Rethinking Small Housing as an Adaptable and Intentional Typology for Shelter, Affordable Housing, and Incremental Living
By: Todd Ferry, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP BD + C & Jonathan O’Neil Cole, AIA, NCARB, NOMA – Pendulum Studio
Executive Summary
Across the United States, housing affordability has reached a critical point. Entry into homeownership has become increasingly unattainable for many households, even as average home sizes continue to grow.¹ At the same time, the demand for shelter has increased in direct correlation with rising housing costs, climate-related displacement, and economic instability.² These conditions have exposed a growing misalignment between how housing and shelter are conceived, regulated, and delivered, and how people actually live, adapt, and build stability over time.
In response, many jurisdictions have expanded shelter capacity and experimented with non-congregate models, including tiny house villages and modular shelter units. These approaches have demonstrated meaningful improvements in safety, dignity, and user satisfaction when compared to large congregate facilities.³ Yet most shelter models continue to be designed and funded as finished products, optimized to meet immediate needs within constrained regulatory and financial frameworks. As a result, they often remain disconnected from longer-term housing pathways and are rarely conceived as foundations from which people can build toward permanence, autonomy, or ownership. This reveals a particular disconnect in approach when noting that permanent housing is collectively understood to be the ultimate goal of any homelessness intervention.
The Pendulum Bubble is Pendulum’s response to these realities. It is a small, complete housing core designed to function across a range of contexts that include shelter, small permanent housing, accessory dwellings, and incremental homebuilding. While modest in size, it is conceived as a durable foundation rather than a finished product, capable of being lived in immediately and expanded or adapted over time as needed. A single unit can support multiple stages of stability and use.
This paper proposes a reframing of shelter and small housing as part of a continuum rather than as discrete categories. As housing affordability declines and housing displacement from climate and economic impacts accelerates, the distinction between shelter and housing has become increasingly artificial. Architectural approaches that treat shelter as a terminal condition or small housing as inherently temporary limit long-term value and reinforce cycles of instability.
What is needed instead are models that recognize shelter as the beginning of an incremental housing trajectory and small housing as a legitimate and aspirational form of dwelling by choice as well as necessity.
The Pendulum Bubble emerges from this context not as a universal solution, but as a design framework that tests how small housing might be conceived differently. By intentionally positioning itself at a price point that overlaps both affordable housing and contemporary shelter units, it challenges the assumption that dignity, beauty, and aspiration must be sacrificed in order to achieve economy and speed of deployment. It also challenges the idea that small housing must be marginal or provisional.
This paper does not argue that architecture alone can resolve housing insecurity or affordability. Instead, it offers the Pendulum Bubble as one response within a broader conversation about how housing might be reimagined as flexible, incremental, and human-centered. By treating shelter and small housing as a better beginning rather than a better endpoint, and by extending that logic to housing more broadly, the project invites architects, service providers, municipalities, and individuals to reconsider how design, regulation, and investment can align more closely with lived experience and long-term possibility.
The Limits of Current Housing Models
Housing affordability remains one of the most significant challenges facing communities across the United States, particularly for those seeking modest or entry-level housing. For many households, the gap between income and housing cost has widened to the point where conventional pathways into ownership or long-term rental are increasingly out of reach. This condition is not the result of a single failure, but of a convergence of economic, regulatory, and cultural forces that have reshaped housing production over time.
One of the clearest indicators of this shift is the divergence between household size and housing size. While family sizes have steadily declined, the average size of newly constructed homes has continued to grow.¹ Larger homes require more material, higher upfront investment, and greater operational energy use, all of which drive up costs. As a result, smaller starter homes that once provided an accessible entry point into ownership have become increasingly rare in many markets.
Development economics reinforce this trend. Larger homes often offer higher profit margins, particularly in contexts where land costs are high and financing structures reward scale. Zoning codes and building regulations further amplify these dynamics through minimum square footage requirements, setback standards, and parking ratios that implicitly favor larger buildings. Even when smaller homes are permitted, they are frequently treated as exceptions rather than as legitimate and desirable housing typologies.
Financing mechanisms compound these constraints. Mortgage underwriting standards, appraisal practices, and construction loan requirements tend to privilege single-phase, fully realized projects that conform to conventional definitions of housing. Incremental or expandable dwellings, which may align more closely with occupants’ needs, resources, and values, often struggle to fit within these systems. As a result, housing production prioritizes completeness at delivery over adaptability over time.
There are emerging signs of change. Many cities have begun to eliminate single-family-only zoning, reduce minimum lot sizes, and expand allowances for accessory dwelling units in an effort to increase density and diversify housing options.⁸ These reforms reflect growing recognition that existing housing models are insufficient to meet contemporary needs. However, regulatory change alone does not generate new architectural approaches. Without corresponding shifts in design thinking, revised codes risk reproducing familiar forms at smaller scales rather than enabling fundamentally different ways of living.
What remains largely absent is a housing typology that treats smallness, adaptability, and intentional living as primary values rather than as compromises. Such a typology must be capable of operating within evolving regulatory environments while responding to economic and environmental realities. It must acknowledge that housing is rarely static, and that stability is often achieved not through size or completeness, but through the capacity to grow, change, and remain relevant over time.
From Deficit-Based Shelter to Asset-Based Design
Contemporary shelter design is shaped by a convergence of urgency, regulation, and limited resources. In moments of crisis, speed and scale are often prioritized, and rightly so. Lives are at stake, and immediate protection from harm is essential. Yet the frameworks through which shelter is typically conceived and delivered tend to be grounded in deficit-based assumptions that focus on what residents lack, what risks must be mitigated, and what minimum conditions must be met to ensure safety and compliance.
These assumptions influence not only programmatic decisions but also architectural outcomes. Shelter environments are frequently optimized around durability, surveillance, and operational efficiency. Units are designed to withstand (often unfounded) expectations of misuse, limit personalization, and reduce perceived liability. While these priorities are often well intentioned, they can result in spaces that feel cold, constrained, and disconnected from the lives unfolding within them. In such contexts, architecture becomes an instrument of risk management rather than a framework for aspiration.
This deficit-based orientation is reinforced by regulatory and funding structures that treat shelter as a temporary exception to housing standards rather than as a legitimate space for the act of dwelling. Codes and permitting pathways assume that shelter is inherently short term, even as many individuals and families remain within shelter systems for extended periods. As a result, design decisions are frequently driven by the presumption that residents will not remain long enough for quality, beauty, or adaptability to matter. More disheartening is the reality that these attributes are not deserved.
Evidence from non-congregate shelter models and tiny house villages suggests otherwise. When individuals are provided with private space, control over their environment, and opportunities for self-determination, outcomes related to safety, well-being, and successful transitions to permanent housing improve. These findings point toward a different way of thinking about shelter design, one rooted not in perceived deficits but in existing strengths, capacities, and aspirations. In other words, design responses that utilize the full toolkit of architecture.
An asset-based approach begins with the assumption that people experiencing housing insecurity possess agency, knowledge, and the ability to shape their environments when given appropriate tools and support. Rather than asking how little is sufficient, it asks what qualities of space support dignity, stability, and a sense of future. This approach does not ignore constraints of cost or constructability. Instead, it reframes them as design challenges rather than limiting factors. Designers may ask, given budget and spatial realities that limit the size of a dwelling unit, what kind of space would I want to live in and how can it be designed with attention toward a life of intention, healing, and thriving?
Within this framework, dignity is not treated as an aesthetic add-on or symbolic gesture. It is understood as a spatial condition created through access to light, privacy, thermal comfort, and the ability to adapt one’s surroundings. Beauty is not equated with excess, but with care, proportion, and intention. Economy is achieved not through deprivation, but through clarity of purpose and efficiency of means.
The Pendulum Bubble is informed by this asset-based perspective. Its design resists the notion that shelter or small housing must look or feel temporary in order to be affordable. Instead, it proposes that compact, well-designed spaces can meet immediate needs while also functioning as legitimate domestic environments. Spaces so loved that residents would choose to expand over time rather than leave. By prioritizing qualities typically associated with housing rather than emergency response alone, the project challenges the assumption that aspiration and economy are mutually exclusive.
This shift does not suggest that architecture alone can resolve the systemic causes of housing insecurity or affordability. Rather, it acknowledges that design plays a meaningful role in shaping how people experience stability, autonomy, and possibility within existing systems. When shelter and housing environments are designed solely to manage risk, they risk reinforcing the very instability they seek to address. When they are designed as foundations for growth, they can support trajectories toward permanence, connection, and self-determination.
Incremental Housing Is Not New
Incremental housing has roots deeply embedded in the history of domestic construction. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, small and expandable dwellings served as practical and culturally accepted pathways to stability, ownership, and permanence. These models did not assume that housing needed to be fully complete at the moment of occupancy to be permitted for construction. Instead, they were structured to evolve over time in response to available resources, family needs, and changing circumstances.
They also embraced empowering the self-builder. Early twentieth-century kit houses provide one such precedent. Companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold mail-order homes marketed explicitly to individuals without specialized construction expertise. Advertisements promised that a “man of average abilities” could assemble a house in a matter of months using standardized components delivered by rail.⁵ These homes were often built with the help of friends, neighbors, and extended family, drawing on collective labor and shared knowledge.
Many of these structures remain desirable today, not despite their incremental origins, but because of them. Their durability and adaptability have allowed them to remain relevant across generations.
Post-disaster housing offers another extremely instructive example. Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, thousands of small wooden cottages were constructed to house displaced residents. These “earthquake shacks” were modest in size (averaging 10’x14’), but were conceived beyond their role as temporary shelters. Residents were able to rent the units with payments applied toward ownership, after which the structures could be relocated from government-owned land and expanded over time.⁶ This approach inadvertently facilitated one of the largest pathways to first-time homeownership in the city’s history. While a limited number of these structures remain today, their legacy illustrates how temporary need can become long-term stability when housing is designed to adapt.
Intentional minimal living also offers a parallel lineage, though one grounded less in necessity than in values. Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond, built in 1845, remains one of the most cited examples of voluntary minimalist dwelling. Measuring just ten by fifteen feet, the one-room structure was constructed largely from salvaged materials and served as both a home and a philosophical statement. For Thoreau, the house was not a compromise but a deliberate critique of material excess and industrialization. His reflections framed housing as a means of supporting autonomy, clarity of purpose, and engagement with the natural world. While not directly transferable to contemporary housing systems, this precedent underscores the idea that smallness can be aspirational rather than deficient. That is, if we are willing to embrace the poetic of intentional living.
What these examples share is a conception of housing as a process rather than a product. Small beginnings were not viewed as failures or compromises, but as reasonable and expected starting points – and sometimes, as with Thoreau’s cabin, also a sufficient finality. Expansion, adaptation, personalization or remaining small were assumed possibilities rather than discouraged. Housing was understood as something that unfolded over time, shaped by lived experience rather than delivered as a finished artifact.
In contrast, contemporary housing systems often suppress incremental approaches through regulatory and financial mechanisms. Minimum square footage requirements, prescriptive zoning codes, and mortgage underwriting standards tend to favor fully realized construction completed in a single phase. Where incremental housing persists today, it often does so through informal or marginal pathways, such as unpermitted additions, accessory structures, or mobile dwellings. These conditions are frequently labeled as “informal,” obscuring the fact that they reflect enduring human strategies for creating shelter, stability, and community under constraint. Incremental housing as a beginning design strategy has become so uncommon that Alejandro Aravena’s clever Half-A-Good-House project in Chile contributed significantly to him receiving the Pritzker Prize in recent years, architecture’s highest honor.
Recognizing incremental housing as a suppressed rather than novel practice in the United States reframes the current moment. It suggests that the task is not to invent entirely new models, but to recover and reinterpret approaches that have long aligned housing with lived reality. This perspective provides essential context for contemporary efforts to bridge shelter and housing and grounds new design responses within a lineage of tested, adaptive domestic environments.
Informality, Regulation, and the Suppression of Participation
Many of the challenges associated with creating more affordable and adaptable housing are not technical in nature. They are cultural, professional, and regulatory. Over time, the professionalization of architecture and allied disciplines has produced clear standards for safety, performance, and habitability. These standards have delivered important benefits but, at the same time, they have narrowed the range of housing forms considered legitimate, particularly those that evolve gradually or are shaped directly by occupants.
Within this framework, housing that does not conform to established norms is often labeled “informal.” This designation suggests a lack of rigor, safety, or intention, even when such housing reflects careful decision-making, long-term investment, and deep knowledge of place. As Menna Agha and Léopold Lambert argue in Outrage: Informality Is a Fallacy, informality itself is an invention. Labeling self-built or incremental housing as informal erases its architectural, social, and political reality while reinforcing professional and regulatory systems that determine who may participate in the creation of housing and on what terms.
As a result, many pathways that once supported modest, expandable housing have been constrained or eliminated. Minimum square footage requirements, prescriptive zoning categories, and financing standards favor housing that is complete at the moment of occupancy.
While these frameworks were developed with the intention of ensuring safety and quality, they have also had the effect of restricting who is permitted to build housing and how that housing may evolve over time.
Efforts to reform these systems are underway. Movements such as single-stair reform and zoning liberalization reflect growing recognition that rules created with good intentions can produce impacts that outweigh their benefits. Yet many of these reforms remain focused on improving feasibility for developers within formal processes, operating on the assumption that end users will ultimately receive more affordable housing as a result.
Far less attention is paid to how regulatory reform might instead enable homeowners and would-be homeowners to directly participate in creating housing that is more immediately and meaningfully affordable to them. This dynamic reinforces a cycle in which small housing is treated as provisional. When a dwelling is permitted only because it fits within a narrow exception, it is rarely designed for longevity or growth. It is expected to remain temporary, even when occupants invest significant time, labor, and care. Over time, this expectation shapes both design outcomes and public perception, reinforcing the idea that small housing lacks permanence or value.
Reconsidering incremental housing requires more than adjusting technical standards. It requires a shift in how legitimacy is defined. When small housing is understood as a deliberate and aspirational choice rather than a temporary compromise, it opens space for architectural approaches that engage regulation directly while remaining open to growth, adaptation, and long-term use.
The Problem with Designing Finished Solutions
Despite the historical viability of incremental housing, most contemporary responses to shelter and affordable housing remain oriented toward finished solutions. Projects are typically conceived as discrete deliverables, bounded by available funding, regulatory approval, and construction timelines. Once built, they are treated as complete in parallel with the closure of regulatory obstacles, with new barriers for how they might be allowed to adapt or evolve in response to changing needs.
This orientation is reinforced by financial structures that prioritize upfront completion. Loan vehicles, grants, and capital funding streams tend to reward projects that can demonstrate a clear scope, fixed cost, and defined outcome at the point of delivery. Housing typologies that anticipate growth or transformation over time often struggle to align with these mechanisms, particularly when they fall outside conventional definitions of housing.
Within shelter systems, this logic is even more pronounced. Shelter units are typically funded and evaluated based on their ability to meet immediate demand and comply with specific operational requirements. While this framework supports rapid deployment, it also limits the extent to which shelter environments can be conceived as long-term assets. The assumption that shelter is temporary persists even when residents remain for extended periods, discouraging investment in adaptability, longevity, and integration with future housing pathways.
Designing housing and shelter as finished products also constrains how success is measured. Projects are often evaluated based on speed, cost, and capacity rather than on their ability to support transition, agency, or long-term stability. Once a unit is delivered and occupied, the design process is considered complete, even as residents’ needs and aspirations continue to change.
An alternative approach is to conceive shelter and small housing as components within a timeline of possibilities. In this framework, initial construction represents a foundation rather than a conclusion. Units are designed with the expectation that they may be expanded, reconfigured, relocated, or integrated into larger domestic environments over time. Economic investment is fully aligned where investment in shelter IS investment in housing. These two burdened funding streams become one. This shift does not eliminate the need for immediate solutions, but it reframes them as part of a longer arc of habitation.
Such an approach also challenges prevailing notions of permanence. Permanence need not be defined by immobility or completeness at first occupancy. Instead, it can be understood as the capacity of a dwelling to remain relevant, useful, and dignified as circumstances evolve. Designing for change becomes a form of resilience, particularly in contexts shaped by economic uncertainty, climate impacts, and displacement.
The Pendulum Bubble is informed by this understanding. It is intentionally designed not as a singular endpoint, but as an enduring starting point capable of supporting multiple futures. By resisting the assumption that shelter or small housing must be disposable or static, it proposes an alternative model in which small housing is valued both for its immediate service and long-term potential rather than defined by incompleteness.
The Pendulum Bubble as Case Study
Design Intentions of the Pendulum Bubble
Why is it called the Pendulum Bubble? With just a little breath, Bubbles expand, they can be combined with other bubbles, change organically, and activate and bring joy and life to an otherwise quiet space. The team at Pendulum is guided by an intentionally ambitious set of design intentions for the Pendulum Bubble. These intentions are not conceived as optional features, aesthetic gestures, or future upgrades. They are foundational principles that shape the project from its earliest iterations and inform how the unit can function across a range of housing and shelter contexts over time.
First, the Pendulum Bubble is designed as a complete compact dwelling that can be lived in immediately and indefinitely from the start. It is not a partial structure, placeholder, or shell awaiting future investment in order to become habitable. From the moment of occupancy, the unit functions as a legitimate domestic environment capable of supporting daily life with intention and beauty in mind. This completeness is essential to its ability to operate credibly as shelter, as small permanent housing, or as part of an incremental building process. Dignity, comfort, and functionality are not deferred to a later phase.
At the same time, the Bubble is designed to expand over time in multiple ways. Growth is treated as an expected condition rather than an exception or upgrade. The initial investment is intended to serve as a foundation for future adaptation rather than as a disposable or temporary solution. This approach recognizes that housing needs, household composition, and available resources change over time, and that dwellings should be able to respond to those changes without requiring replacement.
Universal design principles inform the project wherever possible. The Pendulum Bubble is conceived to accommodate a range of mobility and access needs and to adapt as occupants’ physical abilities change. Accessibility is treated not as a specialized condition tied to a specific user group, but as a reality that unfolds across the lifespan of both the dwelling and its inhabitants. The goal is not to anticipate every possible need, but to avoid foreclosing adaptability through rigid design decisions.
Crucially, the Bubble is also designed for assembly and disassembly.
Recognizing the realities of displacement, land tenure uncertainty, shifting site conditions, or just opportunities on the shelter-to-housing continuum illustrated with the San Francisco Earthquake Shacks, the unit can be constructed, deconstructed, and relocated multiple times. Design for disassembly is treated as a core architectural value rather than as a contingency. This approach extends the useful life of the unit, reduces material waste, and allows the same structure to support different uses over time.
Sustainability and engagement with the natural world are integral to the project’s intent. The Bubble’s compact footprint reduces material use and operational energy demand, while its openness to light, air, and outdoor space supports both environmental performance and human well-being. Sustainability is approached not only as a matter of technical performance, but as a way of supporting intentional living through awareness of scale, resource use, and relationship to place.
From a construction standpoint, the Pendulum Bubble is designed to support partial to full prefabrication. Prefabrication allows for cost control, speed of deployment, and consistency of quality, while remaining adaptable to different fabrication environments and labor models. This flexibility supports deployment across a range of contexts, from municipal shelter programs to individual owner-builders.
Flexibility under varying building codes is another central design intention. By maintaining interior dimensions and programmatic elements compatible with multiple regulatory categories, the Bubble aims to be able to function as a detached bedroom, an accessory dwelling unit, an alternative shelter pod, or a standalone small house depending on jurisdiction and context. This regulatory compatibility aims to reduce reliance on loopholes and increases the likelihood that units can transition between uses over time.
The Bubble is also conceived to operate in aggregation. Individual units can be clustered to form small neighborhoods or village-scale communities that balance privacy with shared space and social infrastructure. In these configurations, the consistency of the core simplifies planning and service provision, while the capacity for adaptation allows individual dwellings to evolve in response to occupant needs.
Finally, the Pendulum Bubble is designed to support partial or full off-grid operation when needed. While technically demanding, this capability reflects a commitment to resilience and autonomy in contexts where utilities may be unavailable, unreliable, or intentionally minimized. Off-grid capacity is treated not as a novelty, but as part of a broader strategy for adaptability and long-term relevance.
Taken together, these design intentions position the Pendulum Bubble not as a single solution, but as a flexible framework capable of supporting multiple housing trajectories over time.
The Pendulum Bubble as a Core
The Pendulum Bubble can be understood not just as a discrete housing unit, but as a foundational core around which multiple forms of dwelling can emerge. This distinction is intentional and fundamental to the project’s logic. Rather than delivering a complete and fixed object, the Bubble concentrates the most complex and essential elements of domestic life into a compact structure that can function independently while remaining open to future expansion.
At its most basic level, the Bubble functions as a complete, livable space. It provides a protected environment and accommodates sleeping, living, cooking, bathing, and utility systems within a compact footprint. This completeness is critical. The Bubble is designed to be occupied from day one, allowing it to operate credibly within both shelter and housing contexts without deferring dignity, comfort, or functionality.
What differentiates the Bubble from many small housing and shelter typologies is its explicit anticipation of change. The design assumes that occupants’ needs, resources, and aspirations will evolve, and that the built environment should be able to evolve alongside them.
Expansion is treated as an expected condition rather than as an exception.
A central strategy enabling this flexibility is the separation of the dwelling core from its protective envelope. The Pendulum Bubble employs an external structural frame utilizing a wood bypass system that supports a lightweight marine canvas roof held independently of the core. This configuration creates a second protected volume above and around the dwelling that can be used in multiple ways while limiting an increase to the complexity or cost of the initial build. Within this protected zone, additional space can be used for storage, sleeping, living, or utility infrastructure depending on context and need. In some cases, it may support off-grid systems such as water storage or photovoltaic infrastructure. In others, the roof may be pulled back for stargazing. Importantly, the design does not prescribe how this space must be used, allowing it to be shaped by occupants rather than dictated by the architect. The independent external frame and canvas roof are key elements that allow for disassembly and reassembly should the unit need to be moved or adapted in significant ways. As resources allow or circumstances change, the Bubble’s core may be incorporated into a larger envelope. The superstructure and roof may be removed or replaced, leaving behind a compact but complete core that can serve as the kitchen, bathroom, living, and utility spine of a larger dwelling. In this way, the Bubble is designed to be able to seed future housing if the homeowner desires.
Equally important is the Bubble’s capacity for aggregation from its onset. While each unit is designed to function independently, groups of Bubbles can be arranged to form small neighborhoods, villages, cottage clusters, or campus-like settings organized around shared outdoor spaces and amenities. In these configurations, modest scale supports density without sacrificing privacy, and consistency of the core simplifies infrastructure planning while allowing individual dwellings to evolve uniquely.
Underlying these design decisions is a commitment to dignity as a spatial condition. The Pendulum Bubble does not seek to emulate conventional housing at a reduced scale, nor does it adopt the aesthetics of emergency shelter. Instead, it creates spaces that feel intentional, cared for, and capable of supporting daily life with clarity and purpose. Light, proportion, and materiality are treated as essential components of domestic experience rather than as optional enhancements.
The project reframes what it means to build shelter and small housing. It suggests that the most valuable contribution architecture can make in this space is the delivery of possibilities.
Applications Across the Housing Spectrum
Because the Pendulum Bubble is conceived as a core rather than a fixed typology, it is capable of operating across a wide range of housing and shelter contexts. Its value lies not in serving a single programmatic need, but in its ability to remain relevant as circumstances change. The same architectural logic can support shelter, small permanent housing, incremental homebuilding, and intentional living by choice.
Shelter and Transitional Housing
Within non-congregate shelter and village models, the Pendulum Bubble can function as a high-quality sleeping and living unit clustered around shared facilities. Its compact footprint and controlled cost allow it to compete directly with existing shelter units, while its completeness and spatial quality offer a meaningful improvement over many current models. Privacy, autonomy, and personal control are treated as foundational conditions rather than privileges. Crucially, the Bubble is not designed to become stranded as a single-use shelter artifact. Units can be relocated, repurposed, or incorporated into future housing developments as needs shift. This capacity extends the useful life of each unit and improves the long-term value of public and philanthropic investment by allowing shelter infrastructure to participate directly in permanent housing pathways.
Disaster Response
In post-disaster and climate-related displacement contexts, speed, adaptability, and durability are essential. The Pendulum Bubble’s size, compatibility with prefabrication, and design for disassembly make it suitable for rapid deployment. At the same time, its capacity for expansion and integration into longer-term housing pathways addresses a persistent failure of emergency shelter, which often remains temporary far longer than intended (think Katrina trailer). In these scenarios, the Bubble can serve as immediate habitation while providing a foundation for rebuilding that unfolds over time. Rather than cycling displaced residents through multiple layers of temporary housing, the same structure can remain in use as conditions stabilize and resources become available.
Small Permanent Housing and Intentional Living
For individuals and households pursuing modest or intentional living by choice, the Pendulum Bubble can function as a complete small home. Its scale, efficiency, and engagement with light and outdoor space align with values of sustainability, autonomy, and reduced environmental impact. In these contexts, the Bubble is not a compromise or stepping stone, but a deliberate dwelling aligned with personal priorities. Where desired, the unit’s capacity for expansion allows it to grow alongside changing needs, or remain as a freestanding space alongside others.
Accessory Dwellings and Backyard Infill
As municipalities revisit zoning regulations to allow for increased density and diversified housing types, the Pendulum Bubble offers a flexible option for accessory dwelling units and backyard infill. While the initial design is smaller than ADU requirements in some municipalities, it anticipates compatibility with multiple regulatory classifications in order to operate within evolving residential contexts. In these applications, the Bubble can support intergenerational living, rental income, caregiving arrangements, backyard office, or just extra space. Over time, it may be incorporated into larger residential compositions or remain independent, depending on site conditions and household needs.
Rural and Exurban Housing
In rural and exurban contexts, where access to utilities, capital, and formal housing markets may be limited, the Pendulum Bubble’s off-grid capabilities and phased expansion strategy provide a viable pathway to housing. The unit can be deployed initially as a complete dwelling and later incorporated into a larger structure such as a barndominium as resources allow. This approach supports self-determined building practices while maintaining a level of quality and performance often absent from informal or ad hoc construction. It also reduces the pressure to complete housing in a single phase, aligning investment with lived realities.
Community Clusters and Intentional Neighborhoods
When aggregated, Pendulum Bubbles can form the basis of small neighborhoods or cottage-style communities organized around shared outdoor spaces and amenities. These clusters benefit from reduced infrastructure requirements, efficient land use, and opportunities for social connection without sacrificing individual autonomy. The Pendulum Bubble is intentionally designed to serve constituencies whose needs often intersect but are rarely addressed by a single housing typology. These include municipalities seeking shelter options that function as direct pathways to permanent housing, individuals and families pursuing affordability and intentional living, communities experimenting with collective arrangements, and service providers responding to displacement in the wake of climate and natural disasters.
Implications for Policy, Practice, and Design
Reframing shelter and small housing as incremental systems rather than finished products carries implications beyond any single project.
For municipalities, it suggests the need to reconsider regulatory frameworks that assume permanence must be achieved at the moment of occupancy. Policies that allow for phased development, flexible definitions of dwelling units, and alternative permitting pathways can enable more responsive and cost-effective housing solutions. Importantly, this does not require abandoning safety or quality standards, but aligning them with how people actually build, adapt, and inhabit space over time.
For service providers, the Pendulum Bubble highlights the value of shelter environments that support agency, dignity, and future orientation. When shelter is designed as a foundation rather than a stopgap, it can reinforce stabilization efforts and support transitions to permanent housing rather than interrupting them.
For architects and designers, this approach calls for a shift in professional posture. Designing for adaptability requires comfort with unknown future collaborators and an acceptance that housing will change in ways that cannot be fully predicted. Rather than delivering fixed objects, architects are asked to design frameworks that support growth, modification, and participation over time. This expands the scope of architectural responsibility beyond the moment of occupancy and places greater emphasis on long-term relevance and stewardship.
For funders and policymakers, incremental housing challenges conventional metrics of success. Speed, cost, and unit count remain important, but they are insufficient on their own. Housing that can adapt, relocate, or integrate into future development retains value longer and reduces the need for repeated cycles of temporary investment. Funding for housing and shelter can be combined into one investment. Evaluating housing as an evolving asset rather than a one-time deliverable can improve both fiscal and social outcomes.
Conclusion
The distinction between shelter and housing is often treated as self-evident. In practice, it is a product of regulatory, financial, and professional frameworks that privilege completeness, fixity, and single-use solutions. As housing affordability declines and climate-related displacement increases, this distinction has become increasingly misaligned with lived reality.
The Pendulum Bubble serves as a case study for an understanding of small housing that does not propose to resolve these conditions on its own. By treating shelter as a better beginning rather than a better endpoint, and by designing housing as an adaptable core rather than a finished product, it challenges assumptions that limit who housing is for and how it can evolve. And, critically, by designing units as permanent housing of choice that can serve as shelter in some cases rather than designing shelter that can unintentionally become long term housing, architects can contribute to an approach that utilizes their larger skillset.
Incremental housing is not a new idea. It is a suppressed one. Recovering its logic requires not only regulatory reform, but architectural approaches that acknowledge housing as a process shaped by time, resources, and human agency. The Pendulum Bubble is one such approach. It demonstrates how small, well-designed cores can support multiple housing trajectories without relying on exception, avoidance, or disposability.
In doing so, it invites a broader reconsideration of how shelter, housing, and permanence might be reimagined as parts of a continuum. When housing is designed to grow with people rather than replace them, it can support stability, dignity, and possibility across a wider range of lives and circumstances.
As Pendulum continues to evolve its Pendulum Bubble design approach through prototyping, dialogue, and community feedback, we look forward to sharing outcomes and our evolution in this realm.
“Someday we’ll build a home on a hilltop high – You and I – Shiny and new, a cottage that two can fill – And we’ll be pleased to be called – The folks who live on the hill. Someday we may be adding a wing or two – a thing or two – We will make changes as any family will – But we will always be called – The folks who live on the hill. ” -from The Folks Who Live on the Hill (Kern & Hammertstein), an American Standard.
About the Authors
Jonathan O’Neil Cole is the founding principal of Pendulum Studio, a Kansas City–based architecture firm known for its innovative civic, residential, and sports facility design. With a career spanning over two decades and more than 22 ballparks nationwide, Cole is recognized as a leading mind in sports architecture.
In recent years, Cole has expanded Pendulum’s impact through ventures like the Pendulum Lifestyle studio and a new fabrication shop – Pendulum Industrial Works. His latest effort, the Pendulum Bubble, reflects a deep commitment to socially responsive design.
For Cole, this tiny house represents the power of Pendulum’s design ethos to address pressing 21st-century issues such as housing, sustainability, and equity. His work continues to explore how architecture can empower communities, challenge norms, and deliver long-term value through innovation, craft, and purpose-driven design.
Todd Ferry
Todd Ferry is an architect, researcher, educator, and nationally recognized leader in public-interest design, focusing on how architecture can address pressing social issues such as homelessness. During his more than ten years as associate director at Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design, he led pioneering efforts in alternative shelter, mobile placemaking, and community engagement, most notably advancing the creation of tiny house villages to address homelessness, including the country’s first city-sponsored tiny house village. This work has been featured in publications including Architectural Record and The New York Times. He is a co-founder of PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative (HRAC) and a faculty fellow of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions. In collaboration with HRAC colleagues, he has conducted the largest study to date on the impacts and outcomes of tiny home villages for people experiencing homelessness. His current National Science Foundation-funded research explores how to support Alaska Native communities facing displacement due to climate change through improved housing design and participatory design processes. Now based in Baltimore, Todd serves as Studio Director for Pendulum’s Mid-Atlantic region, where he is advancing the Pendulum Bubble and forging new typologies to address critical housing needs.
Endnotes
- U.S. Census Bureau, “Highlights of 2024 Characteristics of New Housing,” accessed December 17, 2025, https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/highlights.html.
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, The 2024 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, Part 1: Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness (Washington, DC: HUD, 2024), https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2024-AHAR-Part-1.pdf.
- J. Greene, T. Ferry, E. Leickly, and F. H. Spurbeck, “Cost comparison of congregate, motel, and village-type shelters for people experiencing homelessness,” Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness (2025): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/10530789.2025.2473756.
- Pendulum Studio, The Pendulum Bubble (internal publication, 2025).
- J. Romero, “The House Is in the Mail,” Econ Focus (Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond), 2019, https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2019/q2-3/economic_history.
- San Francisco Planning Department, Earthquake Shacks Theme Document (San Francisco: City and County of San Francisco, 2021), https://sfplanning.org/sites/default/files/documents/preserv/HCS_Earthquake_Shacks_Theme_Document.pdf.
- Federal Emergency Management Agency, “Transportable Temporary Housing Units: Frequently Asked Questions,” last modified January 31, 2025, https://www.fema.gov/fact-sheet/transportable-temporary-housing-units-frequently-asked-questions.
- American Planning Association, “Accessory Dwelling Units,” APA Knowledgebase, accessed December 17, 2025, https://www.planning.org/knowledgebase/accessorydwellings/.
- Agha, M., & Lambert, L. (2020, December 16). Outrage: Informality is a fallacy. The Architectural Review.
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