If you find that a strange room protruding from the second floor of a Victorian house in the UK isn't in perfect harmony with the rest of the house, it's probably a sleeping porch. The porch itself has been around for a long time and was used as a sleeping place to escape the heat of summer, but it became popular during the tuberculosis epidemic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Before the advent
of
antibiotics, sunlight and fresh air were the most popular
"cure" for deadly illnesses. And It is also relevant to
today’s pandemic which attacks our respiratory system too so this architecture
gonna be suit and gives many benefits for us according to the previous pandemic
Health professionals in the early
20th century touted the health benefits of screened sleeping
porches that offered fresh air.
These features are lost,
as are the hoop skirts and top hats worn
by the owners of these homes during their
heyday. However, the current pandemic can
trigger a modern incarnation of historical
features that suddenly revived its
purpose.
The
benefits early 20th-century health professionals tied to a sleeping porch also
align with the current global crisis
Fresh air and a good night’s sleep were tied to strong immune
systems when many people were fearful
of contracting tuberculosis or succumbing to the 1918 flu pandemic. Those
porches became must-have home accessories for everything from bungalows to
sprawling Victorian mansions.
A
modern revival may be less about sleeping outside and more with simply having
access to fresh air.
“I
think you’re going to see a big return to outdoor space, even in high-density
housing,” said Anne Tate, a professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of
Design. “The ability to get out in the air from a multistory building is going
to become the equivalent of the 1918 [pandemic-inspired] zoning laws. Instead
of windows in every room, it’ll call for something like balconies in every apartment.”
The
sleeping porch, like other historic home features, have
declined primarily due to advances in air conditioning technology and changes
in the way owners view their homes. Houses are often designed for seasonal
changes, and residents have moved to different components, such as summer
kitchens and north-south living rooms, depending on the season and the sun
“I
think air conditioning has been devastating for the special components of
housing in some ways,” Tate said. “We forgot how to use basic climate design
tools because we no longer needed to.”
A
renewed focus on outdoor space isn’t the only historic home component Tate
expects to return to the residential space.
Quarantine led to much of the world learning how to work from home and increasingly rely on one’s own cooking rather than the services of local restaurants. The longer people were in lockdown, the more they took note of what was practical and what wasn’t in their own home.
Expandable House / Urban Rural Systems
“coronavirus makes us redesign our lives”
Between a move towards urban flight and global housing crises, the growth of more low-rise, dense developments may provide an answer in the countryside. Turning away from single family homes in rural areas and suburbs, modern housing projects are exploring new models of shared living in nature. As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads, it has exacerbated living conditions. With the possibility of the pandemic stretching on for years, more urbanites have considered the move to rural areas and small towns.
As the pandemic's impact is felt globally, there is a turn towards existing plans, multi-family housing and mobile units.The expandable house is designed to be one part of a sustainable response to the challenges of development in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago. The expandable house project focuses on the challenge of housing. It does so by allowing the building to be flexibly configured around the fluctuating patterns of resource consumption and expenditure, or metabolism, of its residents.The expandable house (‘rumah tambah’ in Bahasa Indonesia, or rubah for short) is designed to be one part of a sustainable response to the challenges of rapidly developing cities like Batam, in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago. Once a collection of sleepy fishing villages of a few thousand inhabitants, Batam developed to be a cosmopolitan city of over one million people in less than 40 years. This remarkable growth, fueled by a new free trade agreement and Batam’s proximity to Singapore, has not abated. By 2015 Batam was named the fastest growing city in the world.The expandable house project focuses on the challenge of housing. Practically this means understanding the patterns of household income generation and expenditure, water, energy and food consumption, as well as waste production. The expandable house is designed around the following five principles:
1. Sandwich Section.
This system allows flexible financing whereby the developer or state housing agency provides the roof and foundations, while the residents provide infill as their circumstances require and budget allows.
2. Domestic Density.
The house encourages domestic densification in the vertical dimension. This supports the benefits of co-location of dwellings and employment.
3. Decentralized Systems.
Rainwater harvesting and solar electricity generating technologies, sewage and septic tank systems, and passive cooling principles are integrated locally with the expandable house, avoiding expensive and often unreliable centralized, or ‘big pipe’, approaches to infrastructure provision.
4. Productive Landscape
The expandable house integrates food and building material production capacity locally.
5. Seed Package
The expandable house is designed as a seed package, containing technologies, material strategies and planning guidelines that can develop in different ways depending on local social, cultural and environmental conditions.
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