Flexible Living

Flexible living is an approach to housing in which homes are designed to change over time: to be rearranged, extended, divided or reduced as households grow, shrink, age or change the way they use space. Instead of fixing one plan for the life of a building, it separates what should last (structure, services, shared ground) from what residents may alter, and leaves room for that change in advance.

What is flexible living?

Flexible living covers a range of strategies at different scales. Inside a dwelling it means rooms without fixed functions, sliding or movable partitions and furniture that converts. At the scale of the building it means a structural frame and service cores that let apartments be merged, split or refitted. At the scale of the neighbourhood it means plots and frames that residents can fill in and extend themselves, a strategy known as incremental housing.

The common thread is time. A family home has to serve a couple, then young children, then teenagers, then perhaps an elderly parent or a home office. Most housing is drawn for a single moment in that cycle. Flexible housing is drawn for the whole cycle, and accepts that the people who live in it will make design decisions too.

It is easy to confuse with compact living, and the two often meet in the same project. Compact living is about doing more with less floor area: small footprints, storage, multipurpose furniture. Flexible living is about change: a home that can become larger or smaller, more open or more divided, over years rather than over an afternoon. A small flat can be rigid, and a large house can be flexible. Flexible living also overlaps with modular housing, which supplies one of its main construction methods.

A short history of flexible living

An early landmark is the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, built in 1924 by Gerrit Rietveld with and for Truus Schröder and her three children. On the upper floor a system of sliding and revolving panels lets the living level stay one open space or be closed into separate bedrooms when needed. Schröder wanted a floor usable in either form, and the house became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000.

The theory arrived in 1961, when the Dutch architect N. John Habraken published Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing. He proposed separating the "support", the long-lived base building that a community builds, from the "infill" that each household controls. According to the history of open building, he argued that housing must recognise two domains of action, the community's and the inhabitant's, and that excluding the inhabitant produces uniformity and rigidity. From 1965 the SAR research foundation in the Netherlands, which he directed, developed methods for adaptable housing, and the ideas later spread to Japan, Finland, the UK and the US under the name open building.

"The idea that built environment is in constant transformation and change must be recognized and understood."

N. John Habraken, Open Building: brief introduction

In Japan, the Metabolist movement took a more technological route. Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo, completed in 1972, attached 140 factory-made capsules to two concrete towers, each held by only four high-tension bolts so that a single capsule could, in principle, be removed and replaced.

The most influential recent case is social housing. At Quinta Monroy in Iquique, Chile, ELEMENTAL, led by Alejandro Aravena, kept 93 families on their central site and built only half of each house: a two-storey frame with kitchen, bathroom, stairs and essential services, beside an equal void the residents could fill and extend themselves.

The Pritzker Prize announcement of 2016 singled out this "half of a good house" approach, which ELEMENTAL calls incremental housing, noting that it allows social housing to be built on more expensive land closer to economic opportunity.

Key principles of flexible living

Separate support from infill

Habraken's distinction remains the basic rule. Structure, shafts and shared circulation are designed to last for generations, while partitions, kitchens and fit-out are designed to be replaced. When the two are tangled together, every change becomes a demolition.

Use a generous, neutral grid

A regular structural grid with rooms of similar size lets any room become a bedroom, study or living space. House H by Yoshimasa Kishimoto Architects Studio, featured in a uni.xyz journal, organises its 134 square metres on a grid of four-and-a-half tatami mats taken from traditional Japanese house plans, so that spaces can be connected or divided and rooms can take on different uses over time.

Plan the next phase now

Extensions are cheap when they are anticipated. The uni.xyz feature on PH Ruiz Huidobro by Estudio Yama in Buenos Aires describes a 111 square metre home that can work as one family dwelling or, later, as two independent units, with a new concrete slab built to carry future vertical expansion.

Build in modules that can move

Prefabricated units can be added, removed or relocated. The modular cabin by Lukas Kunze, Malte Terboven, Katharina Frescher and Jo_OsX, a winning entry in The Cabin competition, offers five different A-frame modules that can be individually combined into a unit that suits each user.

Choose dry, demountable construction

Bolted and slotted joints make change possible without waste. The KABINA prototype by NODO Arquitectura + Naturaleza, a 20 square metre cabin covered in a uni.xyz journal, uses a dry system whose parts connect without power tools, screws or nails, so the building can be assembled, dismantled, relocated or resold.

Fix the wet rooms, free the rest

Kitchens and bathrooms are the hardest parts of a home to move, because they depend on drains, risers and ventilation. Grouping them around accessible service shafts, and keeping the rest of the plan free of pipes and load-bearing walls, gives every later change a fixed point to work around. It is also what allows one flat to become two, or two to become one.

Let residents decide

The most durable flexibility is social: giving inhabitants the right and the means to change their homes. That is the lesson of Quinta Monroy, and it applies as much to a rented flat as to a self-built house.

Flexible living on uni.xyz

Several uni.xyz competitions have asked members to design for change directly, and the topic gathers proposals for growing neighbourhoods, plug-in units and housing that moves with its residents.

Neighbourhoods that can grow with its inhabitants by Azade Hosseini, Mohadeseh Kazemian and Ronak Abdolhoseiny is a winning entry in the Dwell competition, whose brief was to design neighbourhoods able to grow with the people living in them. The team looked for a plan that could meet cultural, social, climatic and sustainable development needs at once, treating growth as a property of the whole settlement rather than of single houses.

The plug-in housing idea, a fixed frame that receives changeable units, runs through several entries. Plugin Housing by Mozhgan Mousaeipour, Faeze Ghazanfari and Ainaz Alafchi, entered in the Plugin Housing Challenge competition, proposes an affordable, flexible model for low-income groups with minimal material waste and minimal damage to the environment.

Forgiveness housing by Amin Mohsen Rikani, from the Reborn competition, applies the same logic to disaster recovery: prefabricated units made from new and eco-friendly materials are combined before an earthquake, then separated and re-installed according to need afterwards.

Verzendaccommodatie by Antonio Abreu and Phillip Tu, an Honorable Mention in the Container City competition, is a modular student housing concept for Amsterdam University College built from 15 shipping containers.

The same competition series produced Malja Almubaraka (The Blessed Shelter) by Shivya Puri, Shaurya Malik, Siraj Singh and Vikram Ghattora, entered in the Plugin Housing Challenge 2020 competition, which proposes plug-in micro housing for the resettlement of Syrians left without homes after the war, designed so that survivors can alter it to suit their own requirements. Bubble Hub by Татьяна Таратута and Данил Назаров, an Honorable Mention in the Hustle Hub 2019 competition, takes flexibility into collective living for millennials: it drops conventional walls and corridors so that the proportion of public and private space can vary, and the living space resembles a village.

For migrant workers, AABHAS: a sense of home by Pranjal Tak, entered in the UnIATA '25 competition, treats housing as dignity rather than shelter, adding a creche, workshops and safe spaces for families.

"Modular, mobile, and co-created, it moves with them, grows with them, and uplifts their families with creche, workshops, and safe spaces."

Pranjal Tak, project statement for AABHAS

The journals, with House H, PH Ruiz Huidobro and KABINA above, add built evidence from Japan, Argentina and Australia of homes planned to be divided, extended or moved.

Challenges and future directions

Flexibility promised is not flexibility used. The Nakagin Capsule Tower is the warning case: although its capsules were designed with mass production and replacement in mind, none of the original capsules was ever replaced, and the building was demolished in 2022. Systems that depend on a manufacturer, a specialist crane or a single owner's goodwill tend to freeze.

Other obstacles are legal and financial. Building codes, fire rules and mortgage products usually assume a fixed number of rooms and a finished building. Incremental schemes need clear rules on what residents may add, so that growth stays safe and does not block light or escape routes for neighbours. Movable walls must still meet acoustic and fire separation standards.

The direction of travel is clear, however. Demountable construction supports reuse of materials, ageing populations need homes that adapt instead of forcing a move, and remote work has turned bedrooms into offices. Digital tools that let residents test layouts before changing them, and structural systems designed for disassembly, are likely to make flexible housing easier to deliver and to keep flexible in practice.

Flexible living for students and designers

Flexible housing rewards a time-based design method: draw the same plan at year one, year ten and year thirty. Useful thesis angles include incremental housing for a fast-growing city, a support-and-infill apartment block, conversion strategies for homes that must later house an elderly relative, demountable timber systems, or rules that let residents extend social housing safely.

Related uni.xyz topics include social housing and prefabricated architecture. Housing and modular briefs appear regularly among uni.xyz competitions.

Frequently asked questions

What is flexible housing?

Flexible housing is housing designed to change with its occupants. It can be rearranged with movable walls, extended into planned space, divided into separate units or combined with a neighbouring unit, usually without rebuilding the structure.

What is open building?

Open building is an approach, first set out by N. John Habraken in Supports (1961), that separates a long-lasting base building from the infill controlled by each household. It lets layouts and fit-out change over the life of a building while the structure stays in place.

What is incremental housing?

Incremental housing provides the parts of a home that residents cannot easily build themselves, such as structure, bathroom, kitchen and services, and leaves space for them to complete and extend it over time. ELEMENTAL's Quinta Monroy in Chile is the best known example.

How is flexible living different from compact living?

Compact living focuses on making a small area work well. Flexible living focuses on change over time, so that a home can grow, shrink or be reorganised as a household's needs shift. Many projects combine both.

References and further reading

• Open building, Wikipedia
• Open Building: brief introduction, N. John Habraken
• Rietveld Schröder House, Wikipedia
• Quinta Monroy, Wikipedia
• Alejandro Aravena, 2016 Laureate, The Pritzker Architecture Prize
• Nakagin Capsule Tower, Wikipedia