In contemporary cities, housing is consumed as a finished product.
Buildings are decided before people arrive, and life is forced to fit within predetermined boundaries.
But urban formation has always followed the opposite flow:
Paths emerge first, people gather, and space accumulates along those lines.
This organic structure is not unique to a specific site. it represents a universal logic underlying urban growth across the world.
Root Architecture reactivates this principle.
Dwelling units attach like roots along branching paths, and the housing cluster grows not through planning, but through movement and accumulated use over time.
Driven by repetition, choice, and coincidence,
this system redefines housing as something that grows, not something that is merely built.
Rigid systems fail to respond to changing urban lifestyles.
Cities are evolving rapidly, yet housing remains bound to uniform block typologies, unable to accommodate spatial diversity, mobility, and short-term residents. As a result, many urban voids remain underutilized and disconnected.
Contemporary housing can no longer be defined as a fixed type.
It must adapt and evolve with its users, requiring a more flexible and responsive framework.
Shifting from Order
to Adaptability
to Adaptability
Recent studies in urban morphology show that grid-based systems emerged to serve order, speed, and expansion, but in doing so, they often erased the fine-grained spatial relationships inherent in organically developed environments.
In contrast, path-oriented structures — such as those in Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and Paris — have evolved through iterative adjustments. Streets align with desire lines, blocks respond to slopes and waterways, and public spaces emerge naturally where major flows intersect.
The grid, by comparison, struggles to achieve these qualities. Large, uniform blocks rarely align with the granular scale of everyday life, producing underutilized spaces and rigid land-use patterns.
This project translates the adaptive logic of path-oriented networks to the scale of dwelling units, proposing a housing system that can branch, infill, and reorganize in response to demographic shifts, temporary residency, and changing urban conditions.
Efficient and predictable for development, but rigid and repetitive, limiting adaptability to diverse living needs.
Formed through incremental growth along movement paths, path-oriented networks adapt to terrain and daily life, creating varied blocks that accommodate flexible, mixed-use integration.
In urban and architectural circulation systems, the underlying grid determines the flow of movement.
A square grid restricts circulation to four directions, creating rigid and orthogonal paths. In contrast, triangular and hexagonal grids provide
six directions of connectivity, producing more continuous, flexible, and isotropic circulation patterns. This geometric framework establishes
a basis for optimizing behavioral adaptation, enabling structural networks that respond dynamically to user movements.
A square grid restricts circulation to four directions, creating rigid and orthogonal paths. In contrast, triangular and hexagonal grids provide
six directions of connectivity, producing more continuous, flexible, and isotropic circulation patterns. This geometric framework establishes
a basis for optimizing behavioral adaptation, enabling structural networks that respond dynamically to user movements.
N square = 4 < N tri/hex = 6
→ Higher connectivity, more flexible network.
2. Shorter center-to-center distance:D tri/hex = 0.866x < D square = x
→ Denser network at the same scale.
3. Area efficiency (esp. hexagon):A hex = (3√3/2)x² > A square = x²
→
Larger coverage with same side length.
Because of these properties, triangular and hexagonal lattices can reduce bottlenecks, distribute density more evenly,
and encourage organic circulation similar to natural branching systems.
Applying such grids in architectural design allows for more adaptive layouts, where pathways evolve and expand without losing spatial coherence.
and encourage organic circulation similar to natural branching systems.
Applying such grids in architectural design allows for more adaptive layouts, where pathways evolve and expand without losing spatial coherence.
they function primarily as circulation frameworks. These modules operate first within the system, guiding movement and defining spatial flow.
At the same time, they perform a structural role, forming the primary skeleton upon which other modules can attach or expand.