Abstract:The design of housing systems is today challenged by a highly uncertain context, dominated by the rapid development of functional and technological obsolescence in inherited housing models. If flexibility is the ability of a system to be easily modified and to respond to changes in the environment timely and conveniently, it can be considered as the antidote to obsolescence or the characteristic of the system that guarantees slippage over time. Our paper focuses on the concept of flexibility as a fundamental prerequisite for residential building in order to extend its life cycle design, through strategies and constructive solutions that ensure both the convertibility of the space in response to changing usage and the use of building materials that encourage the reversibility and the long-term easy maintenance of the technological choices that have been implemented. Flexibility is examined both from a conceptual point of view, so as to obtain a clear and logical definition that is distinct from related terms, as well as from a practical point of view, by finding ways to incorporate this requirement into the designing of housing.

One of the main problems of home design is that, of all technological systems, it is the most at risk of becoming technically or functionally obsolete. This is partly due to the fact that interventions on housing construction have oriented themselves toward the Optimal Point logic Design (OPD), which has the single goal of living in the more traditional sense of the term, therefore eliminating all possibilities that do not comply with those specific features. Once removed, the results become rigid towards new tasks. It is obvious that in the building sector, the inability to handle the uncertainty of social and economic contexts, the changing needs of users, and the environment, makes the system obsolete and reduces its useful life. If flexibility is the ability of a system to be easily modified and to respond to changes in the environment in a timely and convenient manner, then flexibility can be considered an antidote to obsolescence. This paper provides a critical assessment of the implementation of flexibility starting on four lines of action for design flexibility in homes: Spatial flexibility with constant surface, spatial evolutionary flexibility, technological flexibility relating to construction techniques, and technological flexibility concerning the plant maintainability. This research therefore proposes that project strategies incorporate these factors aimed at ensuring the survival over time of the building, implementing its cycles of use, and reconfiguring the internal structure to intervene in a simplified way regarding the technological system that governs the space.

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