Architecture Myths #33: Flexibile Space
The theory is that being able to reconfigure or otherwise allocate a space in different ways enables that space to be used for a greater variety of activities. This seems simple and obvious enough but still needs untangling. First, it assumes that different activities require different spatial configurations and this isn’t necessarily true because most activities rely upon walls only indirectly to isolate them from other activities. These most activities take place in the middle of rooms and independently of walls – apart from access I suppose which is more the intent to do something inside a room.
How we choose to distribute the space we have is largely a matter of culture and custom. Frederick Keisler’s Endless House proposed a single multi-blob space without partitions. Its occupants would just jump into one of the bathing pools and presumably sleep where they felt like it. Keisler didn’t go into details and neither do the plans. I won’t delve into his metaphysics other than to say the project offers a series of spaces to be used however and whenever.
Traditional Yemeni houses1 are generally about five to eight stories high with two or three rooms per floor. Since the advent of water supply and drainage, one of those rooms will be a dedicated kitchen and another a bathroom. Otherwise, the allocation and reallocation of rooms depends upon the size and composition of the household at any particular time, and who and how many are visiting. Construction is rammed earth, there’s no scope for extension other than upwards, and beam spans aren’t large so there’s nothing to gain from dividing space. If there are guests, then the household simply redistributes itself in the space available. It helps that people have few possessions and can easily store them in niches in the walls whatever room they are in.
The Japanese are also predisposed to the arbitrary use of space and have a history of sliding fusuma apart or even removing them to change the size of a room. It’s no surprise that contemporary bespoke partitions like those below exist alongside systems in which wall partitions roll into and out of boxes according to need – the most common one being the need for a temporary guest room. Creating additional spaces for incompatible but simultaneous uses is of course the crux of the problem and hard boundaries are necessary when those uses can’t be reconciled.
There have been various attempts over the decades. One of the first in Western architecture was by Le Corbusier at Marseilles 1947-1952 with the sliding doors between the children’s bedrooms supposedly giving them both more space when they wanted to play together. We were to see the same idea in the 1956 Monsanto House of the Future.
And again, in 1957, with Gio Ponti’s use in his own family’s apartment, of folding doors to make part of the bedroom spaces into one vista along the front of the apartment for some reason.
This idea of flexible space seems to be a response to some inherent inflexibility of space. The Richard and Su Rogers 1967–69 Zip-Up House used folding doors to do much the same thing for the more central partitions of the house. The six spaces still have walls but one of them (or two in the case of the kitchen) function as huge doors that are either open or closed but, apart from making a larger space, it’s not clear what the benefit is. The plan remains as inflexible as ever.
The same could be said of Joe Colombo’s showpiece apartment2. The folding wall has two different places to be but it’s either closed or open much like a regular now-you-see-it-now-you-dont door. The bed twists and the table shifts and everything seems to have more than one place to be but no more so than any other piece of free-standing furniture. The ceiling lamps can be ceiling lamps anywhere on their cross-shaped brackets. This does anticipate the hot tracks of retail display lighting design but two or three free-standing floor lamps would provide more lighting variations. This is the problem with flexibility. Designing for one type limits other types. In this case, it’s the ability to choose whatever things you think you need.
Do tables really need to be incorporated into Gesamkunstwerk such as Colombo’s Total Furniture Unit – or The Smithson’s House of the Future for that matter? Colombo did allow for his total furniture unit to be split and the pieces repositioned according to one’s preference, the size of the room, door and window positions and, presumably, the positions of water supply and drainage outlets. This last, I think, would be a major determinant. Below, the K is never too far from the B.
However compact Joe Colombo made his roving minikitchen, he never managed to squeeze a sink in there and this, I think, is a bit of a cop-out because any kitchen anywhere is basically a source of heat and a source of water. Problems of the preservation, storage and preparation of food don’t require a concept of a kitchen however mini.
This is no mere oversight. Places such as studios or workshops needing a kitchen will presumably have a sink or basin somewhere nearby but, if there’s going to be a sink nearby then why not a refrigerator or a table or a cupboard? The image below is around the back of a security gatehouse and the man is using a flat surface, an induction cooker, and a wok to cook his lunch. Water supply and drainage aren’t problems. I expect there’s a rice cooker somewhere inside but there’s no concept of a kitchen.
When placing furniture on a layout it’s good practice to ensure that the activity areas associated with each item of furniture overlap as much as possible. The image on the left below shows some activity spaces, but the two images on the right show it in action in a small apartment consisting of living area, bed, bathroom and kitchen.
I should have said almost shows it in action because you can see a corner of the kitchen counter in the first photo taken from just inside the entrance door. That kitchen counter extends about two metres out of frame to the left, and faces the window on the opposite side of the living area. The activity space for that kitchen counter completely overlaps the activity space for the side of the bed along it, and which is also the corridor leading to the bathroom behind the head of the bed. Lost here is the concept of a bedroom but it looks like the bed can be curtained off for whatever reason. Compressing the sleeping, cooking and bathing areas in this way is what architect Akio Yachida3 does with his clever constructions over and around entrances. The area remaining for the occupants to do what they like with is maximized, even if in this case they’ve made it look like a conventional living room.
While on the subject of activity spaces, FutureHaus by the Virginia Tech Center for Design Research4 overlaps not just the activity spaces but the actual spaces of supposedly incompatible activities. The blue walls shown in plan below, slide to enlarge the size of the living room at the expense of the office or bedroom or both. This house won the 2018 Middle East Solar Decathon for a combination of reasons, but nobody pointed out that it’s the three spaces used for the greatest amounts of time that have to expand and contract, while the kitchen and bathroom used for the least amounts are left unchanged. Compromise is for the living spaces and not for the service spaces that comprise half the volume of the haus.
FutureHaus is as inflexible as Shigeru Ban’s 1997 Wall-less House and Colombo’s Total Furniture Unit in that the positions of the kitchen sink and the bathroom washbasin, toilet and bath are determined by the positions of water supply and drainage connections. If spaces can only be “used” when there’s something inside them to use, it’s not a problem of how flexible the space is but of how mobile the things inside it are.
Speaking of how mobile some things aren’t, that washbasin above is a shocker! I can’t help wondering what it’s there to conceal. It might be a water heater but I suspect it’s for the plastic stools and bowls associated with Japanese-style bathing, and I only think that because of the large space between the toilet and the bathtub. That exceptionally ungainly bathroom mirror suggests that the bathroom mirror is perhaps the one place in a living space where people interact with a wall via the mirror or bathroom cabinet mounted on it.
One way of adding genuine flexibility of use is by having multiple drainage and water supply connections distributed across the floor in much the same way as electrical sockets are distributed around our walls and sometimes in floors as well. For now, let’s not focus on the special problems posed by bathrooms5 but if it’s just a matter of drainage and hot/cold water supply then the problem is already solved. In the past, hairdressing salons often had a special corner for shampooing customers’ hair before and after a cut. [“Would you like to come through please?”] Some salons had mobile but heavy shampoo stations on casters that carried their own water supply, heating mechanism and drainage container all so that customers did not have to change chairs.
The mobile shampoo basin that’s moved into position where it locks into water supply and drainage connections beneath the floor is, as far as I know, a Japanese invention and aligns perfectly with the Japanese predilection for not having separate spaces for particular things but for bringing those things onstage when they’re needed. The four images above explain. A hairdresser6 moves the basin into position, uses their foot to depress some pedal that locks it in place and connects to hot and cold water and a drain. These basins7 cost about JP¥637,000 (approx. US$4,000) which seems inexpensive for the amount of retail space saved8. I’m assured the connecting mechanism has a simple configuration and is easy to keep clean.
This piece of equipment works because the places it needs to be for only a short period of time are limited and fixed. Total freedom for the positions of bathrooms and kitchens is probably never going to happen but, since it only costs US$4,000 to have a 100% mobile kitchen or bathroom, I’m surprised nobody’s thought of its implications for residential space design. I understand that the publicity benefits to be had from pursuing the appearance of transparency or weightlessness are far greater than actually freeing architectural space from the tyranny of water supply and drainage.
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- https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2018/04/22/the-inflexible-house/ ↩︎
- https://www.domusweb.it/en/from-the-archive/2011/09/01/joe-colombo-s-own-show-home.html ↩︎
- https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2025/08/24/role-model/ ↩︎
- https://misfitsarchitecture.com/2021/04/11/architecture-myths-26-flexibility/ ↩︎
- (although I suppose toilets could be fitted with macerators) ↩︎
- I’ve only seen and experienced this ingenious contraption at Barber KAMITO in Tokyo that I recommend anyway. Ask for Shimada-san. https://www.instagram.com/barberkamito?igsh=dXEzMTgyeWJtazdr&utm_source=qr ↩︎
- https://www.tb-net.jp/product/shampoo/yume_oasis.html ↩︎
- https://www.tb-net.jp/product/shampoo/fihbi4000000351i-att/size.pdf ↩︎
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“Associative Design”
“The Inflexible House”
“Political Correctness and Architecture”
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Graham McKay
says:I haven’t passed through Stanstead since about 2005 but what you described is exactly what I remember, specifically a pub called The Union Jack that was neither spacious nor exilarating.
yorksranter
says:(Also, a thought that struck me the last time I passed through Norman Foster’s Stansted Airport; the problem with a reconfigurable building is that some bastard will come along and reconfigure it. Stansted’s management is endlessly building and dismantling a labyrinth of huts and hoardings inside it that never seem to settle or improve, just add more plasterboard.)
Graham McKay
says:That sounds like an interesting tussle – I’ll try to get hold of it. I think I’m inclined to lean towards Hertzberger’s position but I need to check up on how far he thought those architectural relations could be anticipated. The MOC mandate makes sense too, especially in Japan where many of those corridors would have been open corridors anyway.
Casey Mack
says:I think Hertzberger discusses this in an issue of Forum from 1962, in the article “Flexibility and Polyvalency.” Hertzberger was battling there against John Habraken-type ideas of total residential flexibility, promoting instead polyvalent design where the sizes and relations of distinct (walled) spaces allow for multiple programmings without the need for demolition. So he wasn’t talking about risers or waste stacks, but architectural relations. However, the Japanese approaches from MOC, etc. do mandate that all shared piping is located on a shared corridor for ease of servicing — no risers or stacks within private spaces or walls.
Graham McKay
says:That’s really interesting. On the one hand there’s a voice for flexibility of wet service locations yet I can’t see how this can happen without some inbuilt level of service redundancy. Do you know if Hertzberger was talking about their locations as spaces providing services within a household or as spaces requiring services such as water supply and drainage? Even “servant” spaces still need to be served. Thinking about an example we both know, the capsules in Nakagin Capsule Tower have the one spatial relationship between the bathroom and the rest of the capsule but the most common unit type with the door opposite the bathroom has the longest length of practically level and possibly flexible pipe. Uh-oh. Modern architecture is about more than just water supply and drainage but I’m beginning to think it’s incompatible with flexibility of use. Thanks Casey.
Casey Mack
says:The mobile wash station is pretty neat. But Japan’s Ministry of Construction has been promoting residential access floors to enable flexibility in wet service locations since the 1980s, as does the national 200-year housing plan from 2008. There are more and more access floors in Japanese housing projects, at least as published in JA. On the other hand, there’s the master’s voice of someone like Herman Hertzberger who felt there was always one true best location for a kitchen and a bathroom.
Graham McKay
says:You’re right of course. Japanese value acoustic privacy too. Riken Yamamoto documented that momentous invention of the masonry wall between bedrooms in Japanese public housing. But speaking of wardrobes, I’ve seen contemporary variations that amount to the same thing – usually dividing children’s rooms into two. I agree that older buildings are likely to be more resilient. Pre-1830 London townhouses famously converted into dwellings for multiple occupation. I wonder what buildings we’re going to be left with to inhabit? And how we’re going to inhabit them? Office buildings don’t convert well into any of the standard types of residential layouts but nobody’s trying to discover what could work. I had a go once at converting a shopping mall into residential. I’d like to try again using two-storey mud-brick structures between slabs. Or even reconfiguring contemporary apartment buildings into apartments that could be lived in in other ways. There are plenty of empty ones in China but purchasers are quick to customize them by enclosing balconies and removing internal block walls. This all suggests that much overbuilding is going on and that pointless value is added prior to sale. I used to pride myself on being good at devising architectural layouts according to function and such and I’m pleased to see AI still struggles to create credible ones. When it finally does, I expect we’ll have far more important things to worry about than how layouts reflect how we want to live. Many thoughts still looking for something to coalesce around. I’m trying to conceive of interior design as a kind of adaptive re-use that’s unburdened by theory yet resistant to being turned into a style like Schemata’s anti-design was.
victorperunkov
says:Regarding buildings and flexibility, one thought I had even before architecture school was that old palatial civic buildings were more resilient than any of the modernist structures with bespoke spaces to suit their exact functions. The former never boasted about their functionality but therefore were generic enough to accommodate switching tenants and missions.
The university I spent a year shirking linear algebra and analysis classes at, before fleeing to the architecture school appeared to always have been there. It was later that I learned it was built only in late 1950s for a regional branch of a reformed national administrative office that Nikita Khruschev had envisioned, only to be cut down in the Brezhnev coup. Most civic things around were built around the 1950s though. The few constructivist worker clubs in the surrounding neighborhoods were not as lucky. Their disrepair is not geometrical alone though, and in no way would I want to critique these structures.
Having lived only in apartment blocks, I can not trust the airy Japanese partitions, as even the concrete slabs and cinder blocks fail to give any kind of acoustic privacy. The Japanese must not fall for an illusion too. After all, during the 20th century with all of its “residential issue” occurrences, people split the single rooms they lived in with bedsheets to have the only privacy they could afford. Grandmother’s bed was put behind the wardrobe cabinet. One recurring idea from lay interior decoration books is its author musing about making partitions out of wall sized closets. But a closet is not a wall in any meaningful sense. This invention thus revives that ancient technique of hiding from grandmas behind wardrobes.
Graham McKay
says:I totally agree. Now I think about it some more, what I was noticing was the security guard cooking his lunch untroubled by this entire apparatus of architecture and design. He’s the one growing those vegetables in the foreground. I wish now I’d said hello and asked what he was cooking but just by taking this photo I felt I’d already intruded enough. I might yet. I know where he works and can contrive to walk by at lunchtime. Separately, I wonder what’d be left of architecture and design if they were relieved of the pretence of being necessary to solve problems and enhance lives?
sam
says:The security gatehouse cooking photo seems so natural that imagining cooking in any of the other images feels improper. Perhaps the crisp lines and untouched surfaces have the feel of a new notebook where any mark is a blemish – on the one hand there’s design and on the other is real life, and never the twain shall meet.