On Tabula Rasa

One of the critical fallacies within modernist architecture was the rejection or dismissal of time as an element intrinsic to the holistic design process.  As if the Parthenon is not falling apart, many works strove to consciously ignore prior historical, social, economic or ecological contexts while evoking a sense of permanence and timelessness.  Irregardless of simple material properties and the Law of Thermodynamics, people change, use patterns are fluid not static, building life cycles are increasingly being designed for shorter and shorter time spans.  Not only is this incredibly short sighted and wasteful, but it has created a pervasive methodology in architecture and the construction system at large that is centered on delivering a static product.  Architects design objects rather than processes, and consequently the building begins to deteriorate as soon as it is finished construction.  

This manifests itself in our contractual apparatus, which is designed for one final set of contract documents.  And it manifests itself in the studio, where there is not enough time to commit fully to one design, never mind sequential iterations.

What if we imagine a reversal of this line of logic?  What if instead of a tabula rasa, we were to use a palimpsest as an analog?  Taking into consideration the historical, social, economic and ecological conditions of the site and brief, rather than just superficially grazing over them, and thinking about the afterlife of the building and site as opportunities to strategize economic models as well as future use patterns and relocating and reusing raw material.  

The palimpsest model is not new.  It's used subconsciously all the time in renovations.  However, what would it be like to conceive of a 'ground up' project as future palimpsest prior even to schematic design?

How would the contractual apparatus change?  How can we design building tectonics that can be easily changed or manipulated to serve a different spatial configuration?  How do entropic physical properties of material effect use patterns?  How can iterative architecture begin to inform future entrepreneur endeavors by a constantly changing clientele?