A good place to start this enquiry would be to look at the work of Herman Hertzberger, the grea dutch architect whomaddressed is issue in practice throughout his career. In particular he worked on ways of enabling users to take possession of his buildings and adapt them to their needs. His famous experiment with his office at Central Baheer is seminal. You can look at his two books of lessons for students of architecture. You can also read my chapter on him arising from interviews I did with him in Design in Mind listed here.

Thank youfor your reply. I am aware of Hertzberger's approach, as of Brand's layers or of Habraken's supports. They truly are references for me in this field. I was just wondering how much of these ideas can really be put in practice outside the seemingly beautiful philosophy they convey, given implementation limitations, and curious to know if the community has heard of explicit recent attempts.

Alexander is an important figure. One of his disadvantages in terms of practical take up is that his approach particularly that of patterns tends to be a little prescriptive and designers in general and architects in particular are put off by what they can easily see as a restriction on creativity rather than assisting it.

you will also find in here all the work I did on therapeutic environments. Here we analysed a couple of thousand pieces of resarch and produced a tool for the nhs to use with its clients and designers that did not advance a particular design or form but rather allowed the team to evaluar the extent to which a design respected what the research told us. We found this helpful to use when designers and clients and users worked together in workshops.