Quantifying Adaptability of College Campus Buildings

While much has been written about adaptable buildings, quantification of adaptability is still in its nascent stage. Little has been published toward validation of quantitative adaptability models. This paper proposes a scoring system for evaluating the design-based adaptability of college campus buildings. This system was created to be a tool to guide future designs. Different physical features (i.e., floor-to-floor height and structural span lengths) of the buildings are considered in the scores. Adaptability scores are calculated for four buildings on Clemson University’s campus. Scores are compared to those from an earlier study of the same buildings; the earlier study quantified adaptability by surveying experts through an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Both approaches rank the subject buildings in the same order with respect to adaptability. Additionally, scores from both approaches are linearly correlated. These encouraging results suggest that the proposed scoring system is a starting point for quantifying the adaptability of college campus buildings.