National Building Museum Exhibition Showcases the Future of Versatile Housing Solutions

Owing to a combination of socioeconomic factors and shifting demographics, the way we live is changing. Today, 30 percent of American adults live alone, and a quarter of all renter households spend more than 50 percent of their income on rent. Clearly, there’s a need to explore alternative micro and macro solutions to make the most of our existing housing stock.

A comprehensive exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., proposes to do just that. Opening Saturday, November 18, "Making Room: Housing for a Changing America" will explore alternative methods for both the creation of new housing options and the dynamic reconfiguration of existing spaces to meet the needs of new constituencies. The exhibition will include displays and information about housing solutions like backyard accessory cottages in Seattle, tiny houses for the homeless in Austin, and other experimental approaches from across the country.

But the undisputed pièce de résistance is Open House, a literally transformative approach to housing realized by Italian architect and designer Pierluigi Colombo. Drawing on his previous work with Launch Pad (a hyperefficient vision for a New York City micro apartment) and his deep knowledge of multipurpose furniture design, Colombo constructed a 1,000-square-foot apartment within the exhibition that he says demonstrates “a way to deal with space in different sociological contexts.” To that end, Open House will be modified over the course of the exhibition’s run to depict how one apartment can sustainably suit the needs of three emergent housing demographics: single roommates/students, multigenerational or extended families, and retirees who wish to age in place.

Through the use of movable walls and furniture that can transform or hide out of sight, Colombo’s design enables developers to create mixed-use housing from the same template and allows tenants to live in a space that evolves with them: “The walls, ceilings, floors, and lighting can change according to the necessities that people have during not only the day but also the seasons and over the years,” he tells AD. By allowing us to adjust the dimensions of a room and turn beds into desks once we wake up and start working from home, Open House creates “three different environments within the same wall,” promoting a more streamlined and harmonious way of living in turn.

Given that Colombo designed everything in Open House using existing solutions on the market, he hopes to convince real-estate developers that the future of housing lies in offering residents more value per square foot. “If you design like we did in this exhibition from the beginning, the advantages are much greater,” he says, “I hope this exhibition will make all developers and architects more sensitive to this new perspective.”

"Making Room: Housing for a Changing America" opens November 18, 2017, and runs through September 16, 2018, at the National Building Museum. Learn more and take a virtual tour of Open House at nbm.org