The Flexible Housing: Criteria and Strategies for Implementation of the Flexibility

The design of housing systems is today challenged by a highly uncertain context, dominated by the rapid development of functional and technological obsolescence in inherited housing models. If flexibility is the ability of a system to be easily modified and to respond to changes in the environment timely and conveniently, it can be considered as the antidote to obsolescence or the characteristic of the system that guarantees slippage over time. Our paper focuses on the concept of flexibility as a fundamental prerequisite for residential building in order to extend its life cycle design, through strategies and constructive solutions that ensure both the convertibility of the space in response to changing usage and the use of building materials that encourage the reversibility and the long-term easy maintenance of the technological choices that have been implemented. Flexibility is examined both from a conceptual point of view, so as to obtain a clear and logical definition that is distinct from related terms, as well as from a practical point of view, by finding ways to incorporate this requirement into the designing of housing.