Fabian Jäger

HOW DOES ONE DISENTANGLE SPACE AND PROGRAM IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE LONGEVITY
THROUGH OPENNESS OF USE?

Building for longevity is tantamount to building sustainably. The more resilient a structure is to external pressures—technical, social, climatic—the more sustainable it can become. Longevity names the temporal horizon within which a structure persists, with or without maintenance. Sustainability, by contrast, seeks to satisfy present demands without foreclosing those of future generations. Yet what if those future demands fundamentally diverge from today’s patterns of occupation and technology? Can a long-lived structure be adaptable enough to accommodate such shifts without becoming obsolete?

Only by decoupling structure and use can a building sustain long-term relevance and resist the logic of demolition. This project probes the notion of a durable, adaptable framework—a prototype not conceived as monofunctional hardware, but as an enabling armature whose flexibility derives from programmatic openness. The ambition is an architecture that can absorb both technical and operational change, allowing the building to be reconfigured over time without compromising its core fabric.

The thesis is tested through a prototypical proposal for a Berlin infill site, drawing on the Mietshaus typology as a historical exemplar of endurance. Across differing storeys in the front and rear houses, the design demonstrates how an open plan can anticipate and accommodate successive shifts in use. At its centre stands the use-neutral-room: a square, 25m² field without prescribed function. These rooms are intentionally indeterminate, inviting inhabitants to script their own arrangements rather than conforming to preassigned programs. In this way, the architecture solicits active appropriation and becomes ever evolving.

Constructively, the building is conceived as monolithic and low-layered, reducing interfaces and thereby making the primary structure robust and less failure-prone. This strengthens resilience while keeping options open for future retrofits, insertions, and reprogramming.

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