• 
  • Carpentry
  • Plumbing & Wiring
  • Energy Efficiency
  • Kitchen & Bath
  • Building Codes
  • Interior Finish
  • Foundations & Masonry
  • Building Plans
  • DVDs
  • Magazine Archives
• 
  • Digital Issues
  • Member Home
• 
  • Subscribe
  • Renew
  • Gift Subscription
  • Current Issue
  • Magazine Extras
  • Magazine Index
  • Advertiser Marketplace

The Daily Fix

What is Open Building?

FHB_WEB, member

no recommendations

The open-building concept is ultimately about infusing the concept of building with the realities of life.

Add Comment
Print

by Tedd Benson

Somebody once pointed out, “To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.” But for that, my whole professional life would be on shaky ground. As it is, my company associates and I are avid researchers, constantly on the lookout for good ideas we can pluck from wherever they might be on the never-ending quest to do things better.

So it was in the early 1990s that I bumped into a marvelous little book by the Dutch architect John Habraken titled Supports (Urban Press, 1999). Originally written in 1961, it was a response to the European mass-housing experiments of the post-WWII period. He argued passionately that the process of making housing must preserve the “natural relationship” that humans need to have with the place where they live. He also believed that the building’s shell can be constructed without specific concern for the occupant, but fixing the interior without consideration of particular people and their constantly changing requirements does a disservice to the very concept of home. This book was the birth of the open-building concept, which is ultimately about infusing the concept of building with the realities of life. In retrospect, it’s amusing to see that I underlined most of the book.

Subsequently, I tracked down other books by John Habraken and also learned that he was then the head of the architectural department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and living in Cambridge, Mass. I sought him out there and had the good fortune of getting to know John over a period of time. He gave a seminar to our company, and I later made several trips to Holland to learn more about how John and his colleagues were putting the ideas into practice.

For our company, there was a natural acceptance of open-building ideas. We were determined to do everything necessary to ensure that our houses could last hundreds of years and, with that in mind, already thought of the building’s shell and the interior layout as two different issues. We were searching for ways of making our buildings more adaptable, and therefore more durable. We didn’t need convincing; we needed to find or develop methods that would work with our design and building systems.

Coincidentally, in the same time period, I also had the opportunity to communicate with Stewart Brand as he was completing his book, How Buildings Learn (Penguin, 1994). The essential point of the book is that houses appear to be insentient, but are more like living organisms, no matter what the intentions of the designer and the builder. After showing examples in many types and styles of buildings, Brand concluded that attempts to prevent adaptation and change are both futile and shortsighted. Life is not static; therefore, buildings that house life should be mutable.

In the book, Brand built on a theory developed by British architect Frank Duffy that there are actually distinct layers in buildings that live in time differently. To make buildings more flexible and durable, these layers should not be entangled with each other. Duffy described four layers, but Brand amended the four to six, and he called them the six Ss: site, structure, skin, services, space plan, and stuff. From our experience with timberframe buildings, the idea of separating structure and skin from services and space plan sounded exactly right and provided us with a clear and memorable objective that could improve our homes.

Inspired and educated by Habraken and Brand, we have further developed their ideas, added our own, and continued our research. From our own experience, we know that quality, efficiency, and consistency can come out of a workshop setting in the form of parts and preconstructed elements. From the Europeans, we have seen that is possible to build standard homes with firmer structure and better energy efficiency. From the Japanese, we have seen that it is possible for every home, even by the tens of thousands, to be customized for the owners. From the auto and computer industries, we have seen the systems and technology that should be available in the average home. More than anything else, we can see that the world is changing, and home building should not drag behind. We should lead.

Read the complete article... Reinventing the House Open building is a systematic method of efficient, adaptable design and construction by Andrew Dey

Add Comment Print

A Homeowner's Story: Did Going Green Make Sense?

Back to List

What's the Difference Between a Standard and Low Angle Block Plane?