030 Reading: Flexible: Architecture that Responds to Change

• Flexible architecture consists of buildings that are designed to respond easily to change throughout their lifetime
• “Flexible architecture remains in use longer, fits its purpose better, accommodates users’ experience and intervention, takes advantage of technical innovation more readily and is economically and ecologically more viable”
• It has potential to remain relevant to cultural and social trends
• “Human beings are flexible creatures. We move about at will, manipulate objects and operate in a wide range of environments. There was a time, not too long ago in evolutionary terms, when our existence was based on our capacity for movement and adaptability; indeed it is to this that we owe our survival as a species. Most cultures now lead a more or less sedentary life, but it could be that flexibility is once again becoming a priority in human development and that technological, social and economic changes are forcing, or at least encouraging, a new form of nomadic existence based on global markets, the world wide web and cheap, fast transportation”
• Flexible architecture responds to change – it adapts, transforms, is motive and interacts
• “The ultimate flexible interior may be one that is completely amorphous and transitional; changing shape, colour, lighting level, acoustics and temperature as the inhabitant moves through it”
• Japan: Flexible rooms are common due to lack of space – they include flexible items of furniture and fittings which can allow the rooms to adjust use – their culture is a large driving factor for this – is it possible that in western society that our culture (or lack of) allows us to just construct buildings that provide every need via greed

o “The features of contemporary life that lead to mobility – personal transportation, computing, mobile phones and access to affordable air travel – are directly linked to the economic, political, social, demographic and technological developments that are now taken for granted in the west”

• Flexible architecture must respond to new problems and opportunities that arise from cultural, societal and functionally needs – also has to provides meaningful, high-quality design to accommodate the human need and desire for beauty
• Frank Lloyd Wright – understand of Japanese architecture feature in his praire-style houses with moveable screens and shutters
• Le Corbusier – flexible elements such as gridded, folding and sliding screens to change room uses – and furniture that had multiple uses
• Nakagin Capsule Tower – Japan 1972 – the idea was there however the building was never altered

Kronenburg, R. 2007. Flexible: Architecture That Responds to Change. Laurence King Publishing