Abstract: Framing the Question
This research begins with a simple but unresolved question: how can modular housing design become local. In the twenty-first century, architects face a housing crisis shaped by financialisation, scarcity, and displacement. Modularity is often presented as a global solution that promises efficiency and scalability. Yet when implemented, these systems rarely connect with the realities of local labour, materials, and everyday life. The study argues that modularity should not be understood as a fixed technical model, but as a relational process shaped by the people and practices that construct it.
The investigation compares four communal housing projects located in Chile, Burkina Faso, Denmark, and Bangladesh. Two of these projects, Quinta Monroy and Gando Teachers’ Housing, are deeply rooted in their contexts. The other two, Living Places and Essential Homes, represent a more universal and industrial logic. By studying how modular strategies are reworked through local labour and material practices, the research reveals how adaptation and efficiency operate in tension within housing design.
Part A: The Political Economy of Housing
The first part of the research situates the housing problem within a longer history of political and economic development. Drawing on the work of David Madden and Peter Marcuse, it describes how housing has been transformed from a place of use into a financial asset. Scarcity in this sense is not the natural absence of housing but a manufactured condition created by speculation and deregulation.
Efficiency has become the dominant language through which this process operates. Once understood as a technical goal, efficiency has been redefined as an ideological tool that justifies dispossession and austerity. The result is a landscape marked by cycles of overproduction and vacancy, where homes are built as investments rather than dwellings.
This section identifies four key themes that shape the current condition. They include speculative development as the engine of crisis, housing as a political project, ontological precariousness as the lived effect of insecurity, and fragmented geographies as the spatial outcome of inequality. These themes reveal that scarcity manifests both internally and externally. Internally, it is experienced as precarious dwelling and alienation. Externally, it is seen in the fractured fabric of the city. Together, they define the structural context in which modular systems now operate.
Part B: Typology and the Medium of Design
The second part traces how housing types evolved through the twentieth century and how they came to embody the economic and ideological conditions of their time. The study looks at the shift from the industrial experiments of the early modern period to the mass housing estates and suburban expansion of the postwar decades. Each typology, from the courtyard block to the tower, carries an imprint of the political economy that produced it.
Typology is introduced not as a catalogue of forms but as a conceptual tool for understanding how architecture translates social and economic forces into spatial order. Following the ideas of Pier Vittorio Aureli and John Habraken, the thesis proposes typology as the meeting point between macro systems such as finance, policy, and governance, and micro systems such as rooms, thresholds, and circulation.
Typology therefore provides the medium through which modularity can be examined. It allows the research to connect systemic economic forces with the tangible design of housing, making visible the ways architecture embodies both constraint and agency.
Part C: Methodology and Analysis
Building on this theoretical foundation, the research develops a diagnostic method for analysing modular housing systems. The approach is based on the work of John Habraken and John Turner and is designed to reveal how material and labour practices shape architecture in context. Rather than measuring performance in purely technical terms, the method looks at how systems balance control, permanence, and adaptability.
The study began with an attempt to read each project through a coherence and control map, but during analysis it became clear that a control and permanence map provided a more accurate way to compare how systems function. Control captures how labour is organised and who holds technical knowledge. Permanence measures the degree to which materials and structures are fixed or open to change.
Each project was divided into five parts: structure and infill, service core, enclosure, outdoor devices, and incremental strategy. These were scored using four indices: level of expertise, adaptability, durability, and material origin. The results were first plotted as spider charts, then reinterpreted on a control and permanence grid to show the relationships between skill, material fixity, and user agency.
Across all four cases, an important pattern emerged. In the modular prototypes, adaptability was strongly linked to high expertise, while in the local counterparts adaptability relied on shared knowledge and collective effort. Gando Teachers’ Housing provided the clearest example. Its use of stabilised earth bricks created a quasi-modular system that was both flexible and standardised. It was not a direct copy of the local Mossi compound but reflected its spatial and social logic through material continuity and communal labour.
The analysis demonstrated that modular systems cannot be evaluated solely by their efficiency. Their real value lies in how they are reinterpreted through the material and social resources of place.
Part D: Conclusions and Reflections
The research contributes to three levels of knowledge. Theoretically, it reframes housing as a relational artefact shaped by the exchange between labour and material. Methodologically, it offers a comparative framework that links typological analysis with material-labour evaluation. Practically, it gives architects and planners a tool to assess whether modular housing truly responds to local realities or merely reproduces abstract efficiency.
The main limitation of the study lies in its reliance on four cases and the subjective nature of scoring. However, these constraints also highlight opportunities for future work. The toolkit could be developed as a generative design instrument, capable of producing hybrid modular types that integrate lessons from diverse contexts.
Ultimately, the research calls for a shift in how modularity is understood. The future of modular housing depends not on its ability to repeat but on its capacity to adapt.
