Abstract

The flexibility in housing, one of the main paradigms of domestic architecture of the twentieth century, is criticized by the philosopher José Luis Pardo, who describes it as a "process of fluidification", where the borders of the private sector are diluted, a process that he questions if it has no limits. To respond to this criticism, we must distinguish flexibility from adaptability, protagonism of the architect or the user, hard versus soft tactics, determined versus indeterminate systems. But is it possible that mobile or variable stuff and the design of the space are designed according to the same principles? That a partition or wall is a piece of furniture? That the furniture has enough dimension to be habitable? That in addition to containing living space is able to organize the space around it? We will review different moments of twentieth-century domestic architecture that propose variations on “hard” and “soft”, in which flexibility takes on different names and uses different strategies —evolutive housing, electrical appliances, habitable furniture, house inside the house— to finish analyzing an own project which is taken as an example of “research by design”, a house that, on a building from 1859, rather than seeking flexibility, has left adapting for twenty years to the user's life, both as domestic and work space. As Till-Schneider concludes, this is an example of the incomplete or unfinished as a paradigm of soft strategies, that is a basic infrastructure that leaves room for the user to occupy, use and transform over time.