Architecture is typically slow, heavy, expensive, and inert. By contrast, the speed of social, technological, and institutional upheavals has never been greater. Climate change, health crises, and economic and political instability are quickly outpacing architecture’s ability to respond with agility. Clearly evident across COVID-19 in New York City, millions of square feet of office space still lie vacant while affordable housing shortages continue to rise. Ambitious plans to convert empty office buildings into residential space have run up against physical obstacles: deep office floor plates, central cores, and excessive distances from sources of light and air make these buildings incompatible with housing standards. This mismatch illustrates a general architectural problem: buildings have historically been designed to serve a single program well. This monofunctional approach produces an architecture that satisfies one set of needs while rendering the structure useless when needs inevitably evolve.
As many buildings drift into obsolescence and architecture falls increasingly out of sync with a changing world, adaptation offers an alternative model. Adaptive reuse is generally embraced for its commitments to the preservation of cultural heritage and promotion of environmental sustainability. As populations expand and needs diversify, however, the demand for more space and new needs is inevitable. The future calls for a more agile approach. How do we design for an indeterminate future in which the only certainty we have is that everything will change faster than we can imagine and that today’s urgency may well be displaced by tomorrow’s crisis?
If our uncertain future requires flexible buildings, what forms can they take? Does adaptability necessarily produce a neutral architecture or can new and distinctive building types emerge unprompted by programmatic difference?
Princeton University School of Architecture
Graduate Option Studio
Fall 2021