Adaptability of Space
"The balance between what will change and what will remain long term is becoming increasingly important when projects become larger and larger"
There's a trend to design for adaptability. Buildings come and go as time goes on, the wants and needs for users change and the demands of culture continually change. Designing a flexible, adaptable space can allow for all of these changes and demands to take place. For example, commercial office buildings offer the tenants an empty floor space to be fitted out to their specific needs. So the architect is now just designing shells for tenants/users to come in and fix them up to their specific needs. This flexibility of space is supposed to take advantage of the ever changing needs and wants of a space. A building that never needs to be torn down. On the other hand, architects that design to the specific needs of the users to where to building is designed perfectly to how that user is going to use and interact in the space. Does this mean once that user vacates the space that the space can never be used again and just needs to be torn down?Design for adaptability or design to the specific needs of the user, which is better?
I'm not sure that it has to be just one or the other. I think that the conflicts between the two present a new design challenge: how to design to the needs of a specific user while building in the flexibility for change in the future? Maybe it is more about thinking of a building in terms of layers and their corresponding lifespans so that there is an easy or accessible option for adaptability in the future.
ReplyDeleteI think that there are times when designing for adaptability is better and times where designing for the user is better. In your example of designing a generic office space, yes you want to make the building function the best that it can as an office space, but you also want to design for adaptability so that when the user changes, the building adapts. Some spaces though, such as a church, doesn't really want to change uses. Converting a church into an office doesn't always make the most sense and in my opinion, designing with that thought process would take away from the users experience in the church. I think we need to remember that not all buildings are meant to last forever and while we do not want to poorly design, some buildings will always need to be background buildings that get torn down 50 to 100 years in the future and something else gets built. Another way to think about it is, if nothing ever got torn down, how would our profession continue? How would we be able to advance if everything was just being reused rather than being built?
ReplyDeleteI agree with an above comment, there doesn't have to be a dichotomy. The challenge is something beyond us as designers purely because we cannot predict the future. However, we can do out best to predict the next 15 years. Floor heights, location, site conditions, façade conditions...the larger picture may have a greater impact over many years. The interior space however may fluctuate programmatically. To me the challenge is more about smarter design and flexible interiors.
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