Flexible housing is the dwelling that can respond to changes arising within time (Kronenburg, 2007). Traces of flexible housing can be found since the most initial dwellings erected in the form of demountable shelters. To analyze the recent status of flexible housing, this thesis undertakes the comparison of acknowledged precedents in flexible housing design with contemporary case studies from current practice. The central problem in this study is whether flexible housing practiced today has similarities with precedents in this field or is producing new, innovative solutions. It is searched to what extent recent projects rely on established models and what new features are observable. To achieve the goal, flexible housing proposals introduced from different time intervals are reviewed, three case studies from current practice are analyzed, and those two groups are compared respectively.

To study flexible housing, eight major sources are utilized. The first three of them center on flexible housing introduced in the 1960s-1970s, which can be chronologically listed as follows: John Habraken’s book, “Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing” (1972), followed by those of John Turner and Christopher Alexander named “Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments” (1976) and “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction” (1977) respectively. The remaining five sources center on flexible housing applied in the 2000s which can be chronologically listed as follows: Three articles of Schneider and Till that are “Flexible Housing: The Means to the End” (2005a), “Flexible Housing: Opportunities and Limits” (2005b) and “The Opportunities of Flexible Housing” (2005c) followed by a book of them entitled “Flexible Housing” (2007), and the last one is an article of John Habraken named “Design for Flexibility” (2008).