Space Use and Claim

Little information is available as to what house type works for families at various stages in their life cycle. As the modern family is constantly changing and fragmenting, flexibility and adaptability in house design are of great importance to future generations. To study the family at home as a unit, which embodies many relationships can best illustrate the complex nature of space itself.This book introduces new methods to analyse space use and claim by families across a variety of common house types with varying syntactic structures. It uses both qualitative and quantitative methods, first to identify and record the key aims, and then to illustrate the findings. It is thought that the methods can be applied not only to houses in the United Kingdom, but across the developing world to gain a fuller understanding of what families need and want from their houses through their life-cycle. It has a significant contribution to make in the designing of methods for assessing the changing structure of the family, its values and beliefs and its importance as an integral factor in house design.