Flexibility and affordability are the main focus of Expandable House, designed specifically in 2019 for the town of Batam, Indonesia, by Urban Rural Systems, a team at Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, whose research and development focuses on solutions for growing cities.
In the past half century, Batam increased in size and population from a small fishing village to a city of 1 million people—and growing. This raised issues of how to house the large numbers of incoming migrants, organize sewage systems, and provide transportation infrastructure.
Expandable House tackles the housing problem through a flexible structure that can adapt to the homeowner’s needs.
Since every household differs in their needs, Expandable House is customizable to fulfill them. The Urban Rural Systems team studied patterns of household income generation, as well as the consumption of water, energy, and food, to develop a spatial layout that can flexibly and affordably meet these requirements.
The most basic form of the house consists of a one-story, open-plan layout. The height of the roof can be raised. The dwelling’s floor and foundations are structurally capable of supporting up to three additional floors, which would be added in between the foundation and the roof.
The developer can sell the basic model of the house, allowing the homeowner to add infill levels according to their needs or their budget. They may also choose to use the home as a live/workunit by allocating the ground floor for commercial functions, generating income that can in turn pay for the house.
This form of housing curbs urban sprawl by encouraging densifying vertically instead. The basic model is inexpensive to construct, using local brick for walls and corrugated steel for the roof. Due to the adaptable nature of the house, it prevents unnecessary elements from being built, further cutting down costs.
Although the structure of the house is very minimal, it comes with all resources needed to live sustainably, including rainwater harvesting, solar power generation, and sewage/septic-tank systems.
The house is also designed using passive cooling principles to avoid reliance on centralized energy infrastructure that is costly to build and disturbs the environment. A kitchen garden is included as an integral part of the house, encouraging self-sufficiency as part of the residents’ lifestyles.