Towards a Sufficient Dwelling

As a direct response to a ‘crisis’ in domestic architecture that has been abruptly placed in public discourse to an unprecedented extent by the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper critically explores the notion of The Sufficient Dwelling as a pathway to more sustainable housing models.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus and the subsequent lockdowns that were introduced globally with the aim of reducing the spread of its resulting disease COVID-19 have starkly revealed limitations with normative housing models. During lockdown, our homes had to accommodate a broader variety of activities with varying and sometimes conflicting requirements, which were often overlapping, both spatially and temporally. For co-habitants, this could make it difficult to establish personal territory, while for those living alone, lockdown could result in an atomisation of social interactions, physical isolation, and increased feelings of loneliness. Concurrently, the unprecedented climate emergency that we are facing as a planet has placed focus on individuals’ consumption of resources, including space. In fact, the notion of spatial consumption is an acute issue for Denmark’s housing sector, having the highest average floor area per capita in the EU.

Through the notion of The Sufficient Dwelling, a pathway to more sustainable housing models in relation to spatial, material, and social concerns will be critically explored.

The methodological approach for this research inquiry involves a contemporary critical reimagining of Karel Teige’s, ‘The Minimum Dwelling’ (1932) through the lens of sustainable architecture, with a point of departure in the notion of sufficiency. In ‘The Logic of Sufficiency’ (2005), the Political Economist, Thomas Princen, describes sufficiency as, “ensuring that all humans can live a good life without overshooting the ecological limits of the Earth (for now and generations to come).” The Sufficient Dwelling unfolds the concept of sustainable housing into three holistically connected domains, Spatial Sufficiency, Material Sufficiency & Social Sufficiency. The paper argues that the production of sustainable housing requires a holistic approach that addresses the humanistic, just as much as the technological.