A Comparative Study for the Layout of Wet Areas in Flexible Residential Buildings

Change is an undeniable part of life. Change is always needed in people’s lives, and this has become more essential in this era due to the complexity and diversity of lifestyles. Apart from rapid social, economic, and technological advances, the need to increase adaptability and flexibility has become one of the most important issues in residential design. Considering the ecological factors, this issue is so important that, according to Schneider and Till, sustainable development can be achieved through a flexible design (Schneider & Till, 2007: 50). Given the characteristics of the contemporary era and the successive changes to the lifestyle in Iran, it seems that flexibility must be one of the priorities for residential building designers. Factors involved in the design of flexible housing are numerous and intertwined, and their appropriate consideration can lead to a proper design. These factors include structures, the layout of the wet areas, access space, and appropriate space dimensions (Albostan, 2009: 28-34, Friedman, 2004: 92). According to the above issues, wet areas are chosen as the main focus of this study in order to better understand the formation of flexible residential buildings (considering the location of wet areas) and also to take steps to facilitate the design process for residential building designers. In this regard, this study aims to identify the most common layouts of wet areas in flexible residential buildings and makes a comparative study based on different approaches to flexibility.

The present study is an applied, descriptive, and analytical research. Obviously, a typology for wet area must be provided after understanding the typology of flexible residential buildings. Thereby, an appropriate process can be followed in the layout of the wet areas based on the designer’s approach to the plan flexibility. Using a library research method, this paper scrutinizes and identifies the common approaches to flexible residential building. Regarding the importance of flexible design in residential complexes, when several adjacent units are designed, two approaches can be adopted in two levels of intra-unit and inter-unit. At the intra-unit level, the layout of the wet areas within a residential unit as well as the relationship between the wet area and the adjacent spaces are studied. At the inter-unit level, the location of the wet area in the layout of several adjacent residential units are studied. Flexible residential plans are then collected by library research and, based on the flexibility approaches, the location of the wet areas in the plan are studied. After collection, description, and qualitative study of residential plans, the most widely used wet area layout of residential plans are specified and the layout of the wet areas in flexible residential buildings are identified in the form of three main patterns. Next, these three patterns and their subsets were analyzed more accurately by selecting about forty plans. The criteria for choosing the plans were the success of the projects, the variety in the plan form, and access to high-quality visual documents of the project. Also, for consistency reasons, exceptional patterns that had been rarely used were not included in this study. In the last step, unlike the previous steps, a comparative study was conducted. It is worth mentioning that in this research, technological issues were avoided and more attention was paid to architectural design, i.e. spatial organization.

Consequently, it can be concluded that one of the most important features of all flexible residential projects is merging of wet areas. This can occur in various ways mentioned in the article. Regardless of the types of approach to flexibility, it seems that the whole plan can be divided to separate areas or free areas. In both cases, the layout of the wet areas plays an essential role in configuration of the design in the early stages. Thus, it can be concluded that in most layouts, the plan should be divided into two separate or free parts. Eventually, the design process can be made much easier by recognizing and selecting common patterns to devise wet areas in flexible plans. One of the advantages of dividing the plan into free spaces is that the wet areas are placed in the peripheral spaces and other spaces are therefore completely free of many changes in the plan. In this way, the dry spaces can be easily placed in different places without overlapping wet areas. In contrast, when the dry and wet areas are separated, the wet areas reduce the number of hypothetical alternatives of spatial layout and simplify the design while providing a relative control of space.