072. Everything will become housing

On a gorgeous spring day like today people literally dwell their city, everybody's outside with the kitchen tables and other elements of furniture that normally is reserved for the interiors. Kids have provisional sandboxes and small swimming pools, barbecues are running. Also boats are in the move where everybody's having the traditional composition of beer and cheese. The city is becoming again a peaceful domestic space for everyone with squares being nothing much else but bigger living rooms not to mention the amazing boats which are the same rooms but floating around the city center where ever you want to go.

Will then the city scape as one can conceptualize it become a permanent variation of a "house". Will architecture actually be housing?

Environmental psychologists categorize space by the degree of human control over it. In this context psychologist Irwin Altman differentiates private territory (an apartment, one's own house, bed or computer) where the control level is highest (including legal sanctions if the private territory is invaded) from the secondary territory used by a group but not necessarily in the same time (stairwell, backyard, shared workshop or office, schools, etc) and public territories accessible to all (libraries, park benches, squares, streets, etc) The are of highest risk from the psychological point of view is the secondary territory, because it is here where conflicts most often arise about who has the right to use the area. From what I can see around me, here the stairwells are brought to the most minimal dimensions possible, backyards don't even exist and the shared spaces are well funded, very tidy and multi-functional (an old church is at certain hours a community building, a concert hall, etc) which removes the dilemma of who has the most right to use them or the question of temporal dis-occupancy.

The notion of semi-public/semi-private space becomes out of date. Is the city scape now an amalgamate of something that is public and private in the same time? How to grasp this new feeling, how to put into the right word? Public-Private fluidity? My City is My House?

I have found one clue in one of the recent press reviews of UNStudio on the Tax Office in Groningen. The building is designed so that it can be transformed into housing in the future without any major structural modifications. Therefore, the locations of elevators, stairs and technical spaces have been carefully considered and a structural grid of 1.20m has been deployed rather than the conventional office grid of 1.80m?

Why is it being considered that a brand new and fabulous office building will transform one day into a housing estate? Will all the work be transferred to the virtual reality and people could work at home. Finally could work be performed in close distance to the home address, in one neighborhood, so that mobility could be brought to the minimum.

Should architecture point out to the flexibility or already give a more progressive programmatic and typological answer to the public/private questions?