Elastic Living – Millennial Housing

‘Elastic Living, Millennial Housing’, is dealing with the fuzzy boundaries of working and living, as well as peer to peer and part to whole relationships in a collaborative architecture. An architecture that reacts to the accelerated life in a hyper-capitalist sharing economy. Collaborative Objects that can expand and contract, adapting to current needs. The sharing of experiences, opinions, and private feelings on social media platforms, the sharing of smart ‘objects’ like bikes, cars, tools and children’s toys have become daily habits of a collaborative sharing generation. Working and Living become a shared lifestyle in co-working and co-living concepts, questioning how much space we need, in which community we want to live and how to deal with privacy. The paradigm of a collaborative sharing generation ‘Access over Ownership’ is resulting in an architectural concept in which the private living space is reduced to a minimum, but is at the same time always embedded in a sharing landscape. Living units, that can be rented on multiple floors, in multiple buildings, neighbourhoods or cities. This evolving social paradigm is fundamentally challenging ownership, objects are used collaboratively. Disruptive technologies, like the internet, blockchain and the internet of things, are based on decentralized networks and their collaborative information exchange. Peer to Peer communication, networks, sharing concepts, and collaborative commons are promising concepts to redefine architecture. The fundamentals of those technologies(tectonics) are part to part and part to whole relationships. Objects (parts) that are able to create, receive, process and evaluate information, that communicate and with other decentralized or neighbouring objects(peers), to generate the fuzzy form of a collaborative architecture. Rethinking architecture as a discourse on the relationship between parts, objects, peers, networks, platforms and Humans has the potential to respond to our accelerated digital life. A resilient and redundant concept with the potential to generate a ‘collaborative impact’. The future of living is distributed. Elastic Living, Millennial Housing.