Strategies for the contemporary home

The rapid social-cultural transformations of the contemporary, necessitate the formulation of a new concept of "living", a new reflection on man and on his spaces, where the temporal dimension has an essential role. Globalisation and the development of “information society” and the consequent precariousness and mobility that characterize our time, affecting the "time of use " of the house and it becomes a temporary home, "a machine for living" that embodies all the characteristics of contemporary living. At the same time, the concept of sustainable development focuses on the need to curb the consumption of natural resources and requires a reflection on the "life time" of the house and on the duration, on the global costs and on Life Cycle Design of buildings. Time becomes a factor extremely important in the contemporary construction of the habitat, because it interferes indirectly with the performance level of the building, on its usability, and with her being sustainable, as a result as a building is able to adapt to the needs of users moving inside so his life will be sustainable. Prefabrication, modularity, durability, adaptability, flexibility and reversibility, become the keywords of a model of living space which meets the current social questions, such as the sudden change of households, the need to overcome the obstacle of inaccessible cost, the change of the needs, where the explicit physiological needs (which have guided the current rigid model of "functional organization " of the house) are added the psychological ones are not always so explicit. These needs can be pursued by means a new conception of the house not as a stationary object in space but as a flow of matter moving in the time, of which, as a user does not perceive that a moment. Its duration, so as the capacity to respond to the function for which it was created, depends within the Life Cycle Design by its ability to adapt to different functional and socialy requirements of the different users over time. In this new model, the requirement for flexibility in its various exceptions (flexibility of use and technological flexibility) and in relations with the criteria of modularity, reversibility, durability and adaptability, is essential to respond through the design to change the "time of use" and the " time of life" of the house.