my grandmother's near senile blabber
and her near senile bladder

how come architecture is flexibely innate? i think once one faces up to architecture's innate inflexibility, then one might go about creating deviced inflexibility or at least an impression of flexibility. your typical walls are a paragon of inflexibility. you know, a scanned sketch or two would give your quest for an expected diarrhea on our part a bit more credibility.

flexibely innate is a nice turn of phrase...but...
innately flexible...:) tori in my ears. i should be paying more attention to myself writing all this.

check your spelling first, i'd say.

it's very little to judge upon, just maybe try not to oversimplify the concept of flexibility, try to aim for "multiple specificities" if you get my drift.

the best way to be flexible is to not design in too many flexible things but instead to go generic box - allowing it to be populated with whatever your users interpret as flexibility. this is a conundrum for architects because we always want to show 'stuff' that we can design.

check out 'how buildings learn' by stewart brand if you haven't already. and stick with it. don't quit in the first chapters because you think you know where he's going.

so are the systems being overlayed the school and the industrial area? i have seen so many of these dialetically opposed typologies put upon each other that it verges on cliche. now i am sure this is still what they teach in architecture school because well if they taught anything real everyone would go to barnes and nobles and pick up the lsat books anyway why does a school need "seemingly random spontaenity" can you even design "seemingly random spontaenity"? design has the pleasure of draining all your random spontaenity dry... architecture ain't jean arp randomly dropping construction paper triangles on a sheet of paper and gluing em down...unless of course chance is your concept...

see i was suggesting the exact opposite of what steven is saying, simply because I think that as a thesys project it should explore the possible programmatic convergences and divergences (is that a word?) of the various functions of the building...

you could read loads of books on spontaneous order and autopoiesis, but i'd rather go in the direction of studying programs, spaces, functions and various types of teaching techniques...but maybe i've just been working for too long!

thanks for the comments....I wanted to post some pics of study models...can you attach jpegs on a post?

if flexibility is reinforced, is it still flexible? isn't the idea of flexibility, then, actually quite inflexible? just kidding.

i think the idea of users being able to appropriate architecture for their own purpose is one of the most interesting, and also elusive ideas out there. Steven is right on when he says that the easiest thing to do is make a box, then step back and let the users program it basically. that's not really architecture, of course though, and i think much more challenging, but also much richer to find a way to create something more substantial i guess, but somehow also flexible. certainly not impossible, but tricky indeed. so i guess i have no answers, but i think it could be a compelling project.

the problem with flexibility is that it very easily slips into the generic. the ultimate in flexible space is the most generic space.

perhaps instead of flexibility you could consider multifunctionality - and consider several specific sets of functions.