Measuring building change : a method to capture building knowledge

Buildings are subject to change of requirements during their periods of use. In the last decades it has been mostly assumed that the rate of change is increasing. Exact description of the type of change or the amount of change is not always investigated. Requirements change knowledge in currently used buildings is lacking. A method is required that identifies empirical building change knowledge. Identification of changes in buildings has the objective of examining if the empirical change could be useful in forecast change in newly designed buildings. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 1 overviews general knowledge and building knowledge. Section 2 identifies and structures requirement change knowledge. Element change knowledge is structured and described in section 3. A change measurement method is introduced in section 4. Empirical analysis application to the change method is explained in section 5. A tool prototype in section 6 shows how change knowledge is captured from existing buildings and made useful to forecast change in new designs.