ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a highly nuanced answer to this seemingly straightforward question by exploring the complex network of intentions that catalyzed the reification of a particular construction technology, the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) project, and its longitudinal reception over time in relation to its shifting context. It also provides a lengthy analysis of an architectural experiment of the 1960s that took an alternative approach—to create school facilities with a high degree of spatial flexibility capable of adapting over time. A framework is developed for various categories of change explicitly stated in architectural publications and labeled these as social, economic, environmental, technical, aesthetic, and cultural forces of change. Social changes are those linked to various categories of interpersonal relations, which occur at various scales of interaction (micro, exo, and macro). Just as social change occurs at many scales, so does economic change.
