Office building adaptability through buildings’ layers : office buildings in Erbil city as case study

الملخص EN

A building has an average life span over fifty years through history, whereas adaptability in the building motivated by a number of factors, not least the desire to ‘future need’ or ‘future change’ for buildings against social, economic, and technological change.

Adaptability is concerned with the capacity to adjust or be adjusted to suit new situations.

A building as a composition separated in to a number of layers (site, structure, skin, space layout, services, stuff, social, surrounding) that together define building as a whole.

Each layer is distinguished from others by special role it fulfills.

According to previous studies, there are six types of adaptability that users ‘demands; adjustable, versatile, refitable, convertible, scalable and movable, can be linked to building layers through building design strategies and characteristics.

This research will examine adaptability through analysis of office buildings according to their layers, to show ratio of adaptability in both public and private office buildings and explore needs of users for each type of changes.

The aim of the research is to bring needed clarity to the concept of adaptability by providing more detail insight into what constitutes adaptability is in Erbil office buildings and the factors that give rise to different level of adaptability.

For analyses of case studies using meta-model methodology of Robert S.

and Simon A (2016)..

It showed that the average percentage of adaptability is half of total characteristics of building and the need for types of change are increasing in both public and private office building.

For feasibility of building the problem mostly in layers such as spaces ,space plan, services ,stuff and structure.

Therefore this research provides researcher, designers and other practitioners with the knowledge and tools to raise client’s awareness of building adaptability, helping to clarify their needs in future design