Strategies from the Sufficiency Toolbox: Flexibility

Whether in buildings, cars or clothing, everything should be designed for multiple functions.

I went shopping in London yesterday. I hadn’t planned on it; I thought that I brought most of everything I needed for a month in Europe in my backpack. The day before I left I read the dress code for participants in the Paris UNEP Conference on Buildings and Climate and it said “formal;” I thought OMG and grabbed a 20-year-old blazer in such bad shape that Kelly had to cut the drooping lining out of the sleeves. (I couldn’t fit into my 20-year-old suit) Needless to say, when surrounded by Parisian men with their tight tailored suits and gorgeous scarves, I felt like a schlub. And now I had to look forward to being on stage at the Passivhaus conference in Innsbruck.

Then I passed the window of a store, Lestrange, in London’s Coal Drop Yards. I was intrigued by the pitch of “modular clothing” and their statements like “Good design for us means designing fewer things, but better… we focus on designing clothes that are multipurpose and can be used in numerous settings.” Needless to say, I fell hard for this promise of flexibility, of clothing that wouldn’t hang in the closet for twenty years.

I never thought much about clothing. When I wrote my first book, Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, where I cut back on consumption of everything, I didn’t even mention clothing even though it is responsible for as much as 10% of global carbon emissions. After all, I am an old white male architect who only wears black. The Take the Jump people suggest that we buy no more than three new items of clothing per year, and I have no trouble with that. But if I buy three items of clothing, they have to be flexible.

In my new book, The Story of Upfront Carbon (pre-order from New Society Publishers now and get a 20% discount!) I have a chapter on “strategies for sufficiency”, the tools to help us use less stuff. One of those tools is Flexibility, which applies to buildings, vehicles, and yes, clothing. Here’s an excerpt; I talk about Volkswagen buses, and over the years have collected old ads for them which I finally get to show here.

Strategies for Sufficiency: Flexibility

The first Volkswagen Type 2 bus rolled off the assembly line in March 1950. It was a simple box with an air-cooled engine at the rear, the driver way up at the front, and a lot of room in between. It came in different versions; a passenger model, a panel van, and a pickup truck plopping different boxes on top of the standard base. It was a flexible design, cheap, and easy to maintain.

However, what happened to these buses after was a cultural phenomenon. People installed sinks and beds, turning them into campers. They could carry anything, including lots of hippies to rock concerts and rallies. Roger White, curator of transportation at the Smithsonian, said^, “It became popular with people who were rejecting mainstream American culture. It was their way of saying, ‘We don’t need your big V8 cars.’”

It was such a successful design that VW kept making the original model until 1967 and in modified versions until 1999, when the engine was moved to the front for crashworthiness.

What made this such a success? It was designed for flexibility. It was adaptable to many different uses. It was simple; as the 1962 ad said, “You want to move something? Get a box.” It wasn’t very fast and had trouble on hills, but it was enough.

Historically, everything was flexible and multifunctional. Witold Rybczynski explains in his book “Home” that “people didn’t live in homes so much as camp in them” in the Middle Ages. Siegfried Giedion wrote in “Mechanization Takes Command,” these were times of “profound insecurity, both social and economic, constraining merchants and feudal lords to take their possessions with them whenever they could, for no one knew what havoc might be loosed once the gates were closed behind him. The deeply rooted in the French word for furniture, meuble, is the idea of the movable, the transportable.“ If people dined at a table, it was made of boards on trestles-hence the boardroom- and taken down after a meal-hence turning the table.

There were few chairs reserved for special people- hence the chairman. Everyone else sat on cushions placed on the trunks where belongings were stored.

Rooms were also flexible and multifunction. Robert Kronenburg writes^:

“Once we domesticated animals, we still moved according to seasonal grazing, and when humans finally settled to longer-term habitation, forming villages, towns and cities, the few rooms each dwelling possessed were multi-functional – used for sleeping, eating, entertaining and sometimes work. Consequently, they were furnished with demountable tables (that also served as beds), stools and benches (that also served as beds), chests containing clothes that also served as seats (and beds!). In Europe, it is only in the last three centuries that rooms with dedicated functions and associated specially designed furniture have appeared.”

Even when we got rooms, they were not very private; there were no halls, and all the rooms were lined up enfilade with one room leading into another.  Judith Flanders writes that “For most of human history, houses have not been private spaces, nor have they had, within them, more private spaces belonging to specific residents, nor spaces used by all the residents in turn for entirely private functions.” Trades worked from home or lived where they worked; there was no separation.

This all changed in the West in the 18^th century, especially if you had money. With the Industrial Revolution, we got the factory and the office and the separation of work from home. We got parlours at the front of the house and bedrooms upstairs. Kitchens were separate from dining rooms which were separated from living rooms. In my own house, a developer home from 1918 in a streetcar suburb, the dining room had sliding doors so that it could be separated from the living room while the servant prepared the table from the separate kitchen. There was even a steep stairway from the kitchen to a stair landing mid-way to the second floor so the servant wouldn’t be seen in the front hall or living room if guests were visiting. There was one toilet for everyone; previous owners ripped out that servant stair and put a toilet there on the ground floor.

But the main stair of the house was on the side, and the rooms on the second floor mirrored those on the first. So when the kids moved out, we could divide the house into two separate units. The bedrooms on the second floor became a combo open living, dining and kitchen area. My daughter’s family now lives there, and my wife helps care for her grandchildren. It is likely that in the future, they will be taking care of us. This is the wonder of flexible design; a living space can be anything.

Robert Kronenburg notes that the way we live has changed:

A flexible approach to our domestic environment is now necessary for a wide range of reasons; twenty-four-hour work patterns based in the home; changing family size and groupings; ecological issues that are questioning the desirability of commuting; lifestyle issues that envisage a more fulfilling personal life; the possibility of remote working due to communications technology.

Many 19^th-century warehouses were flexible and were converted into lofts and offices. Now, many are trying to convert older office buildings to residential since the pandemic made them superfluous. It’s not proving to be easy in many cases, mostly because they were lousy offices with floor plates that were too big. In Europe, where there were strict rules on how far workers could be from windows, conversions are far easier. It turns out that people’s needs and desires are the same in either offices or homes: fresh air and a view of the outside. But in the north American office, those needs could be ignored. So instead, we got inflexible buildings with monster floor plates that will be difficult and expensive to convert.

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I know, it is a bit of an extrapolation from a pair of pants to an office conversion, but flexibility means you need less stuff which can serve multiple purposes, whether it is a van or an office building.