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Loose-Fit Architecture: Designing Buildings for Change September/October 2017 Profile 249 Volume 87 No 5 ISBN 978 1119 152644 Guest-Edited by Alex Lifschutz The idea that a building is 'finished' or 'complete' on the day it opens its doors is hardwired into existing thinking about design, planning and construction. But this ignores the unprecedented rate of social and technological change. A building only begins its life when the contractors leave. With resources at a premium and a greater need for a sustainable use of building materials, can we still afford to construct new housing or indeed any buildings that ignore the need for flexibility or the ability to evolve over time? Our design culture needs to move beyond the idealisation of a creative individual designer generating highly specific forms with fixed uses. The possibilities of adaptation and flexibility have often been overlooked, but they create hugely exciting 'loose-fit' architectures that emancipate users to create their own versatile and vibrant environments. Contributors include: Stewart Brand, Renee Chow, Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, John Habraken, Edwin Heathcote, Despina Katsakakis, Stephen Kendall, Ian Lambot, Giorgio Macchi, Alexi Marmot, Andrea Martin, Kazunobu Minami, Peter Murray, Brett Steele, and Simon Sturgis.

Lifschutz focuses on how to tackle the carbon crisis in UK by giving tax breaks to the housing sector. He suggests that Chancellor Hammond need to think what housing and energy solutions are needed and uses tax incentives to create a housing sector that is more efficient, more flexible and which stimulates community and sharing from cradle to grave. He explains that taxpayers should look at tax policy and social behavior in the round, and see whether there are better ways to manage the existing resources--before consuming them and the planet.

If you're going to go to a shop to buy books it has to have a particular sense of place that feels distinctive, not just through the architecture but because of the way you can interact with other people - customers and booksellers - in a stimulating environment.

Describes 1 New Bond Street, which is the first auction house built in the UK within living memory: it shows Bonham's commitment to London as a global auctioneering centre. Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, the architects, have created a well-lit and spacious Mayfair setting for viewing and bidding for art works which features two grand entrances onto New Bond Street and Haunch of Venison Yard.

The current debate regarding the dubious benefit of iconic buildings comes as little surprise to those who have been employed in urban areas blighted by too rich a mix of splendid structures. London's South Bank has been unable to digest its ample share of landmark office buildings despite a succession of masterplans by leading architects aiming to integrate them into a coherent urban fabric. How much more difficult it must be, therefore, for cities coping with buildings that have sought but failed to achieve such architectural status. The example of the South Bank seems to indicate that the big school of regeneration is, in fact, problematic - it is the illness to which it purports to be the cure. Yet, at the other end of the spectrum, the potential drudgery of contextual architecture can be equally problematic; how often this tends to discard the possibility of a better, more inspired, urban environment, substituting boring for big. Again, the South Bank, indeed much of London's riverfront, abounds with ghastly examples of the failure of imagination that comes with merely attempting to fit in with the background and replicate.