In architecture, open building is an approach to the design of buildings that takes account of the possible need to change or adapt the building during its lifetime, in line with social or technological change. Open building design seeks to co-ordinate inputs from different professions, users of the building, and other interests associated with the locality.
John Habraken first articulated the principles of open building in his book Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, published in Dutch in 1961 and in English in 1972 and 1999, and in many other languages.[1] He argued that housing must always recognize two domains of action: the action of the community and that of the individual inhabitant. When the inhabitant is excluded, the result is uniformity and rigidity. When only the individual takes action, the result may be chaos and conflict. This formulation of a necessary balance of control had implications for all parties in the housing process, including architects. A research foundation was established in 1965 at the SAR (Stichting Architecten Research) in Eindhoven, the Netherlands to explore the ramifications, for architects, of the views laid out in that book. Habraken was invited to be Director of the SAR. Later, in the 1980s, a research group (OBOM) was formed at TU Delft under the direction of Professor Age van Randen, the goal of which was to study the practical issues of implementing the ideas in practice.[2]
From the late 1960s onward, a number of pioneering projects were completed in the Netherlands, the UK, Japan [3] and elsewhere. This history is recounted in part in Housing for the Millions: John Habraken and the SAR (1960–2000).[4] Frans van der Werf, a Dutch architect, was one of the early pioneers.[5] A number of other books have been published specifically on the subject, dozens of technical reports have been produced in several languages, open building is referred to in countless books, scholarly papers, dissertations, and articles in professional journals, and in-depth country reports and studies have emerged in Finland, the Netherlands, the US and Japan. Residential Open Building[6] was published in 2000, telling in more detail about the pioneering projects and the principles underlying their implementation. This book has been translated into Japanese.[7]
Widespread interest in these concepts and their practical implementation led to the formation of an international commission.[8] This group was formed in 1996, under the auspices of the CIB (International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction). Members of the CIB W104 come from many countries including the US, the Netherlands, the UK, Iran, Finland, France, Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa.[9]
This commission's original purpose was twofold. First, it intended to document developments toward open building internationally. Second, it intended to stimulate implementation efforts by disseminating information and by convening international conferences at which government and university researchers, practitioners and others could exchange information and support local initiatives. These activities focused largely on the technical and methodological aspects of residential open building. There were continuing exchanges between colleagues in the less developed countries and developed countries, but the dominant focus was the latter.
Between 1996 and 2008, the commission met 14 times, in Delft, Tokyo, Taipei, Washington, DC, Mexico City, Brighton (UK), Helsinki, Paris, Hong Kong, and Muncie, Indiana (USA), on a few occasions with other CIB Commissions, and at several of the triennial CIB World Congresses. The most recent conference in the US (2008) focused on education, and included an international student competition, with winners from Korea, China, Singapore and the USA. Each conference has produced a published book of proceedings, containing a total now of over 300 peer-reviewed papers.
State-of-the-art
Since the turn of the 21st century, a number of developments in various countries indicate that open building is no longer a speculative idea of a few pioneer practitioners and theorists. It has or is poised to become mainstream.
Shopping centers and office buildings are recognized as exhibiting the characteristics of open building.[10] An architect, working for a developer, will design a base building that defines public space and common services, leaving space for individual stores or offices, which hire their own architect to fill in their leased space. It appears that no theoretical or methodological work preceded the coming of age of this kind of architecture. The first appearance and subsequent evolution of shopping centers and office buildings progressed pragmatically, as a response to new realities, led by real estate developers and business entities of all kinds. Architects and contractors learned how to provide the needed services, often producing work of exceptional quality. Product manufacturers and their supply chains began introducing suitable products, fabrication and construction methods. New standards and regulations were developed to match the new realities. These developments were international in scope, crossing economic, political, cultural and technical boundaries.
Aside from these two building types, many parties – public and private – now ask for residential open building on a regular basis. This is evident in Finland, Poland, Japan, and the Netherlands. In other countries, residential open building – known by many names – is no longer recognized as something unusual. Evidence of this is found in Russia, Switzerland, Germany, China and to a lesser extent in the United States. New examples of housing in less-developed economies, designed by professionals to be incrementally upgraded in a user-controlled process, come to light in Chile, Mexico, and South Africa.
Mainstreaming of open building is a response to the pressures, conflicts and waste caused by continued adherence to rigid functionalism – that is, defining functions and designing buildings to fit. Open building is also a pragmatic answer to a state of technical entanglement in buildings that has resulted from the incremental addition, over a long period of time, of new technical systems and the “ownership” of these new systems by different trades who rarely cooperate. These pressures are forcing all parties to reconsider and realign their procurement and investment practices, their design methods, and their regulatory systems. In mass-consumer societies, attitudes toward the sphere of control exercised by inhabitants in the making and transformation of environments are changing, vis-à-vis the role of large corporations, governments and communities. The idea that investments should consider long-term asset value is also forcing all parties to learn to make buildings–especially but not limited to multi-occupant buildings – that can adjust as technologies, social patterns, and preferences–both individual and community – continue to evolve.
These changes in attitude and priorities are taking the force of law. In part this can be explained by the widespread–and parallel - adoption of a sustainability agenda. In 2008 the Japanese parliament passed new laws mandating 200 year housing, accompanying the legislation with a set of regulatory and administrative tools for use by local building officials who have the responsibility to evaluate and approve building projects. Projects approved under the new law receive a reduced rate of taxation. In Finland, one of the largest real estate companies develops open building projects for their residential portfolio. In the Netherlands, a number of companies–from product manufacturers to developers to architects–implement open building by other names. In Warsaw, Poland, open building is known as the “Warsaw Standard”. In San Francisco, residential developers build “bulk” housing, ready to be fitted out individually. Around the world, old office buildings that have retained their social and economic value are converted to residential occupancy, after being “gutted” to prepare them for new uses and layouts.
Besides shopping centers, office buildings and housing, open building is also evident in the health care facilities sector in the United States, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, among other countries. Hospital clients can no longer afford to let short-term functional programs drive facilities procurement methods and investment decisions. They demand “change-ready” facilities, assessed by their accommodation capacity over time, rather than short-term functional performance.
These projects, often large and complex and providing mixed-use space for housing, offices, commerce, health care and other uses, are recognized as having the systemic properties of large private (or public) infrastructures. They involve many decision-making bodies and users over long time periods and often implicate numerous territories. As such, they present technical, economic, political and cultural questions that go beyond the architectural discourse that tends to emphasize the special case, formal gymnastics, and the self-expression of the designer or client. These developments toward open building are not taking place for their ideological purity but for pragmatic reasons.
Open building implementation implies a new approach to architectural education. A number of schools of architecture around the world (TU Delft, Ball State University in the US, The University of Hong Kong, Southeast University in China, National Cheng-kung University in Taiwan, Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo, University of Florence, University of Pretoria, among others) are experimenting with it.[11] Because open building rejects functionalism, educators who teach open building help students develop skills in making built form, at various levels of intervention that can accommodate changing function.[12]
Open building implementation also implies new business models for the delivery of fit-out as integrated design-build packages, serving the consumer market. These companies, now operating in Finland, the Netherlands and Japan, operate with advanced IT support, advanced logistics, and showrooms with electronic and physical samples of products, and with trained installers.[13]
Open building terminology
Levels: specific spheres of control in the built environment. The built environment can be seen as having an hierarchical structure in which higher levels serve as the setting and context in which lower levels operate. As such, higher levels exercise dominance over lower levels, while lower levels are dependant on higher-level structures. Examples of levels include urban design and architecture, or base building and fit-out.[14]
Base building: the part of a multi-tenant building that directly serves and affects all occupants. In conventional North American practice, base buildings are constructed by speculative office building developers, leaving choice and responsibility for the remainder of the building — the fit-out — to occupants. The base building normally includes the building's primary structure; the building envelope (roof and facade) in whole or part; public circulation and fire egress(lobbies, corridors, elevators and public stairs); and primary mechanical and supply systems (electricity, heating and air conditioning, telephone, water supply, drainage, gas, etc.) up to the point of contact with individual occupant spaces. Base buildings provide serviced space for occupancy; Supports is another term for base building.
Fit-out (tenant work): the physical products and spaces controlled by the individual inhabitant or occupant used to make habitable space in a base building. Fit-out can change without forcing the base building to change.
Capacity: the measurable quality of a base building to accommodate a range of variations in floor plan and use within the constraints of a given base building. More generally, capacity concerns the degree of Open Building freedom offered by a higher level to a lower level.
Related Research Articles
A house is a single-unit residential building, which may range in complexity from a rudimentary hut to a complex structure of wood, masonry, concrete or other material, outfitted with plumbing, electrical, and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems. Houses use a range of different roofing systems to keep precipitation such as rain from getting into the dwelling space. Houses may have doors or locks to secure the dwelling space and protect its inhabitants and contents from burglars or other trespassers. Most conventional modern houses in Western cultures will contain one or more bedrooms and bathrooms, a kitchen or cooking area, and a living room. A house may have a separate dining room, or the eating area may be integrated into another room. Some large houses in North America have a recreation room. In traditional agriculture-oriented societies, domestic animals such as chickens or larger livestock may share part of the house with humans.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a German-born American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture.
Tapiola is a district of the municipality of Espoo on the south coast of Finland, and is one of the major urban centres of Espoo. It is located in the western part of Greater Helsinki. The name Tapiola is derived from Tapio, who is the forest god of Finnish mythology, especially as expressed in the Kalevala.
Zoning is a method of urban planning in which a municipality or other tier of government divides land into areas called zones, each of which has a set of regulations for new development that differs from other zones. Zones may be defined for a single use, they may combine several compatible activities by use, or in the case of form-based zoning, the differing regulations may govern the density, size and shape of allowed buildings whatever their use. The planning rules for each zone, determine whether planning permission for a given development may be granted. Zoning may specify a variety of outright and conditional uses of land. It may indicate the size and dimensions of lots that land may be subdivided into, or the form and scale of buildings. These guidelines are set in order to guide urban growth and development.
Delft University of Technology also known as TU Delft, is the oldest and largest Dutch public technological university. Located in Delft Netherlands, it is consistently ranked as one of the best universities in the Netherlands and as of 2020, it is ranked by QS World University Rankings among the top 15 engineering and technology universities in the world.
In architecture, functionalism is the principle that buildings should be designed based solely on the purpose and function of the building.
The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) is the most used framework for enterprise architecture today that provides an approach for designing, planning, implementing, and governing an enterprise information technology architecture. TOGAF is a high-level approach to design. It is typically modeled at four levels: Business, Application, Data, and Technology. It relies heavily on modularization, standardization, and already existing, proven technologies and products.
Ben van Berkel is a Dutch architect; founder and principal architect of the architectural practice UNStudio. With his studio he designed, among others, the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, the Moebius House in the Netherlands, the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, Arnhem Central Station, the Singapore University of Architecture and Design, Raffles City in Hangzhou and numerous other buildings.
Herman Hertzberger is one of the most famous Dutch architects, professor emeritus and the last Dutch architect to receive the prestigious Royal Gold Medal. Hertzberger is one of the oldest active Dutch architects.
N. John Habraken is a Dutch architect, educator, and theorist. His theoretical contributions are in the field of user participation in mass housing, the integration of users and residents into the design process. The visual result of his theory is the architecture of lively variety. Habraken is the initiator of the international "Participation movement" in architecture. His book "Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing", first published in 1961, is the manifesto and starting point of this movement. The theme "Resident or user participation" has been linked to Structuralism and Open building.
Mecanoo is an architecture firm based in Delft, Netherlands. Mecanoo was founded in 1984 by Francine Houben, Henk Döll, Roelf Steenhuis, Erick van Egeraat and Chris de Weijer.
The bay-and-gable is a distinct residential architectural style that is ubiquitous with the older portions of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The most prominent feature of the style is a large bay window that usually covers more than half the front façade of the home, surmounted by a gable roof. The bay window typically extends from the ground level towards the roof, although a variant of the housing form exists where the bay window fronts only the first level; known as a half-bay-and-gable. The housing form may be built as a stand-alone structure, although it is more often built as a semi-detached, or as terraced houses.
Structuralism is a movement in architecture and urban planning evolved around the middle of the 20th century. It was a reaction to Rationalism's (CIAM-Functionalism) perceived lifeless expression of urban planning that ignored the identity of the inhabitants and urban forms.
Francine Marie Jeanne Houben is a Dutch architect. She graduated with cum laude honours from the Delft University of Technology. She is the founding partner and creative director of Mecanoo architecten, based in Delft, The Netherlands.
Jón Kristinsson is a Dutch architect.
Open-source architecture is an emerging paradigm that advocates new procedures in imagination and formation of virtual and real spaces within a universal infrastructure. Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, modular design, avant-garde architectural, science fiction, language theory, and neuro-surgery, it adopts an inclusive approach as per spatial design towards a collaborative use of design and design tools by professionals and ordinary citizen users. The umbrella term citizen-centered design harnesses the notion of open-source architecture, which in itself involves the non-building architecture of computer networks, and goes beyond it to the movement that encompass the building design professions, as a whole.
Teun Koolhaas was a Dutch architect and urban planner.
Modern urbanist ideas were first conceived and applied in Iran beginning in 1952. During the British boycott of Iranian oil of 1952, the Iranian government looked inward for income by investing in infrastructural and agricultural projects. It is during this period that the Bank Sakhtemani was established to create capital and funding for infrastructure projects throughout Iran, including urban development. In 1952, the Iranian parliament approved the purchase of lands outside the Tehran city limits by Sakhtemani Bank for development into towns. Bank Sakhtemani collaborated with The Association of Iranian Architect Diploma (AIAD) to prepare master plans for these projects. The first of these projects were Kuy-e-Narmak, TehranPars, and Nazi-Abad. The AIAD attempted to integrate ideas from modernist conferences such as the Union Internationale Des Architectes (UIA) and Congrès Internationaux D'architecture Modern (CIAM), with vernacular Persian architecture, hence practicing a vernacular modernism. Decades onward, these neighborhoods still maintain their underlying structure which organized them and makes them identifiable even though social and economic factors of the society have changed.
Ger C. Bout (1950-2017) was a Dutch architect and artist based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Following years of completing furniture designs, architectural structures and installations, Bout began initiating large scale projects in public spaces internationally. In recent years he has focused on and incorporated photography into his projects. His ideas are always process based; he applies multiple techniques and skills to realise his work using varieties of mediums and expressions from architecture to furniture design, installation, drawing, performance, sculpture and photography.
Ole Bouman is a Dutch German historian, writer, curator in urbanism design and architecture. Bouman is the founding director of Design Society, an initiative of China Merchants Group and the Victoria and Albert Museum in Shenzhen, which opened in December 2017.
References
↑ N. John Habraken, Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing, Scheltema and Holkema, N.V., 1961; Praeger, New York, 1972 (re-published by The Urban International Press, UK, 1999)
↑ Ed. E. Vreedenburg. Tangled Building, Untangled Building. TU Delft Werkgroep OBOM, 1992
↑ Fukao, Seiichi. “History of Developments Toward Open Building in Japan”. Proceedings: Education for an Open Architecture, ed. Kendall; Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. 2008
↑ Bosma, van Hoogstraaten and Vos, NIA Publishers, 2000
↑ Van der Werf, Frans. Open Ontwerpen. Uitgeverij 010, 1993
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
