1,3,9 ZWEI

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Can architecture be the design of new inhabitable space, while eliminate the consumption of new space?
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-Theoretically, the construction of a new architectural space must involve the utilization of an area in such a way that a structure will manifest upon it and render that space as available for specific uses.
-However, as time changes, so must the use of each area, and thereby the architecture must change – or so it has been held, but a building can be reconstituted, an area can be reformatted, and through these processes, the space is renewed without need for a new structure, as would apply to a factory becoming housing.
-But what of the cause of this change – if a building is destroyed internally, or partially externally, it would be condemned as uninhabitable, and a new home would go up in its wake, covering more area and utilizing further resource, while the reconstituting process transpired.
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-There are many terms for it; a half way house, a homeless shelter, a safe haven – but fundamentally, the purpose of transitional housing is the definition of itself, a unit of home for those in an in-between stage.
-This in-between stage may take place as a bridge between drug addiction and clean living, spousal abuse and therapy, eviction and move-in, exile and return, and these, brought on by natural disaster, abandonment, job loss, or conflict (and any and all things between), leave those inhabitants as former inhabitants, and leave those areas they are departed from in various stages of composure.
-A house from which a user was evicted during conflict, may reflect this conflict with broken walls, roofs, and no feel of safety; reclaiming this house would require literal reconstruction of those physically shattered objects, as well as restoration of the safety of the environment.
-A family evicted from a house have a wonderful home to return to, but no means of achieving that journey; they must seek shelter for preservation of health, as well as maintain outwards communications to regain the job stability or other economic factor that initially displaced them.
-In either case, a unit facilitating the individual needs of a single person, a couple, or a family is the desired gain – be it a home, an apartment, a hotel room or a trailer, this is the object being sought.
-But if there are no homes in the price range, or no homes where one must settle down, it is a new place that requires new architecture to create these homes – that means materials, labor, transportation, as well as the displacement of space.
-A new unit, capable of sheathing those inside from external forces, natural or otherwise, and maintaining the life needs of its inhabitants, would provide shelter, in a condensed form – a light weight, modular unit, providing a scaled down concept of the home, bringing to bear an expandable unit, which itself opens in construction from a dense packaging, as well as opening further, and attaching as required by the scale of need for those inside.
-But say this is inset into an abandoned factory, and houses 40 families; or say it is inset into a flooded-out house for one family – this conserves space, while providing the requisite shelter – but what of the transitional properties of the unit itself, and the superstructures they inhabit?
-The transitional unit for transitional housing may itself be of disassembling structure that supplies materials for the reconstitution of the superstructures, and house inside of it the tools needed for this act, with chairs being chairs, a wall being a floor, table legs becoming a bike to access a new job – this house physically provides the foundation of a new life after housing those inside.