Adaptive Architecture
The Economist on the London bombings:
No city… can stop terrorists altogether. What can be said, though, is that terrorists are unable to stop cities, either. Perhaps an army, launching wave after wave of attacks, might succeed in doing so, especially if it were to deploy biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Short of that, cities will always bounce back quickly, after the initial shock. They are resilient organisms, with powerful social and economic reasons to shrug off terrorism.
But of course, cities themselves don’t bounce back or change at all. The adaptability of a city lies in the fact that physically, it’s no more than a structure. The composition of the city, the orgamism of the quote above, is the made up of the people, social networks, experiences, and organisation that hang on the physical framework of a densely populated space.
In How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand notes that family homes can easily adapt to the needs of those living in them - rooms can be swapped, renovated, and re-used. Institutional buildings, on the other hand, have great difficulty in changing their function after they have been designed. They can’t adapt easily because their function is too rigidly written into their structure. Form follows function, but it should also be ready to keep up with function. Brian Eno on the appeal of adaptability:
An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me.
This is also Jeff Tweedy’s approach to art:
I believe 50 percent of art is the perception of the listener… as an artist all you’re really doing is hopefully giving people the raw material to think here something and make something out of it. I always think about how the world made something just incredibly beautiful out of Elvis Presley that he could have never in a million years intended. The intent of the author, the artist, the writer is really once it’s done your involvement is finished.
It’s also there in Jane Jacobs’ community-led, bottom-up approach to city planning, and Steven Johnson’s swarmlike collaberative filtering to achieve the emergence of optimium performance.
This way of thinking about design applies to lots of other stuff too - programmers who write reusable, modular code; copyright, and the freedom to remix content; open source and the ability to branch developments; open-ended, free-roaming video games; templates, themes and plugins for blogs; digital rights management and proprietary formats; mobile phone covers and ringtones; evolution.
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August 6th, 2005 at 7:25 pm
just a quick comment in relation to “Institutional buildings, on the other hand, have great difficulty in changing their function after they have been designed. They can’t adapt easily because their function is too rigidly written into their structure.”
rtc galway or gmit where i went to college was one of the first rtc’s in ireland. (may actually have been the very first). opened in 1972 the building was designed around the idea that if attendance never became sufficient to make the college’s future viable then the structure would not be abandoned but turned into a commercial or industrial space. take a walk inside the building and you’ll note that all internal walls serve no function other than division of space. actually, if those walls were completely demolished what would remain would be one cavernous and open space, practically inviting large machinery inside to give the building new meaning and purpose.
although my point is very specific to a fraction of what you talk about, and probably unnecessary, it does illustrate rare government foresight at a time when ireland was really struggling. thankfully, the college succeeded and the network expanded, providing affordable and high quality education to tens of thousands of young irish people, giving them the skills and confidence to achieve whatever they desired. it is said that the irish used to emigrate with nothing more than some honest shovel skills. how times have changed.
August 8th, 2005 at 7:15 pm
The extent to which an environment requires an individual’s input to be completed is essential to creativity as a whole. It is places that ‘aren’t quite done’ that attract artists, creatives and spur urban renewal…and why cookie-cutter strip malls and “historic downtown” areas which offer a mono-chromatic, non-interactive environments are so unappealing and depressing…A person’s ability to impact his immediate envrionment is essential to his creative and emotional well being.
Putting personal photographs and trinkets at your desk is seen as a given, but on a larger scale, the ablility to influence your environment, your own “personal work space”, by interacting with your community, supporting innovation and forward thinking, is denied people who live in ‘pre-packaged’ areas. They are required to view the world only on other peoples terms.
August 10th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
It seems to me that lots of Irish institutional buildings of old have been successfully repurposed — convents as schools, churches as librarys etc. Yesterday I was in a hotel in Sligo that used to be a mental hospital.
I’m not sure what the masses of boxey apartments currently being built everywhere will be good for in 50 years time though. There’s nothing sustainable about the Ballymun model (build, raze, rebuild) being repeated every couple of decades.
All of that said, I don’t know if my respect for adaptive building design consolidates with my fondness for abandoned spaces.
August 11th, 2005 at 12:10 am
if only i had the balls to explore what i am not meant to. this (http://www.actionsquad.org/hammsoverview.htm) is nay more than 10 minutes bike ride from where i sit.
August 23rd, 2005 at 11:47 am
Check this one out on virtual architecture: http://www.fondation-langlois.org/zidarich/
September 10th, 2005 at 11:24 am
[...] This is basically what I was working towards when thinking about adaptive architecture. In fact, what I’ve been thinking about in relation to programming doesn’t really have much to do with writing code (although the style of coding would be directly influenced by the general approach, and necessary to it’s success), but more to do with the philosophy behind the code. That is: let go. Enable, don’t control. [...]
November 9th, 2006 at 9:38 am
i’m a student of architecture studying adaptability of post earthquake housing done in gujarat.
can somebody please give me examples of good adaptable buildings?
November 9th, 2006 at 9:41 am
well, i’m also struggling with finding the differences between adaptability & flexibility.