Spatial quality in modular building

Abstract

The Netherlands is facing a large housing crisis, with a shortage of 390.000 dwellings in 2023. To speed up the construction process, modular building can be used. In this paper, the creation of spatial quality within modular building is investigated. Spatial quality is here understood as the combination of experience value, user value, and future value. The investigation focused on the communal spaces of buildings. Literature was used to find fifteen positive influences on spatial quality. An assessment method was created by observing how many influences were present within specific cases. By comparing this result to an initial judgement of the spatial quality of the cases, the reliability of this tool was found to be good. When comparing the communal spaces of the different case studies to each other, not every influence was directly affected by the change of the organization. When considering only the influences that change with different organizations, the exterior vertical core and “portiek” organization both scored the highest, suggesting these ways of organizing the communal space of modular building brings the highest spatial quality. The assessment method that was used to get this result should be expanded further to remove some of the flaws. The current method does not apply a weight to the different influences, and there might be other influences not yet included in the assessment.