Constellations – Housing Life as It Unfolds
Book Presentation
How can we meet the long-term demand for suitable housing while also fulfilling our ecological responsibility to make the best possible use of the valuable resource of built space? This question lies at the heart of the publication, which explores how we can use the space we build – and the space we already have – more efficiently and sustainably.
The concept of constellation housing is based on the idea of making the traditionally rigid relationships between the spaces within a housing unit, as well as the boundaries between individual apartments, more flexible and permeable. This enables a freer and more adaptable use of space as a resource. Within a building, individual rooms can be assigned independently of their proximity to the core of a dwelling or residential unit, in order to cater to a wide range of lifestyles and corresponding forms of living together, from nuclear families to shared housing arrangements for older people, while continuously adapting to changing spatial requirements over the course of life.
The publication grew out of a two-semester design studio led by Something Fantastic at UdK Berlin. Students explored and further developed the principle of constellation housing through their design projects, contributing ideas and proposals that form an essential part of this book. It brings together their work with interviews with researchers whose perspectives offer further insight into forms of life, forms of living, and forms of construction, as well as graphic analyses that examine these questions from different angles.
The first section, How Life Unfolds, examines the mechanisms that produce imbalances in the distribution and use of residential space. It establishes a description of the current situation through a series of graphics and case studies, providing the basis for the proposition that housing must become more flexible in order to enable a more sustainable and efficient use of space.
The second section introduces the principle of constellation housing and presents the Constellations Type as an architectural and building typology, illustrated through examples situated in a range of urban contexts.
