Pre-daptive Re-use

Strength 

Planar flexibility along a given trajectory‐  
The relationship between functional elements and interpretation of their future conditions has developed a clear growth strategy. This resulted in a centralized configuration whose growth projects outwards. This allows for specialized functions to grow subtractively and loosely defined functions grow additively.  This condition can be built upon by looking at 3 dimensional growth and investigating individual conditions creating a heightened sense of specificity and developing an ‘authored’ core.

Built permanence –
By looking into a designed for disassembly and diagnostic architecture the building is readily able to accommodate change and preserve itself allowing it to last. From this emerges the potential to integrate this strategy holistically into the architecture allowing it to permutate with the user and embody change. Further material and assembly research will provide insight as to how this change can occur and what it will manifest itself as during the change.

Weakness 

Shell + Int. Design –
The architecture is missing as the individual components are seemingly disconnected. The exterior and interior are understood in isolation of one another and by analyzing the correlation between the two to produce a more thoughtful architecture. The spatial configurations have been conceived totally in plan and a cohesive position can emerge through a detailed investigation in all dimensions. By interpreting the functions through plan and section simultaneously, new growth strategies can become evident, drawing the individual components together.

Homogenization –  
For a scheme that attempts to create a high degree of long term adaptability, the proposal maintains an overall homogenization when duplicated. As is typical of housing schemes of this nature to be mass produced by developers, the overall impact of this duplication must be understood. Any changes should be articulated throughout the building and become evident from the exterior. By looking into projects that explore individual expression, strategies could be extrapolated that can personalize individual units and allow them to embody the user requirements.

The development of narrative –  
The narrative of the building was limited to the singular structure of a couple and employs an aging in place strategy.  A wider variety of narratives that project into a varied range of trajectories will provide insight and remove the building from the generic, creating a specific purpose built building that represents the architecture in its entirety. Further investigations into the unique narratives can provide interpretations as to how the architecture will adapt to remain personal.  

Looking Forward 

Architecture of transition, which embraces change while remaining functionally specific, can look to the hybridizing or gender bending of typologies. This becomes evident as a wider range of user trajectories are incorporated from the offset, as the projection of a current function may become flexibly limiting moving forward. This change can begin to manifest itself in other strategies resulting in a new understanding of how growth can occur and how the core is able to permutate to this adjustment.

The economic reasoning for building adaptable can introduce a new layer of specificity to the project. Economically an incremental strategy can be more beneficial to the user and architecture, allowing the building to be readily configured, understanding that a smaller initial investment results in monies becoming available quicker for future additions.This however forces the assumption that the user will want to alter the architecture once monies are available resulting in a maintained homogenization. The economic factor cannot be a driving agent for the architecture but become a supplement which can justify the feasibility of change.

Revised Abstract 

Architecture must be understood as dynamic. Current practice produces static buildings which completely disregard the transitional environment they inhabit. As the vessel for humanity, architecture can be conceived dynamically to produce an object which is capable of readily adapting to the user.  Through a thorough understanding of how time occupies space within a building, a series of parallel narratives emerge. These narratives run alongside one another, occasionally weaving and loop back, manifesting themselves into the architecture and breaking the homogeneous mold of the generic.
A dynamic architecture asserts its performance by readily adapting to user requirements and expressing the specific conditions it houses. The generic free plan approach in architecture limits overall function by employing the benign, while the other extreme instead disregards the future by constricting the user in a scheme with no place to grow. As the ship of thesus, architecture is a vessel in a perpetual state of repair and renovation and must readily accommodate this. This stance opposes the existing condition which denigrates the value of architecture perpetuating its position one step away from a landfill and embraces the romanticism of individual customization. The permanence is understood through the elemental impermanence as the pieces are in a constant state of change allowing the vessel itself to remain.
Architecture of growth will forever remain unique as the building develops organically with the user and embodies their relationship. This relationship between user and building becomes the driving force of design, employing a strategy that is able to create a compromise between existing functionability and future flexibility. By residing in the middle of the two an architecture emerges capable of retaining a high degree of performance functionally, all while accepting the necessity for change and developing the generic as a system to accommodate internal and external growth.