Design strategies to increase building flexibility

As the needs of owners and occupants change, buildings must be frequently renovated, resulting in significant cost and lost use of the buildings during the construction. This research develops a systematic approach to examine the nature of changes that can be expected to occur in built facilities, and analyses specific design strategies that can significantly increase the building flexibility, or ability to accommodate change. The three types of changes in a building are in its functions, the capacity of its systems, and the flow of the environment and people within and around the facility. Analysis of renovation projects reveals that buildings require more changes to all systems (i.e. structure, enclosure, services and interior finish) than is commonly assumed, and that the difficulty of these renovations is determined by the inter-relationships among the systems. The design strategies can provide a specific means to modify these interactions among the systems, and to more easily and efficiently accommodate changes during subsequent renovations. These design strategies increase the initial construction cost by less than 2% on average and usually decrease the original construction duration, and the majority of the strategies provide cost savings of 2% of the initial construction cost within the first renovation.