1. Radical density and flexibility in post-domestic housing: a prospective from the earliest ‘urban’ settlements
Kevin Kay Dept. of Archaeology, University of Cambridge
21st century housing challenges: do more with less space.
E-commerce and working-from-home
Changing and more diverse households
Need for efficient construction and use of space
How can radically different urban traditions inform housing design that is flexible, multi-functional, and space-efficient?
Alternative Cities: Insights into Dense, Flexible Design?
Informal Cities
Postcolonial Transformations
Ancient Cities
Çatalhöyük
Can Hasan
Aşıklı Höyük
Clustered neighbourhood settlements in Turkey, ca – 6200 BCE
Soft and Hard Flexibility
Tatjana Schneider& Jeremy Till (Flexible Housing. London: Routledge ) identify two strategies that contemporary architects use to achieve durable, multi-functional housing:
Hard Flexibility
Soft Flexibility
Many functions are designed into a small space by an architect
Centralized design
Only foreseen transformations afforded
Potentially highly space-efficient
Architect designs a space with as little constraint on organization/use as possible; users adapt ‘frame’ to use.
Distributed design
Open-ended customization
Often includes spatial redundancies/inefficiency
Assessing Design in Çatalhöyük Houses
The development over time of six broadly contemporary houses in the northern part of the ancient city were analysed using stratigraphic contemporaneity analysis. Furnishings’ addition to, or removal from, the house were traced onto a
timeline of the best possible resolution, and
assessed on two components:
Reconstruction by J.G. Swogger;
Plan & photo courtesy Çatalhöyük Research Project
Tempo
The overall rate of transformation in each house’s interior furnishing and organisation.
Temporality
The timing and duration of furnishings’ addition and use, relative to one another (as well as the addition of burials and depositions of exotic material below floors).
Radical Density and Flexibility at Çatalhöyük
Houses at Çatalhöyük were pre-domestic, serving a wide variety of public and private uses. Although all houses served these purposes, the exact mix of activities in a given house changed over time – sometimes dramatically.
Results: Flexible Housing, Then & Now
Thoroughfare
People moved around the town across the rooftops of houses.
Living
Houses contained space and furnishings for cooking, storage, and sleeping
Working
Houses were sites for agricultural processing, craft production, as well as continual maintenance work
Gathering
Houses served as cemeteries, feasting venues, locations for artistic display and performance, and were the only ‘civic’ spaces available at Çatalhöyük.
By interrogating the history of changes in houses’ interiors at Çatalhöyük’s densest period, several design strategies became apparent:
Open-plan design for maximum flexibility
‘Harder’ flexible elements with highest number of stakeholders
Topology & friction: the work of non-barrier boundaries
Reconstruction by K. Killackey.
(Below) Photo courtesy Çatalhöyük Research Project