Adaptability in Heritage Buildings: Concepts and Scope

Abstract

This article summarizes the first stage of a study under development and is aimed at analyzing the meaning and scope of the notion of “available building adaptability” in historic buildings. Likewise, based on establishing analogies with similar concepts used in other disciplines or knowledge, the relationship between adaptability, vulnerability and historical-cultural valuation has been examined.

Our objective is to establish a technique to evaluate how the material characteristics of the building are related to the possibility of admitting changes, in particular with respect to use. When a reuse project is carried out, it is common for the choice and assignment of the new use or function for the heritage asset to be carried out subjectively, without considering or evaluating its material and cultural conditions and characteristics. Because of arbitrary assignments of use, the interventions required adapting or "take" the building to the new destination represent a force with alterations and modifications that negatively impact its materiality and worse still, its cultural significance and value.

      The framework project that we developed hypothesizes that historic buildings have an inherent material adaptability potential that represents the building's ability to respond to some type of change particularly that aimed at reuse. This potential for material adaptability (MAP) is defined by an index elaborated from the evaluation of conditions and material characteristics that are specific to or inherent to the building asset, which can be organized and hierarchized into groups of operational variables among which exist relations.