Flexibile housing

Flexible housing is housing that can adjust to the needs of the user, both at point of design and over time. It is also housing that can accommodate new technologies as they emerge. Flexible housing thus provides homes that are robust enough to cope with future technological and social change. Importantly it avoids obsolescence and allows users to take control of their own homes. Often associated with one-off experiments in housing, this book argues that flexible housing has the potential to make a key contribution to more sustainable and adaptable housing, arguing that it has economic, environmental and social benefits over normal housing. The book asks the simple question: why, when our homes are going to face technological and social change over the next one hundred years, are we still building housing that is inflexible and based on obsolete models? The book is the first comprehensive overview of this important subject, examining the past, present and future of flexible housing. The authors both have direct experience in housing design as well as an established research reputation, and have combined these two areas of expertise. The book collects together over 160 international examples of the genre as a major point of reference, and through a careful analysis arrives at recommendations as to how to design flexible housing. Combining history, theory and design, the book both makes the case for flexible housing and also shows the various ways by which it has been, and can be, achieved. Specially commissioned plans, printed to scale, and over 200 illustrations allow visual comparisons to be easily made; in addition the book is illustrated throughout with diagrams to clearly show the principles. The book ends with a direct and accessible guide as to how flexible housing might be designed and constructed. The book is thus both a major historical reference and an immediately useful manual. The book is written for housing designers who will find direct advice as to how to achieve flexibility in housing, housing managers and developers who will find the rationale for flexible housing, and students of architecture, construction and housing who will discover the history of subject and ways in which their own work might be informed.