Influence of Design on the Adaptability of Buildings: A Case of the City of Nairobi, Kenya

This study investigated the design and adaptability of civic buildings considering the challenge of static architecture and resultant building obsolescence occasioned by human and environmentally induced change. Static architecture escalates the life-cycle environmental impacts resulting from increased resource consumption, building material production, and demolition wastes. Contemporary sustainability standards emphasize energy-efficient structures and updating existing building stocks. The study explored the concepts of building adaptation, layers that conceptualize the building and link time and material form, adaptability for sustainability, design for disassembly, and obsolescence. Examined here too were the strategies on spatial organization, structural configuration, redundancy, upgradability of building services, and adjustability of the building envelope, that optimize building adaptability. Case studies were probed using environmental behavior research methods of observation and tracing effects of after-use with pre-coded checklists to determine how the original design had affected the adaptability of the buildings over time. Other buildings were reviewed through library research and analysis of archival information. Respondent opinions on fundamental aspects of building design, building use adaptability, and its relationship to design were obtained using structured interview guides. This research demonstrated that design choices on spatial organization (loose fit spaces or multifunctional spaces, structural configuration, building services, and envelope) influenced adaptability of buildings.