A playbook for adaptable intergenerational homes

Abstract

As urban areas face increasing densification and a rise in individual living amid the Dutch housing crisis, traditional housing models often fail to support the adaptability needed across changing mobility, care, and changing family strucutres over a lifetime. This research positions timber construction as a strategy for incremental and continuous change in intergenerational living, leveraging its high strength to weight ratio, user approachability, its associations with craftsmanship and self-build culture to empower residents with greater agency over their living spaces. Focusing on systems that allow modification, disassembly, and reuse, the study categorizes adaptation strategies across short-, medium-, and long-term timeframes, each with distinct requirements for materials, components, and construction methods. An assessment matrix then relates timber connection types and biogenic material assemblies to these temporal layers and scales. This research results in a playbook: a practical guide for architects and self-building residents to design for future adaptation opportunities. Based on these findings, this playbook aims to guide architects and self building residents through the strategies used to design the building for future adaptation opportunities, identifying the possibilities for adaptation, and the criteria and methods to achieve them. This playbook will include performance-based criteria and strategies for permissible development, promoting wider use of biogenic materials, with the goal of creating living environments that can evolve over time, and respond accordingly to the needs of residents and the changing urban environment.