An Assessment of Extensibility and Divisibility in the Flexibility of Apartments’ Interiors and Adjoining Units (the Case of Tehran District 2)

The crucial role of housing design to inhabit people requires serious attention to qualitative desing principles. Given the dynamism, subtle, of Iranian life culture and the influential role of housing in it, a housing design tailor-made to a certain period may well be unfit for future needs. Problematically, the housing plan is considered as fixed, whilst families grow, shrink and change, and so do their needs. Taking flexibility into account, therefore, guarantees a longer stay for residents. In other words, planning for future functional and spatial changes would correspond with the future needs of residents, thereby preventing their then unnecessary moves. The present study aims to improve flexibility in contemporary residential units, with a focus on the assessment of extensions and divisions in the interiors and adjoining residential units. In order to do so, a qualitative approach is adopted, first through documents and library studies, and then by analysing examples of traditional Iranian housing and European apartments designed in recent decades as examples of flexible housing. It then moves on to identify the role of extension and division in spatial flexibility, followed by measuring them in apartment housing types in Tehran District 2. The results indicate that the extension and division are at lowest levels in one-bedrooms and highest in three-bedrooms. Also, the allocation of a ‘floating’ space between private and public spaces is proposed as a responsive approach to the extension and division needs.