Types and precedents in design guidance

In recent years Dutch secondary education has been undergoing a fundamental change due to the introduction of new didactic approaches which relate strongly to ongoing social and technological developments. This affects existing school buildings, the majority of which is quite conventional in spatial terms and is characterized by limited flexibility and transformability. Consequently, most schools require extensive modifications in their spatial and building structure. The requirements underlying these modifications are not stable. Many schools have become interested in experimental ideas that may require inevitably further changes in the buildings. The paper considers the continuous transformation of Dutch school buildings with respect to their typology: by correlating new design briefs to building types rather than their instances we arrive at general guidelines that can be easily adapted to specific cases. To achieve this, the types are analysed with respect to geometry, topology and zoning. The results of the analysis describe the affordances of each type in terms of general flexibility, transformability and adaptability, as well as in relation to generic briefs. They also provide an explanation of the historical evolution of the types and the means for relating primary characteristics to local configurations, thereby allowing the accurate description of hybrid instances. The descriptions and analysis of buildings are organized into a polyhierarchical multi-level database that supports typological abstraction and offers several starting points (at various abstraction levels) for matching a new brief to an existing building. This enriches the development of the brief or a design solution with explicit, specific information derived from concrete precedents with known form, structure, behaviour and performance.