New Reality. New Architecture.

The last few decades can be characterized, socially and physically, by rapid shifts and intense impacts. Climate changes year after year, as does advanced technology and human behaviour. Environmental catastrophes and infectious outbreaks force the re-forming of entire cities and regions, imposing high human and economic costs. The built environment cannot keep up with these deviations—rather it simply, in best-case scenarios, endeavours to limit damages. Through our ongoing research into flexible architecture, particularly in residential projects, the most common perceptions have expensive a negative connotation. For many industry professionals, flexible design has been branded as costly, difficult to deploy, and demanding state-of-the-art gadgetry. Such views have been driven, in part, by technical attempts to future-proof buildings through the application of specific parameters such as movable partitions or pursuing over-engineering. Why then, after more than a century of attempts to design for flexibility, the issue is still marginalized to the profession at large? 

Through reviewing of the existing literature, it became clear that design approaches have focused primarily on physical flexibility (e.g., floor-to-ceiling height, structural load, organization of space, etc.). This overly narrow approach arguably leaves the user and the environment out of the equation, leading to inevitable failure of the built environment’s capacity to respond to social or environmental changes. The present research argues that achieving flexible buildings demands a more balanced and integrated approach, namely the pursuit and realization of Agile Architecture. A re-conceptualization is needed that goes beyond matters of physical durability to more nuanced views of buildings as socialized products constantly in the making and always responding to a milieu of change. The present research contextualizes the unifying principles of Agile design by underlining the industry mindset (via a survey to illuminate barriers against formulating/implementing such a holistic approach) and studying current residential design practices (via seminal cases of projects strategically drawn from global cities, illustrating progressive concepts within the design, legislative and/or financial ethos). The present paper positions Agile Architecture in the context of environmental, social, and economic sustainability, then delineates progress along a multifaceted journey that aspires to dramatically reconsider the way we design buildings.