FLEXIBILITY, PERMANENCE AND CHANGE IN ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

A building’s life may be prolonged for various reasons, including because it is becoming obsolete or to adapt it to new uses, temporality being an inevitable condition of all architecture. Our way of understanding any particular architecture also changes as its cultural, social, political meanings – or the interests of architectural criticism – change over time. The authors who most frequently address the concept of flexibility in architecture tend to focus precisely on architecture’s ability to change over time, among other aspects. This article examines two ways in which flexibility as capacity for change derives from a condition of permanence, either through the inclusion of change as a fundamental variable of the project, or through the the architect’s work as an interpreter who brings new layers of meaning to existing constructions. Some recent examples in French architecture – and in particular Lacaton & Vassal – will be cited to illustrate the first of these ideas, while the text La vida de los edificios by Rafael Moneo and his citation of Umberto Eco’s Opera aperta are employed in reference to the second. In both cases, architecture is understood as an “open project”. This article explores these two distinct senses of the term flexibility that link it to change and permanence. It ends with a better known – but more surprising – third aspect of flexibility, in which permanence can also found in an architecture whose meaning and time are invariable, closed.