부산대학교 도서관

In the aftermath of economic doldrums resulting from the 1997 financial crisis typified by the IMF relief loan and the 2007 global financial crisis, or so-called sub-prime mortgage crisis, housing sales rates have sharply declined, leading to a large stock of unsold new apartment housing units. As a countermeasure, each construction company has employed a differential approach to sell out their housing stocks by applying flexible floor plans to apartment housing units. Nonetheless, flexible floor plans for apartment housing units have not settled down yet. Hence, the present study identified the trends in flexible floor plans applied to apartment housing units sold for the past 5 years since the 2007 sub-prime mortgage crisis and analyzed the flexible types so as to explore any limitations of the flexible floor plans provided at home. Also, based on the analysis, this study considered efficiently and practically flexible types as an effort to lay the groundwork for more extensive application of flexible floor plans. In sum, the present study found the following points. In view of the flexible floor plans applied to domestic flexible apartment housing units, the larger number of bays was found to be more beneficial to indoor environment including ventilation and lighting. Particularly, more bays are conducive to larger balconies, which is why the demands for floor plans with more bays are on the rise lately to the extent that 4.5-bay and 5-bay unit floor plans have been developed. Still, in terms of flexibility, unit floor plans with more than 4 bays assume a lopsided design, where all bedrooms are placed on one side. As a result, it was found that flexible floor plans are mostly limited to the space between bedrooms and between living rooms and bedrooms, ending up with inflexible kitchen space that is hard to extend or reduce. In addition, few floor plans were found to make it possible to increase or decrease the number of bedrooms in line with areas. Rather, most of the floor plans reviewed here allowed increasing or decreasing the area of each room only. Taken together, floor plans studied here showed some uniformity without allowing for differences in areas. The analysis of flexible types found that some types provided flexible and efficient spatial application, e. g. R-r, r-L, r-K and L-D-K types, whereas others were far from practical flexibility, e. g. r-r, R-L and R-K types. Besides, the flexible and efficient types (i. e. R-r, r-L, r-K and L-D-K types) accounted for 42.7% of those flexible types investigated here, whereas the practically inflexible r-r, R-L and R-K types amounted to more than 57.3%. These findings indicate that flexible floor plans applied to domestic apartment housing units lack in practicality and spatial efficiency without averting the limitations of existing apartment housing units, and that more extensive adoption of flexible floor plans calls for the application of R-r, r-L, r-K and L-D-K types that raise the satisfaction of occupants in lieu of such nearly inflexible r-r, R-L and R-K types.