Progetto flessibilità evolutività

Design flexibility evolutivity At present, the themes linked to the preservation of the environment and the valorisation of resources are unavoidable necessities requiring a change in the design paradigm in relation to the time factor. “Time” should be interpreted here both as the building’s lifetime and the capitalisation/recapitalisation of the resources used to create and manage such building. This discussion revolves around the regeneration, resilience, multifunctionality and lifecycle of architectural products, as well as their constitutive elements. Current researches venture beyond monofunctional lifecycle, encouraging the constructs to live several lives with different functions. To this end, building organisms need to be dynamic with regards to their own components, and thus to become more maintainable, accessible, replaceable and transformable. In this way they can oppose degradation and favour adaptation. Nonetheless, the debate goes well beyond the accurate and necessary “monitoring” of the effects of time on buildings, which is deeply rooted into maintenance programs; not to mention all those – still quite rare – projects supporting maintainability, indicating that some strategic decisions are being taken in this respect anyway. There is much more to be said. The aim is to introduce a certain potential of the project, an ability which hasn’t been neither acknowledged nor manifested and yet has been studied for many a year now. Such ability has the power to systemically connect the partiality (and thus dynamism) character of quality to time. Therefore, the project gets explicitly enhanced by other constitutive elements such as reversibility and evolutivity, coherently with the pursuit of functional hybridization resulting from a plurifunctional planning process, which contemplates the valorisation of buildings. Time is recognized as a programmatic factor in relation to design choices. Besides, the complexity of the contemporary scenario causes the emerging of another too-many-times-interrupted discussion pivoting on the topic Re-design the design, which develops a series of variants and invariants meant to functionally renovating buildings in terms of environmental, economic and social eco-efficiency. The project basically reinforces its proactivity features through a programmatic behaviour which includes and supports the building’s functional reconversion over time, while anticipating the possibility of transformation and reconversion from the perspective of valorisation. As a result, the project acquires a clear predictive character and the concept of anticipation expands to encompass functional transformations, thus obtaining a project resultant which adapts and reacts to the transformation phenomenon itself. Predictive projects aim to cross over the static condition of time t0 of constructions and current ordinary management procedures, gravitating towards a dynamic, “variable-asset” spatial dimension. Such dimension is supported by a building system with high-variable technological components, which can increase the value of buildings and consequently of their urban context in time t(x+y+w+z). This change in the paradigm is founded on the principle of flexibility – particularly on techno-typological flexibility. Flexibility becomes an important tool to support the thesis according to which architecture should abide by Darwin’s evolution theory. This essay attempts to define and demonstrate the imperative character of project principles. Such considerations are definitely not new, but their goal is actually quite contemporary: the metamorphosis of the project resultant and the extension of its lifecycle based on relative temporality, that is, the ability of a building to change its intended use in relation to the manifestation of a need in a given context.