‘Flexibility’ is a type of phrases that architects use so typically it dangers dropping its which means. It exhibits up on each pitch deck, often as a promise: this constructing can change with you.
For Mariana Bravo Rivera, an architectural designer at Ennead Architects, that promise solely holds if it’s constructed on a technique, not a hope. Her method begins with precedent and ends with projection: examine what has already labored below comparable constraints, then ask what occurs subsequent.
“I design with precedent,” Bravo Rivera says. “You have a look at initiatives which have already succeeded inside their restrictions and particular applications — case research. From there, you ask the customers, or assume on behalf of the communities concerned, about what might be higher, greater, extra effectively linked. When you perceive the actions that truly occur in an area, you’ll be able to put together for various situations — in lecture rooms, know-how, occasion house, storage; in hospitals, site visitors and growth.”
Precedent is simply the primary layer. The second, projection, means designing for circumstances that don’t exist but, however plausibly might: “One other pandemic, the inhabitants of the context rising, or the constructing needing to get repurposed completely, for analysis or isolation.”
That two-part methodology — precedent, then projection — runs by means of Bravo Rivera’s latest work at each scale: a healthcare grasp plan in Northern Virginia, a set of high-end scientific interiors she calls, for confidentiality, “E Clinic,” a graphic workflow she constructed from scratch for one of many largest public infrastructure initiatives in New York Metropolis, and even a small speculative housing prototype constructed completely round a single household’s altering wants.
A Grasp Plan Constructed on Eventualities
Bravo Rivera’s clearest utility of the strategy on the city scale got here on Inova Well being’s ambulatory campus challenge in Northern Virginia, the place she labored with the design associate on a two-person grasp planning staff. The campus — a 282,000-gross-square-foot complicated of clinics, ambulatory surgical procedure, imaging, and a freestanding emergency division — was all the time going to be constructed over time. What wasn’t fastened was precisely how, or into what.
“We had been learning phasing, parking, and programming collectively, as a result of none of them are actually separate selections,” Bravo Rivera explains. Her staff mapped situations for 2 towers — one pairing a medical workplace constructing with a micro hospital, one other pairing two medical workplace buildings — and examined every towards 5 versus six flooring, with some flooring intentionally left as shell house to be constructed out as soon as program want was confirmed.
Parking grew to become one of many clearest exams. “One technique was designing for the state of affairs with the very best parking requirement early on, so the constructing might keep versatile as the necessity was refined,” she says. Her staff additionally studied the trade-off between floor and structured parking within the first section, constructing solely two or three storage bays initially, then increasing horizontally as soon as the second constructing was full.
Bravo Rivera led 4 distinct grasp plan ideas in whole, testing completely different balances of program, entry, and phasing; one was chosen by Inova to maneuver ahead. She additionally ready the presentation supplies proven to Inova’s CEO, govt staff, and company board, serving to transfer the challenge from feasibility into approval. The design is now advancing into Schematic Design. “None of these situations had been guesses,” she says. “They had been methods of creating certain the consumer might change their thoughts about scale, sequencing, or program later, with out the grasp plan falling aside.”
Designing the System, Not Simply the Room
If Inova is versatile on the scale of a campus, a extra intimate model of the identical thought formed Bravo Rivera’s work on a set of high-end scientific interiors for a confidential consumer she refers to, for this piece, as “E Clinic.”
Her process was designing the ready expertise for a high-end govt well being program — an area that needed to operate as a clinic whereas feeling nothing like one. “I designed partitions that would simply flip into greater gathering areas,” she says. “Porous and open, for the stream of individuals and visibility from the seat to reception, however with sufficient privateness that you could possibly sit and work there for longer intervals.”
The core design downside was scale — one ready typology serving very completely different teams with out ever feeling wrong-sized. “The sizes of the ready pods gave each the chance to carry one particular person, or a household, or a number of individuals who got here into the clinic collectively,” she explains. A pod constructed for a solo govt between appointments needed to really feel simply as thought of when it absorbed a household arriving as a gaggle — with out a moved wall or a renovation. The flexibleness lived within the geometry and sightlines of the partitions, not in something workers would wish to reconfigure. The furnishings layouts she proposed had been authorized, and the challenge is at present in building.
“It’s the identical downside as a grasp plan, simply at a very completely different scale,” Bravo Rivera says. “You’re designing a system that may maintain very completely different numbers of individuals, at very completely different moments, with out ever needing to be rebuilt.”
Constructing the Device, Not Simply the Drawing
On SPARC Kips Bay, the city-led initiative changing Manhattan’s Hunter School Brookdale Campus right into a science, well being, and training hub for CUNY and the NYC Division of Schooling, flexibility began the identical approach it did in all places else in Bravo Rivera’s work: with precedent, gathered instantly from the individuals who would use the constructing.
“At SPARC, flexibility was one thing we studied from the person interviews themselves,” she says. These conversations surfaced a constructing whose rooms wanted to do a couple of job: instructing labs that turn out to be analysis labs when the schedule permits it, lecture rooms that convert into debriefing rooms or nursing stations by means of versatile partitions, an occasion house that strikes from flat to tiered, non-public places of work that turn out to be open workstations with extra assembly rooms — a single change able to increasing a flooring’s working capability.
“A part of what we had been designing for was growth — stacking logic that anticipates program progress, infrastructure that helps makes use of that aren’t outlined but,” Bravo Rivera says. “However there’s additionally a broader query beneath that: what is going to training really appear to be, bodily, as studying itself retains evolving.” Designing for that many built-in transformations, throughout 9 departments and three built-in CUNY colleges, was much less a single determination than a representational downside — one she solved by designing not simply drawings however the system that produced them.
Working in Rhino throughout early idea design, Bravo Rivera constructed a room-block system by which each program sort — lecture rooms, places of work, labs, auditoriums, shared examine house, convention rooms, library, café — existed as its personal block with embedded layering, organized into buckets by college so any flooring might be reprogrammed by pulling from the appropriate bucket. “The challenge was by no means going to sit down nonetheless,” she says. “I wanted a system the place reorganizing a flooring didn’t imply ranging from zero.”
The blocks carried a number of show states, toggled by layers from a crammed shade define for early planning, up by means of partitions, home windows, and furnishings for deadlines — so the staff might transfer between planning, presentation, and deadline modes with out rebuilding the mannequin. They may be color-coded by program sort, to learn classroom distribution throughout the constructing, or by division and college, to trace which establishment occupied which aspect of a flooring shared between a number of colleges.
“With the appropriate data and line weights turned on, the identical file might turn out to be a submission drawing,” Bravo Rivera says. “It was a reside working device and deliverable on the similar time.” That permit the challenge staff reply to program adjustments and compressed deadlines with out dropping coherence. “You’re not constructing in flexibility by leaving selections open. You’re constructing a construction exact sufficient that change doesn’t break it.”
Flexibility on the Scale of a Household
Not each take a look at of the strategy has come on a challenge this massive. By means of Ennead Lab, the agency’s inner analysis arm, Bravo Rivera labored on Initiative 99, a worldwide competitors launched by ICON Expertise to design housing prototypes buildable for below $99,000 utilizing 3D-printed building — a scale as small as her work will get, however with the identical logic.
Flexibility lived in two locations: a façade designed for personalization, so every household’s residence might learn as distinctly theirs relatively than a repeated module, and demountable inside partitions that allow a family develop a starter module right into a full home, or mix rooms as wants modified, with out standard demolition. “It’s the identical thought as every thing else,” Bravo Rivera says, “simply scaled down to at least one household — the home has to vary form because the individuals inside it do.” The entry wasn’t chosen, however it carried the identical intuition as in all places else in her work: design the parts so the entire can maintain altering.
Precedent, Then Projection, at Any Scale
Taken collectively, Bravo Rivera’s work throughout Inova, E Clinic, SPARC and Initiative 99 traces the identical two-part methodology at wildly completely different scales — a campus’s phasing sequence, a single ready pod, a device used to attract a constructing, the partitions of 1 home. In every case, she began with what already labored below comparable constraints, then requested what the house would wish to soak up subsequent.
“You begin with precedent, since you don’t get to invent from nothing — somebody has already solved a model of this downside,” Bravo Rivera says. “However precedent solely tells you what labored up to now. The second step is projection: fascinated by what might occur that hasn’t occurred but, and ensuring the design can maintain it when it does.”
That mixture let a hospital system section two towers with out overcommitting to a flooring depend, a ready room maintain one particular person or a household with out feeling just like the improper dimension, a 700,000-square-foot tutorial constructing soak up 9 departments’ value of change, and a single 3D-printed home develop with the household inside it. As Bravo Rivera continues her work at Ennead, that methodology appears to be like much less like a specialty and extra just like the constant approach she approaches any design downside, at any scale.
