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Abstract:

Finland has had supported student housing for over 50 years. As society changes, so do students’ preferences on how they want to live. Sometimes, these changes are also driven by students’ evolving financial situations. For a long time, the trend in student housing was defined by shared living, making dormitories the norm. In the 2020s, more and more students are living alone, which has led to an increase in the number of studios in student housing facilities.  

However, we cannot predict the future, making it impossible to know how students will live 50 years from now. It is also difficult to predict whether we will continue to have supported student housing. Therefore, buildings should be able to adapt to changing housing trends, because demolishing buildings to the extent we do now is not sustainable. Most residential buildings in Finland are designed with the principle that the walls between apartments are load-bearing. This makes it challenging to combine apartments, as it is difficult to make changes to load-bearing structures afterwards. If students want to or must return to larger apartment units, what will we do with all the thousand studios we’ve built now? The same issue with load-bearing walls has arisen when attempting to divide existing dormitories into studios. This is why I decided to explore if it would be possible to design a flexible residential building where combining or dividing apartments is not tied to load-bearing partition walls. One example of a more flexible structural system is the column-beam frame, where columns and beams serve as the load-bearing structures.  

In this thesis, I have designed a flexible residential building for Hoas (Foundation for Student Housing in the Helsinki Region) to Merihaka, Helsinki. My thesis consists of two parts: a theoretical and background section, and a design section. In the theoretical section, I discuss the current state of student housing, the principles of flexibility in residential design, and the basic principles of the column-beam frame system I have chosen. In the design section, I present the brief for my design project and the design principles. After that I present my design and reflect on the different phases of the design process. Student housing has also been approached based on my bachelor’s thesis, through which I investigated the shortcomings of student apartments and small apartments.  

In my thesis, I have aimed to address changing housing trends by utilizing a different structural system. Although the building I have designed includes many studios, it is adaptable to changes throughout its lifecycle. Studios can be combined with each other, and larger apartments can be divided into smaller ones. I have also aimed to meet students’ wishes for their apartments, create quality common areas, and align all of the above with Hoas’s expectations. Therefore, it is possible to decide whether to live alone or together. I strive to design sustainable, adaptable, and pleasant architecture that will create its own layer in the building history of Merihaka. 

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