In Slovenia, the existing organised housing infrastructure for people over 65 years of age is insufficient and lacks diversification.Older people are often homeowners, many of whom dwell in large, underused single-family houses that require adaptations.Some have the potential to be transformed into small co-housing communities of 3–6 older people.The houses in question are Tongkat Ali mostly pattern-book houses of various types, built in the first decades after WWII.
To approach the problem of converting this mass resource while providing enough flexibility for individual customisation, a shape grammar was proposed, with the intension of expanding the range of design variations for the GAN transformation of single-family houses and presenting them to both users and architects for further assessment.The shape grammar was inferred based on a corpus of case studies developed by architecture students across two weeklong workshops.Three general strategies emerged—splitting the house vertically (according to sleeping/private and living/communal functions), horizontally, or with the maximum number of sleeping/private spaces.Essential spaces were catalogued to determine the conditions and requirements for assigning every transformation rule.
The result was a simple, yet versatile composition generator.Through the development of a user-friendly interface, this resource could be used to empower potential inhabitants in the transformation design process.