W-units. An incremental housing approach of the future

Do our houses really seem to belong to our contemporary times? Do they have the same technological content of all other tools we use nowadays such as smartphones and the latest car models? The answer is definitively no ! We are almost resigned to consider houses as something structurally different in terms of modernity compared to other contemporary products. People probably think that what is necessary in a car or in a phone in terms of interface and flexibility of use can not be asked for in a house. Therefore our general approach in perceiving the product “house” is to consider it as something structurally old,something that can can not be at the same level of modernity of all other products we use today.But it has not always has been like that in the past. For instance in the twenties and thirties of the last century the modern house was the symbol of modernity and progress. At that times the most important architects in the world worked and designed outstanding new architectural configurations, and their housing projects implemented the latest achievements of social, scientific and technological progress of the times. They actually tried to imagine the housing of the future. And they succeeded in it. Because nowadays we are living in the materialization of what they’ve thought and imagined almost 100 years ago. Another important moment of experimentaion was during the sixties and the seventies of the last century. We think that is again the moment for architects to think forward and imagine a new way to conceive and live in a house. This is because houses have been left many steps back compared to the boosted progress of our contemporary life in the last ten years. Concepts like “modularity,scalability, reconfigurability,flexibility, mobility” are composing a sort of “way to think” with which we are used to dealing with in many of our daily activities.After a decade of Real Estate ruling the entire phenomenon of new urbanization, the room for innovation has been really small. music and travel industry, tourismand hotels are deeply changing because of this. All the other productive fields should face this genetic change of consumers.Including the housing industry of course.In future if a family needs an extra room for their apartment they should expect to take their ipad, choose and configure their new room, order it and wait some weeks for the extra room to be installed in a day’s time without any noise or building site troubles. This is where technology will lead.Our approach has been focused exactly on this direction: trying to imagine a product “house” that is able to do something that the actual houses cannot do. New functions, new possibilities, a new level of involvement of the consumer into the personalization and configuration of his own house.In this post crisis decade that we are about to live consumers are waiting new products to spend their money on.If houses will not change and if real estate developers will try to sell them the obsolete leftover stock, they will and limited to “ecology” and “energy saving” items. In other words the main efforts to innovate housing have been concentrated on materials and technologies connected with the production phase and the life cycle of a building. Very few have been done to revolutionize the “house” as a product seen from the Consumer’s point of view. Is it enough for a consumer just to live in a house that needs less resources to be heated and cooled? What about consumer’s needs and expectations concerning the way this house fits contemporary life conditions and social needs? Nowadays users thoughts are mostly “building site noise and troubles for refurbishing”, “wait for a year for a new house”, “stress to choose and arrange furniture”, “rigidity of a house in case an extension is needed”,in this modern age concerns like this have become totally unacceptable! Today we search for something on the internet, we take our smartphone and order it on Amazon paying by credit card. The following day we have the order at our home. This already revolutionized the advanced prefabrication user to manage his modular house, as allowed by the new technologies,It is at the core of this innovation that the research group in university has made this proposal. Scalability allows the users to extend their house according to the changes that occur in their life such us marriage, a new baby or a new activity. Even when grown kids leave the house and part of the space can be rearranged and separated to be rented out as a source of revenue.Afterall the main target of this thesis work is to update the concept of our houses and to fill the huge gap existing between their nature and the new lifestyle in which we are living today. This has revolutionized our way to live and to perceive the world in the last ten years, therefore also housing should be deeply reconceived to satisfy a totally changed client and users expectations and needs.