“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.
Sources: