Technological Adaptability: An Approach towards a Flexible and Sustainable Architecture

Abstract

Technological progress is an endless accelerating phenomenon. It becomes a major aspect of our wellbeing and influences our everyday life as well as our use of architectural spaces. Buildings must always embrace technological innovations and follow the pace of their evolution, while absorbing the impact of change. This objective can be achieved by maintaining the building quality, entailing a minimum disruption of the ongoing activities, and lowering expenses as well as energy and materials consumption.The need for technological evolution emanates from users’ needs but also from the surrounding socio-cultural and demographic change, market demands, climate variability, regulations, and aesthetic tendencies. In this context, technological adaptability is crucial to support the building sustainability by ensuring users’ well being and safety (comfort, life quality, positive interaction….), long term value of the building (longevity, cost effectiveness, strong image, etc.) and functional efficiency (multi-functionality, Efficient physical and virtual connections, etc.)The present paper aims to define strategies as well as a set of guidelines that might help to integrate progressive technological features in the building systems. In this perspective, some approaches dealing with architectural adaptability are studied, and a set of guidelines for technological adaptability are drawn from their combination. The adopted methodology takes into account complexity and uncertainty of the building and considers the interrelation of economical, social, spatial, functional and technical aspects. These guidelines constitute a systemic approach and should be considered as a whole to achieve the intended goal.