Flexibility

First Iteration of Abstract: Flexibility: Architecture Adapting to Time and Change

A building has always been synonymous with being permanent.  Permanent does not mean timeless.  Being timeless means being used to your full advantage always.  Society is always evolving.  Today, we are changing at alarming rates.  People can update everything with a click of a mouse.  Why should the architecture we live in and around be any different?

The idea of flexibility in architecture means a building could potentially be timeless.  It is able to change with time.  It is using time to its advantage instead of making it the building’s death sentence.  Allowing a building to change or be flexible mean it can adopt to change.  Programmatically, looking at the way we plan spatially differently to create a successful space and looking at a buildings structure and boundaries (or lack of boundaries) and alter them to design a flexible building.

The scale of change can vary.  Allowing a whole building to change its purpose over a human’s lifetime verses it changing seasonally or changing hourly, can have an affect on experience.  Time based architecture can take full advantage of a site and be extremely efficient, economically, ecologically, and functionally.

Being able to change a building flexibility is the opposite of doing a full overhaul or gutting a building.  It means designing for change and when change occurs, it does not consume time and resources.  Using time-based architecture at an hourly or daily scale can be simple changes, like changing proportions, accessibility or connections, create new programmatic functions.  This brings concepts of having part permanent and part temporary structures to a building.  Creating a semi-permanent structure can allow for the possibilities of a flexible, timeless building.