The Paradoxical Promise of Flexibility

“Valid ambiguity promotes useful flexibility.”

-Robert Venturi

In the later stages of Modernism, the 1960's and on, the obsession for functionalist architecture began to take on flexible qualities. Much of the functional architecture up to that point could be described as rigid and one-minded, and it became apparent as technologies and building use developed that architecture would need to be more flexible.

To achieve a higher level of flexibility, architects joined up with various fields of the sciences to find a possible solution or technique, and it was discovered that programming was a possible method by which this could be achieved. By definition, programming, with respect to architecture, is a “process by which information about a building project is analyzed and interpreted to better describe the spatial strategy around which the tasks and uses of the building will be organized.” That is to say, information gathered from site analysis and questioning local residents directly affects the development of the architecture and shapes the way the program is inserted.

This presents new challenges or qualities to the design process. The first of these is the empowered community. By referring to the local community for their experience and their thoughts about the needs for the area, you are also giving them a role in the design of the new building. It is no longer the architect creating his own set of problems to solve, but rather adapting to a set of issues that are defined by someone else. This forced those architects who clung to functionalist architecture to loosen up a little and pay more attention to the local issues. The other new quality of the design process was a clear separation between problem seeking and problem solving. It was no longer necessary to find/make up a set of problems that might not really exist, but instead encouraged to ask around the site to find what problems have already been identified.

As flexibility began to be introduced, it was done so more as a margin-of-error method as opposed to an entire building concept. I mean to say that architects simply made rooms a little larger and included more undefined space. But as the movement continued, several experiments in flexibility were successful in finding solutions. For example, in public schools, the cafeteria and auditorium were merged into one building to create a multi use space [cafetorium]. These two spaces were identified as the largest spaces in a school that were almost never used at the same time, so it was seen appropriate to merge them together.

In the Venice Hospital, it was Le Corbusier's intention to separate the specialized departments in the hospital while maintaining a flexibility for future development. He did so by dividing the building around cores of circulation with cellular units of repeatable flexibility. He deemed it necessary for the hospital to be designed for future expansion and included the means by which to do that. He was quoted during the projec for saying this, “Architecture must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.”