Feature

“Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” – H. G. Wells

The term adaptation in the field of architecture has numerous connotations – it brings to mind ideas of Darwinian evolution, loose-fit “adaptable” buildings and the prestigious adaptive re-use project which entails the re-birthing of buildings of heritage significance. Charles Darwin espoused the theory that over millions of years the human race has evolved from other primates through processes of natural selection and survival of the fittest1. Natural selection encompasses the idea of adaptation, which has a variety of implications for biology that are also analogous to the field of architecture – both in terms of the building as isolated object and in terms of the city.

Evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky defined adaptation as a “trait [that] is an aspect of the developmental pattern of the organism which enables or enhances the probability of that organism surviving and reproducing”2. This is particularly relevant to human development and the built environment. Humans live in an enormous variety of climatic and geographic conditions; from the icy village of Siorapaluk in northern Greenland, to the scorching desert sands of Dallol Ethiopia, to the stifling humidity of the jungles of Thailand and the megalopolis of Bangkok – the hottest major city on earth. Yet, save for variations in melanin levels and marginal differences in size (often due to diet), human beings show surprisingly little physiological specificity when compared to the way in which some species have evolved in relation to their climate and environment.

What separates the human race from all other life forms comes down to a few physiological traits and our psychological disposition – rational thought, codified language and free will, coupled with opposing digits. Combined, these traits have allowed humans to create tools, domesticate animals, raise crops, build structures and more importantly evolve cultures. Hence while other creatures have evolved to exist in specific environments, homo sapiens have only been able to survive the variety and intensity of climactic conditions found across the planet through their ability to adapt their physical environment in some way.

Le Corbusier noted that humans require buildings as a “means of supplementing our natural capabilities, since nature is indifferent, inhuman, and inclement; we are born naked and with insufficient armour…(buildings are) no more than an extension of our limbs3”. In these terms survival simply refers to keeping warm and dry, it says little of the idea of nurturing the family unit or developing culture.

From clothing, to simple bark shade structures to the socio-economic construct of the city – humankind is constantly adapting its environment to survive. Early examples of adapting the physical environment for cultural purposes can be seen in cave paintings. Sheltering from the extremes of the physical environment, humans, using opposing digits, picked up rocks or made ochre to decorate the walls in a form of graphic communication – a primitive cultural construct. The human need to adapt for survival has operated at both the physical and the cultural for millennia. As Mark Wigley, Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, has described, “the relationship between structure and ornament, always understood as that between a body and its clothes, has been displaced onto that between body and building.

Traditional ornamentation appears to be removed from the building at the very moment when the building itself becomes a kind of ornament worn by its occupant4”. Perhaps for Wigley “wearing” a building refers to use or perhaps, at a push, dwelling5. So the modification of raw material to provide shelter without specific ornamentation still retains cultural value. Even Le Corbusier’s unadorned machines for living6 have implications for culture through our reading of them nearly 100 years after the fact.

What then when building becomes complete technology, when body, machine and space merge? The extremes of this concept are best illustrated in cinema, who can forget Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the 1979 film Alien emerging from the bowels of her ship wearing something resembling a forklift, ready to conquer her enemy? OMA’s House at Floirac/Maison á Bordeaux illustrates a condition where the fragility of the human body can be supplemented by architecture to provide a framework for more than simple survival. The house provides a means by which the wheelchair-bound parent is able fully engage in family life by moving through a central lift that is both platform and room. The void left by the lift as it passes the various levels intrinsically links the father to the entire space, as if emphasising his condition and celebrating the technology that supports it. Koolhaas’ prosthetic7 Maison á Bordeaux goes beyond illustrating man’s technical ability to adapt and manipulate the environment for simple shelter – it confirms a desire to create a social space.

At the scale of the city adaptation and ecological evolution operate in more complex ways. The city is, metaphorically, an organism – alive, growing, changing, adapting, and evolving. The manner in which its mechanisms interact is interesting. Architects, with economists, planners and urban designers are adept at proposing change through the master plan. The master plan, often based on social and economic research, proposes use patterns, open space requirements with height and floor area controls. This top down approach attempts to predict the evolution of the city while the authors sit back and wait. However, it is the unpredicted changes, the proactive bottom up evolution of the city that is of real interest. In his essay “The Adaptive City – City Heal Thyself”, Dan Hill references Barcelona’s Ciutat Vella and the former Walled City of Kowloon in Hong Kong as places that “accommodate near infinite variation, adaptation and internal growth, as if New Babylon, despite its anarchic and essentially intolerable conditions8”.