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Loose fit

The idea of building for permanence, yet incorporating flexibility to accommodate future change and minimizing energy footprint throughout its physical life, is surely the ultimate holistic objective for the architecture profession (Murray, 2011).Sustainable building should reflect adaptability and flexibility for social, economic and environmental impacts. Sustainable buildings should designed to provide long-term benefits to the society they serve, and transcend the utilitarian and the fashionable in favor of performance. Implying that sustainable building design must have considered issues of flexibility to offer in the ever changing world which we live in and must stand the test of time. A zero carbon building with a short life span and no consideration of alternative uses after its original function becomes arguably only a minor contribution towards sustainability of our cities. Cost is usually an important driver in building industry, and a high construction price may well preclude the pursuit of sustainability during design. But the costs of buildings can be many times greater when measured over their lifetime, and there is opportunity that sustainable building can contribute to lower operational costs even in cases where the initial construction cost is higher.
For a wide range of reasons, buildings can become obsolete long before their physical life has come to an end. Investing in long-lived buildings may be sub-optimal if their useful life falls well short of their physical life. It is wise to design future buildings for change by making them more flexible yet with sufficient structural integrity to support alternative functional use. The development of a design rating scheme for adaptation potential enables building designers to understand the long-term impacts of design decisions prior to construction, and thus enable optimization for adaptive reuse to occur from the outset. As adaptive reuse potential already embodies financial, social and environmental criteria, the rating scheme would extend traditional operational considerations such as energy performance to include retrofit, refurbishment and renewal considerations. Today urban development, new buildings are created and older ones demolished when the old ones can no longer accommodate the needs of urban context. The adaptability within a design concept is important because of the potential for change of functional use later in life. Sustainable development is enhanced when buildings meet longer-term design performance thresholds.


Source- https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/jul/29/guardianobituaries3
Image Source- http://isitfuturearchitecture.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/final-digital-presentation.html

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