Flexible Housing

Episodes in Flexible Housing

Flexible housing may be seen to have developed in two ways. The first is a result of evolving conditions in vernacular housing. This approach generally embodies means that are in balance, readily available, appropriate to the local economy, open and therefore easily adaptable to changes in use and occupation. The second is the more official version of flexible housing, involving architects and other experts. This can be described in three phases or episodes: modernity and the minimal dwelling, the industrialization of housing, and participation and user choice.

The first episode occurred after the First World War, when there was a need to provide more and smaller housing. In order to make minimum-sized apartments as usable as possible, flexibility was achieved by introducing double functionalities, foldable furniture, and sliding doors. In Europe, early architectural modernists such as Johannes Van den Broek, Mart Stam, Bruno Taut, and Le Corbusier experimented with ways in which the same space could be used in different ways on both a diurnal cycle and longer term. Flexibility was also aligned to modernism's interests in flux and change and was seen as a social and moral imperative as it became a pragmatic response to the intense demands of the housing crisis at the time.

Flexibility during this period took two forms. First, flexibility was achieved through the provision of rooms that were indeterminate; rather than predefining uses for certain rooms, these plans allowed the user to decide how they wanted to occupy their apartments, such as in Bruno Taut's plan designs for the 1925 development in Berlin, Germany, called the Hufeisensiedlung (“horseshoe”). Second, flexibility was expressed through physical changes, such as the design of sliding and folding apparatuses, an architectural imposition of control that became the hallmark of determinist approach to 20th-century flexibility.

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