Abstract Summary
The global climate challenge, together with the numerous economic, energy and societal crisis, requires architects, designers, citymakers and stakeholders to re-think their approach to the city and the territory. Moreover, the shared urge for a sustainable and inclusive future in the built environment claims for a new way to approach the design of the space. In this frame of uncertainty and technocracy, we want to investigate and understand possible scenarios of transformation and their impact on the design of space. Among the many possibilities, the concept of ‘Adaptive Architecture’ can constitute a holistic approach to cope with future challenges, by providing site- and time-specific solutions to the contemporary issues architecture and urban design are facing nowadays. The scientific paper presents some outputs of our current research project on Adaptive Architecture. We focus on explorations around the theme of adaptability and its recurrence in time in the disciplinary literature, in order to explore in which way(s) it contributes to the design of architectonic and urban space beyond traditional confines. Keeping in mind the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their impact on the design of urban spaces, we want to explore the different concepts and methods of Adaptive Architecture in the last decades, as well as in recent times, and future possibilities, focusing on how they define sustainable and inclusive ways of living as core qualities of a “messy city”. In fact, as design approach, Adaptive Architecture, reveals through the years a continuous search for new spatial configurations that can respond to users’, usages’ and environmental needs. Therefore, these endogenous and exogenous variables contribute to define the difference between the various facets of Adaptability through time, together with the advancements in technology. This manifests at every scale of spatial interactions, from the interpersonal, to those with the direct surroundings, from the architectural to the urban and territorial scales, with specific regards to the social engagement. The capability of responding to many and various aspects have caught the interest of several disciplines, from urban design, to built environment, to civic design and so on, resulting in an overlapping of meanings and definitions. We have been mapping out those interpretations and put them into relations to define the methodological and conceptual resources for a new way of understanding and designing urban spaces. The paper aims to generate holistic insights on the concept and methods of adaptive cities through some of the research outcomes. The expanding mechanism that we reckon in the growth of the adaptive approach -from the building to the network- will be explored, aiming at investigating new lines of research, education and practice, so as to address urgently needed research questions.
