Flexible housing design proposal through spatial behavior patterns exhibited in housings during the COVID-19 pandemic period

Crises such as epidemics throughout history have changed the flow of the world by creating social fractures. Epidemics that have continued from the past to the present have changed the way of life in history, besides have affected the design of modern cities and buildings in architecture. Nowadays, the Covid-19 pandemic has become the biggest problem of our time. The Covid-19 pandemic is a transformation point for today and has led to looking at the future from the perspective of "new normalization". This pandemic has emerged as a design problem rather than a health crisis. Social isolation was required to reduce the risk of transmission by maintaining physical distance during the pandemic process. In this process, people have avoided public spaces and turned to private areas. People have been encouraged to stay in their homes with measures such as "Stay at Home", "Life Fits in the House" and "Maintain Social Distance". This has led to the fact that the residence has assumed a different function from its existing function. During the period when the activities of daily life were switch, the residences became the area where the infected person stayed and the areas where many activities were carried out in the process. The aim of the study is to reduce transmission in residential buildings where people spend most of their time during the pandemic process and by investigating and explaining the regulations for the added functions; by analyzing the spatial transformations depending on the actions in the current housing behavior; it is to reveal the flexible housing design paradigm proposed in the during pandemic and post-pandemic period. In addition, the study reveals the need for the housing tradition to change after the pandemic and how housing should be considered by considering it in the context of flexibility. Within the scope of the study, 12 different housing plans located in different regions of Turkey were selected to examine the different types of plans.Apartment housing plans, which are widely used by people in cities, have been considered in different scenarios. During the pandemic process, which was examined by creating different scenarios, the spatial behavior of existing housing plans was analyzed. Depending on the scenarios, the behavior of existing houses in the pandemic process has been developed with proposal design strategies in accordance with the function parameters. According to the analyzes, it was determined that the residential designs were not designed in accordance with this process during the quarantine process and were insufficient. Then, in accordance with the determined parameters and the analyzed plan examples, a flexible housing design paradigm was proposed. As a result, it is expected that this change and transformation seen in residential buildings will continue after the pandemic or will not be like the use before the pandemic. Therefore, it is expected that the new houses to be designed will be designed taking into account this change and transformation and paying particular attention to the context of flexibility. Keywords: Pandemic, Post-Pandemic Housing, Flexible Housing, Functional Flexibility