Flexibilidade e adaptabilidade como estratégias projetuais: análise de edifícios de apartamentos contemporâneos em Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The purposes of this work are to organize and present the design strategies that aim to guarantee the conformation of flexible and adaptable residential buildings, in addition to analyse their occurrence in contemporary cases in the city of Belo Horizonte. Such strategies enable architects, in their classic assignment, to conceive spaces capable of meeting the demands of dwellers that involve physical transformations and social use variations in more viable ways. Therefore, they represent an alternative to the production usually promoted by real estate, marked by its repetition and rigidity. The case studies definition was guided by sociological analyses of architecture as a cultural field, which made it possible to formulate two hypotheses: [a] the adoption of rupture language in an indication that the building is a product of the restricted production subfield, thus, less determined by economic and functional criteria; [b] the architect’s autonomy over the design is inversely proportional to the external determinations that interfere with the results. The search in specialized publications for contemporary buildings where a rupture language has been adopted led to four cases in Belo Horizonte, which are Montevideu 285, Estúdios Capelinha, Residencial Zíder e Residencial Flor de Liz, designed by various offices and built at different neighbourhoods between 2011 and 2016. The information that constitutes the research object was collected from specialized publications, construction plans of the analysed buildings, technical visits, photographic records, and interviews with the agents involved in their production, from conception to dwelling. It was possible to ascertain from the production conditions that the cases were results of the restricted subfield. But what insured the architect’s decision-making power in design phase was the fact that they were also proponents and investors in the developments or – exceptionally on Residencial Flor de Liz’s case – the proposer and investor was a future dweller, whose interests in production are extended beyond profit. The presentation of the design strategies was organized and distributed by conceptual affinities in three axes: polyvalence, indeterminacy, and prefabrication. Polyvalence is defined by the architect's control of form, which guarantees only adaptability. Indeterminacy, on the other hand, is the approach in which architecture operates as a background, guaranteeing the minimum conditions to meet dwellers' demands for diverse uses and transformations. In turn, the principles that ensure economy and agility to prefabrication may also allow the built space to be flexible and adaptable, as they provide an articulation of the building elements and components that favours transformations. The analysis of the cases from the studied strategies allowed to verify a moderate occurrence of some solutions, sometimes intentional and sometimes collateral, linked to different determinations. However, there was no manifestation of strategies guided by the principles of prefabrication, which would enable an articulation between more determined and indeterminate solutions.