Constellations: Housing Life as It Unfolds asks how the city can house people well over the long term while making far better use of the space it has already built. Its answer is constellations housing—a model in which rooms are no longer locked to a single apartment.
About This Book
Most housing is planned for a household that stays the same size, yet lives rarely do. Children arrive and leave, partners separate, parents age, friends move in together. The result is a persistent mismatch: some dwellings are crowded while others sit half-empty, and the resources spent building and running them go underused.
Developed over two semesters with architecture students at UdK Berlin, this compact, densely illustrated book tackles that mismatch in two parts. The first, Life as It Unfolds, uses graphics, case studies and interviews to examine why housing ends up so unevenly distributed. The second sets out the constellations principle itself—permeable spatial structures in which rooms can be shared, swapped and combined regardless of where they sit—and tests it through design projects in a range of urban settings. The aim is housing that can be appropriated and adapted over time, accommodating everything from the nuclear family to intergenerational shared living.
Key Features
- Introduces constellations housing, a model that loosens the fixed boundaries between rooms and between apartments
- Combines design work, interviews and graphic analysis of how people live, dwell and build
- Grounded in two semesters of studio research with students at UdK Berlin
- Edited by the founders of Something Fantastic, the Berlin practice known for its collaborations with Ruby Press
What You'll Discover
- The mechanisms that produce imbalances in how housing is allocated and occupied
- Why more flexible housing models are also more sustainable ones
- Structural, organisational and spatial strategies for treating housing as a process rather than a fixed product
- Design projects showing how shared and adaptable rooms might work in different urban contexts
About the Author
Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz and Leonard Streich are the founders of Something Fantastic, a Berlin office working across architecture, research and publishing. The book was produced in collaboration with Sarah Scherzer and Eva Erny.
Specifications
- Dimensions: 115 × 178 mm
- Pages: 372
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783944074689
- Publisher: Ruby Press
Perfect For: Architects, housing researchers, students and policymakers interested in shared living, adaptable floor plans and the more efficient use of existing housing stock.