The Land Design Institute (LDI) developed a partnership with Ball State’s Building Futures Institute to extend the understanding of the resource management and life-cycle benefits of flexible architecture, also referred to as open building.
All national flexible architecture and open-building initiatives, including those at Carnegie-Mellon and Ball State’s Building Futures Institute limit their research to the building itself. There is a profound need to extend these efforts (as well as conventional approaches to building) to address community-scale issues, and the implication of building to the life-cycles of environmental resources. The EPA and directors of these open-building centers recognize the need for this research, but see this research as outside their research agenda. There is a profound need to develop and communicate this knowledge.