LEARNING ON FLEXIBILITY FROM EXPERIENCES: REVISITING HOUSING ESTATES AFTER 25 YEARS

In the wake of the Second World War the Danish government tried to increase the capacity of the building industry by establishing new research facilities, stimulating the housing sector and developing a framework for industrialization. The dominating building method during this period became multi storey housing with cross bearing walls. Within multi storey housing the developed system design appeared to be less adaptable to later alterations. Therefore The Danish Ministry of Housing and Building in 1983 issued an initiative to stimulate technology development of residential non profit housing in three to five storeys the target being “to focus on the possibilities to create buildings which in the future can be adapted to new user demands and applications that we do not know of to day - and in the short term add flexibility which can create possibilities for individual housing projects” (The Ministry of Housing, 1984,1) During spring 2011 DTU Management at The Technical University of Denmark has initiated an evaluation with the aim of showing how the ideas from the original competition have been applied during the 25 years period. Thus this paper will review the above governmental policy aiming at stimulating the development of new building designs with an improved technological adaptability to new demands and flexibility. The data input to this review is extracted from 15 residential areas with a total of about 1000-1200 apartments which were built in the 1980s after a competition which attracted the leading building companies. This paper is based on the provisional results from the evaluation and will conclude in a “top six” for most successful steps in the planning and construction of buildings with capacity for incremental change.