A configuration generator: Housing as a toolkit for spatial exploration by users

Social Logic of Space (1984) showed conceptual house plans of 3x3 room layout that can generate completely different permeability graphs. Hillier and Hanson’s point was that a genotype of a building can only be retrieved by looking at its spatial connectedness, not its geometric form. Since then, researchers have successfully verified there are culture-specific housing genotypes in each society. We try to re-think about this archaeological process of genotype retrieval by designing a new housing scheme that will be used as an open genotype test-bed. Based on a concept of ‘incremental self-build housing’, an apartment unit plan of 2x3 interpretable layout was developed for Malaysian low-income city dwellers. Generating a large number of spatial variations out of a single geometry, it can accommodate a wider range of domestic life styles. 24 examples of different configurations were suggested and tested by space syntax analyses to show how a small number of rooms can generate a huge variety of spatial possibilities. At some point in post-occupancy, it is expected that we will get the idea on what ‘actuals’ occur amongst all ‘possibles’ and what dominates while others vanish. By identifying the most socio-culturally adapted plans and decoding the embedded spatial connectedness, it is hoped that we can filter out the modern Malaysian genotype. It is a new way of thinking of a house not as an end product but as a process. Here, finding a genotype does not come from measuring a frozen building form from the past but from continuously looking at its transformation in time - how residents experiment their own way of living to arrive at an optimum solution. In this experiment, the role of architects will be to offer a dwelling toolkit for users to explore configurations that will eventually reveal statistically meaningful genotypes within a given context.