Adaptable Futures
extending the life of our built environment
The AF exhibition was launched from October 1st at The Building Centre’s Vincent Gallery and was produced by a-small-lab (Chris Berthelsen) for AF. The exhibition is a series of collages on the topic of adaptability, each collage provides a different … Continue reading
FlexiRents is the final year project by Preet Panesar from DS17 (architecture and film design studio) at University of Westminster. The scheme explores adaptable live/work housing solutions. Project description: I began by addressing a common flaw found in modern urban … Continue reading
by Vincenza Santangelo, PhD in Quality of Design The visual map below is the result of the project “Reintepretation. Abandonments as potentialities” coordinated by Vincenza Santangelo with the students Marta Chiogna, Elena Maranghi, Yasmin Sarah Menouer, and Antonio Maria … Continue reading
Hosting our first international student competition has been invaluable for the research – seeing how the AF concepts can be embedded into design solutions. The competition asked students to illustrate how the life of their proposal – whether product, building … Continue reading
Charles Holland, a director of FAT and one of our collaborating partners, spoke about our collaborative work at the Live! Croydon housing seminar. Spanning a packed morning, the event served as both a showcase for Croydon and an awareness … Continue reading
AF recently facilitated two half day workshops with Nightingales Associates for two of the practice’s ongoing projects – the Bio Innovation Centre in Liverpool (science sector) and the Baron Road Primary School in Blackpool (education sector). The workshops … Continue reading
At a recent FREI (Festival of Real Estate Investment) conference in Montenegro, Milorad Vucinic a studio director from IBI+Nightingale (an AF collaborator) talked about their architectural practice’s involvement with the Adaptable Futures project. The presentation (a summary of NA’s involvement … Continue reading
Introduction Figure 1 Exterior of church (left) Sheffield City Centre (right) On April 2nd – 4th, the AF team engaged with a cohort of enthusiastic undergraduate and graduate architecture students from Sheffield Hallam University to investigate the potential … Continue reading
This guest post comes from Chris Brown, the Chief Executive of Igloo Regeneration. The text originally appeared as part of a joint submission to our design competition last year with Ash Sakula Architects which was one of the winning submissions … Continue reading
Architectural education sets the foundation as to how architects learn in practice and can provide insights into how value systems are shaped. Cuff (1991) insists that architectural education has, for a considerable amount of time, been very much based … Continue reading
Recently, one of our collaborators discussed with us a project in which the client asked them to construct the adjacent parking structure floor to floor heights the same as their new building. The idea is that when the new … Continue reading
It is not disputed that buildings will need to change over time to accommodate the irresolute demands of its users. Nor, that the more conducive to change a building is, the longer it will remain useful, making it inherently … Continue reading
Registration is now open! DEADLINE EXTENDED TO JUNE 10th! Given the end of term and project deadlines for some universities we’ve decided to extend the deadline. The 10th of June is the latest possible date and hope this helps students … Continue reading
AF held our first project workshop last week. Traveling to Nightingale Associates office in Oxfordshire, we spent the morning with them ‘trying out’ some of the tools. Designed to be as interactive as possible, we explored stakeholder perspectives with post-it … Continue reading
In an effort to rethink how the information from the more ‘polished’ diagrams can be simplified and more engaging particularly in a workshop format we started sketching ideas to re-visualize some of them. The diagrams present a mixture of possibilities: … Continue reading
I recently caught a piece on 60 minutes (an American news show) on how bad the home owning situation has gotten in the US highlighting the ‘dire’ manevour by the city of Cleveland. With an estimated 11 million homes currently … Continue reading
Circle K is an international chain of convenient stores started in 1951 in Texas, USA (now Canadian owned). In the 1980s and 90s the company filed for bankruptcy and developed a new corporate plan which closed many of their shops. … Continue reading
BBVH architects (Rotterdam) have designed a terrace house archetype for the GoldenPlover estate project in Rotterdam-Hoogvliet. Potential owners can go to their website and through an online program customize the house in a variety of ways through a series … Continue reading
Many of us are familiar now with the term ‘meanwhile use’ in the UK which has particular relevance towards the refitability and convertibility strategies of our project. For those unfamiliar, ‘meanwhile use’ is the temporary use of vacant buildings (or … Continue reading
The University of Melbourne’s Future Proofing Schools research project, recently held an interesting ideas competition for the next generation relocatable classroom. The competition looked to enhance the conventional mass-produced response by producing solutions that can be relocated and adapted to … Continue reading