Unit plans for First Step Housing design competition. Units below have been contracted.
The ability to manipulate the qualities of interior space has long been a consideration in the design of Japanese houses, just as it is central to Shigeru Ban’s 9 Square Grid House (1999) or his Curtain Wall House (1995). European designers have given us some well- known examples of flexible design includ- ing the Rietveld-Schroder house (1924), and Eileen Gray’s E-1027 (1955) to whom the idea of impermanence and remaking was central. Canadian designers appear to be less involved in producing works which incorporate flex- ibility. There are, however, some recent ex- amples of flexible designs by Canadians that help to illustrate the value of this approach to design.
Vancouver’s Stephanie Forsythe and Todd MacAllen have designed a ‘Soft House’ which was selected as one of five winning entries in the First Step housing competition held in New York in 2003. This is a multi-unit building in which the units are made of a flexible honeycomb structure that allows them to be literally reshaped by the users. As the soft housing units are compressed, the public hallway takes up their space. Thus, if residents wish to gather in the hallway, they may compress their units to create a suitable venue. This epitomizes the idea of appropri- ating or claiming space. Presumably, the honeycomb structured fabric enclosure of which the units are made will also change the way in which they filter light, depending on the degree to which they are compressed. Both the dimension and the quality of the space are changed.
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