages typically averaged 150 residents before naturally splitting into smaller communities. Roman military companies were organized around this same threshold, and modern Hutterite settlements continue to divide when they reach this magical number.
The practical applications of Dunbar's findings extend beyond academic research into real-world business practices. When the company behind Gore-Tex discovered that social problems and workplace dysfunction emerged when their buildings exceeded 150 employees, they made the bold decision to cap each facility at exactly that number. The results were dramatic and immediate – employee satisfaction increased, productivity improved, and the sense of community within each facility flourished.
Several architectural projects have successfully demonstrated these principles in practice. The Tietgen Dormitory in Copenhagen exemplifies how thoughtful design can foster community through strategic visibility. Its distinctive circular design ensures that residents are naturally subject to mutual observation, creating communal bonds through shared sight lines and informal encounters. The structure succeeds precisely because it maintains a human scale, allowing residents to recognize and gradually get to know their neighbors.
Traditional architecture occasionally managed to defy conventional scale limitations through innovative design approaches. The remarkable Tulou structures of southeastern China, built between the 13th and 20th centuries, successfully housed entire clans within fortified circular earthen buildings. These architectural marvels featured central halls that served all residents, incorporating shared workshops, meeting spaces, administrative areas, and creating an atmosphere of communal defense that bound the community together.
Amsterdam's historic canal houses achieved impressive density through a different strategy – vertical living within narrow, deep structures that maximized space while maintaining neighborhood character. Similarly, Roman insulae created multi-story housing that accommodated large populations, though these examples often devolved into overcrowded tenements that prioritized efficiency over livability.
The cautionary tale of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis serves as perhaps the most famous example of architectural ambition gone wrong. This modernist complex, comprising 33 eleven-story buildings designed by renowned architect Minoru Yamasaki, was intended to house 10,000 people. When completed in 1954, it was initially praised as creating "vertical neighborhoods for poor people," representing the pinnacle of progressive housing design. Within two decades, however, the development had become so plagued by crime and physical deterioration that demolition began in 1972. Architecture critic Charles Jencks famously declared this moment the "death of modern architecture."
The failures at Pruitt-Igoe were numerous and instructive. Skip-stop elevators, designed to save money and encourage stair use, instead forced residents into dimly lit stairwells where muggings became frequent occurrences. The unpainted, poorly lit galleries that were intended to serve as communal spaces instead became hangouts for criminal activity rather than areas for neighborly interaction. Architect Oscar Newman later criticized these "anonymous public spaces," which were shared by dozens of families, noting that they made it "impossible for even neighboring residents to develop an accord about acceptable behavior."
Even celebrated modernist projects like Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation faced similar challenges despite initial success. The building did form a genuine community immediately after completion in 1952, with residents founding a popular association and organizing social activities. However, the commercial "streets" planned for the sixth and seventh floors ultimately failed due to insufficient foot traffic from residents to sustain businesses. Customers from outside the building found accessing these upper floors too difficult and inconvenient, leading to gradual shop closures that left empty semi-public hallways belonging to no one.
Contemporary projects continue to grapple with these same fundamental challenges. Between 1993 and 2000, Dutch landscape architects at West 8 undertook an ambitious transformation of two 19th-century harbor docks into a residential district featuring 2,500 low-rise housing units at a density of 100 units per hectare. The project's success came from learning how to divide the whole into manageable parts rather than treating it as a single massive development.
Three distinctive sculptural blocks, informally known as the Sphinx, PacMan, and Fountainhead, break up the linear monotony of the development, creating recognizable landmarks visible from considerable distances. These high-rise elements provide crucial orientation points within what would otherwise be a confusing sea of three-story houses, preventing the kind of monotony that breeds anonymity and disorientation.
West 8 collaborated with over 100 different architects to ensure maximum architectural variation throughout the development. This approach created an animated street elevation that celebrates individual plots and property owners rather than imposing a single architectural vision. Unlike the hostile galleries of Pruitt-Igoe or the failed shopping streets of Unité d'Habitation, Borneo Sporenburg succeeded by designing for subdivision and diversity rather than unity and conformity.
Recent research on co-living buildings confirms that physical proximity does indeed increase friendship formation, but the effect diminishes rapidly with distance. Studies show that interaction frequency drops by half at just 15 meters and drops by half again at 50 meters. High-rise apartments in Hanoi revealed that the absence of appropriate shared spaces like welcoming lobbies and comfortable lounges suitable for maintaining social networks contributed significantly to social isolation among residents.
Floor level emerges as another critical variable affecting community formation and mental health. Comprehensive studies demonstrate that women living on the fourth floor of high-rise buildings reported twice the psychological distress of ground-floor residents. Similarly, Scottish residents living on the fifth floor and above experienced double the symptoms of poor mental health compared to those residing on lower floors. This vertical separation creates what researchers term "functional distance" – not merely physical meters, but the psychological barrier created by elevators, stairwells, and the mental effort required to maintain connections across vertical space.
The true lesson of traditional concepts like the Japanese roji may lie not in their specific architectural forms, but in their fundamental restraint and human scale. Community does not naturally emerge from impressive scale or ambitious architectural gestures, but rather from carefully designed nearness and opportunities for organic interaction. We continue to build vast structures in our search for connection, yet often forget that genuine belonging thrives only in spaces intimate enough for residents to know each other's faces and stories.
Architecture cannot manufacture community through design alone, but thoughtful planning can clear the ground where authentic relationships might naturally take root. To design for genuine human connection requires approaching projects with humility, accepting that scale is not necessarily progress when it erases the very intimacy and belonging that residents seek. The challenge for contemporary architects lies in finding ways to achieve necessary density while preserving the human-scaled interactions that make places feel like home.
