Cross-scale adaptive design research. A framework for fragile buildings, urban spaces and neighbourhoods

The paper addresses different natures of fragilities, proposing a methodological framework based on a cross-scale approach, helpful in assessing climate impacts and evaluating adaptive design solutions for buildings, urban spaces, and neighbourhoods. Recent advancements in regenerative and adaptive design research and a framework for understanding existing methods’ capability are presented and discussed. However, existing adaptive design methods integrate with some difficulties all dimensions and scales that affect the environmental performance of built environment. Our work proposes to include these dimensions and scales into different natures of physical fragilities: climatic, microclimatic, morphological, typological and related to the building components. For each of the fragility, the method provides different levels of knowledge, both in terms of analysis and design scenario evaluation: urban system, physical characteristics, metrics and performance indicators, spatial and climate database, impacts and adaptation scenarios. Adaptive design research, applied to regeneration processes, is one of the most privileged research areas in the field of physical fragilities for theoretical discourse, design strategies and tools. It constitutes the “design context” in which to face the environmental challenge in local contexts as the strategic objective to implement effective adaptation actions.