SEED: From Vacancy to Subscription-Based Affordable Living

SEED [Subscription-based Elastic Endless Dwelling] explores a subscription-based housing model that adaptively reuses vacant office and commercial spaces to transform them into long-term affordable housing. Inspired by models of subscription-based rights of use applied by digital streaming services, SEED aims at creating a dwelling network that offers affordable, diverse, and widespread housing options. Yet, in contrast to the profit-based setups within the digital world, SEED incorporates the subscription concept into a non-profit co-operative structure where every inhabitant/subscriber becomes a collective owner and participant of the network, benefitting not from monetary profits, but from the abundance of choices, sizes, flexibilities, and the endless right to dwell at an at cost price. Integrating an abandoned commercial building in Koreatown into its subscription network not only shows how SEED’s architectural modules and elements enable to retrofit and occupy such abandoned structures, but also indicates how SEED’s spatial and organisational elasticity enables to grow the network almost endlessly at different scales across buildings, urban blocks, neighborhoods, cities, and even the entire nation.