Designing Flexibility and Adaptability: The Answer to Integrated Residential Building Retrofit

Abstract

Speaking about building retrofit in Europe, the attention is often focused on the residential building stock built after the Second World War, which represents the 75% of the total number of buildings present on the territory. Recently many cities are encouraging campaigns of retrofit of the housing heritage built after the Second World War, since, in terms of cost, time, financing, consumption, and sustainability, the practice appears more convenient than building anew. To maximize the benefits of these retrofit campaigns, it is essential to promote multi-purpose and innovative strategies considering contemporarily architectural, functional and structural aspects. In the field of housing, in particular, it is necessary to develop new models able to answer to the new living style of a dynamic society. In fact, today as in the past, one of the downfalls of the housing sector is failing to recognize the human dimension within the designing process. This paper evaluates past architectural practices to achieve adaptability and flexibility in the residential sector and evaluate strategies for integrated retrofit based on two macro-areas: architectural/societal/functional and structural/technological/constructional.

Keywords

• flexibility
• adaptability
• housing
• building retrofit