Sharing your space in a footloose future

Eva Cantwell - 5th year, UCD

In the future, apartment buildings will have to adapt to the occupants' continuously changing situations. The financial state and family structures of an individual will become even more unstable.

A person married with children one day could find themselves divorced the next, or a sudden micro-chip millionaire could be penniless within a few days. Residential buildings will have to change with people's lifestyles, allowing people to add rooms at will, or reduce their living space, according to how much rent they can afford.

Apartment buildings will be forever changing form, popping out, folding in, sliding down - a building you may pass on the street may be unrecognisable a week later!

With pressures on space people will be forced to live in alternative situations - floating above existing buildings, on man-made islands off Dublin Bay or even within buildings already in use. Residents could have to "time-share" with factory workers or school-goers. The same building could support many different functions - a person's apartment folding away in the morning to facilitate another use during working hours. Perhaps the only permanent personal space an individual may be left with could be in cyberspace - his or her own web page.

People will travel more and identify less with one particular place as home and apartment buildings will have to move with them. The future apartment may just be a lift shaft and services core off which people temporarily plug in to their living pod - a container of personal items that travels with them. In fact, whole apartment blocks could move or at least be transportable, containing a footloose workforce moving from city to city as work becomes available.

It would be possible to dismantle buildings and move them to any site, anywhere. If this idea was taken to extremes it could result in apartments that move with you, like a snail or a shell, an apartment that emerges out of a briefcase, or that inflates out of one's clothing.

Giles Bruce - 5th year, UCD

The architecture of the living space will surely transform beyond recognition in the next 200 years, as it will serve entirely new ways of living. I think the possibility for adaptive architecture is huge. Today, many apartments are used only for around one third of the 24-hour clock.

By 2201, it is conceivable that I leave my D·n Laoghaire apartment to work in Seattle. Instead of lying vacant and obsolete for the hours of my absence, the same space could automatically transform and adapt to the second use of that space.

The days of individual space could easily be numbered and in the quest for efficiency and economy the apartment as a machine for living will become adaptive and flexible.

The essential spaces and services we need for living will be provided such as shelter, water, spaces to sleep, entertain and spaces to wash.

But these spaces will serve many users throughout the day and never become redundant or obsolete. The apartment machine becomes a constantly dynamic interactive mechanism.

My kitchen is my kitchen only when I am in it. Outside those times it moves elsewhere in the apartment block to serve another user.

Perhaps my apartment is a program stored on a disk recording all the things that define "my space". The world is built with empty blank spaces waiting for my disk to upload my apartment into that space.

My apartment is no longer physically tied to one place. It is so adaptive that I can carry it in my pocket - or the 2201 equivalent.

Edward Raftery - 5th year, DIT Bolton Street

Dublin city could by then have a population of 20 million and power for the city will be generated in an environmentally friendly way.

All waste products will be recycled and unprocessed natural materials will be used in building construction.

Communications will be by mobile phone, which will be your credit card, your ID, your PC - in fact your entire life will be stored in it.

Apartment complexes will be connected to underground streets, which connect the apartment to the subway system. You can go to work, shop, see a film, come home and never need to go above ground.

The model apartment for 200 years' time will have to look at environmental issues like self-sufficiency in terms of heating, power, recycling and water.

Big Brother may be looking over your shoulder all the time and end up controlling everything from food production for high density cities, power production, apartment buildings, subways, underground street construction and recycling.

People will live according to a particular value system and their homes will reflect those value systems.

Today we live in homes that are largely built according to the Victorian world, despite the fact that our value systems have completely changed.

I guess the apartments of the future will reflect our own value systems equally, in which case freedom and flexibility will be the aim of the apartment block of the future.

emorgan@ irish-times.ie