Residential Architecture as Infrastructure

Open Building in Practice

Stephen H. Kendall, Stephen H. Kendall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000456660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Residential Architecture

This edited collection provides an up-to-date account, by a group of well-informed and globally positioned authors, of recently implemented projects, public policies and business activities in Open Building around the world.

Countless residential Open Building projects have been built in a number of countries, some without knowledge of the original theory and methods. These projects differ in architectural style, building industry methods, economic system and social aims. National building standards and guidelines have been promulgated in several countries (Finland, China, Japan, Korea), providing incentives and guidance to Open Building implementation. Businesses in several countries have begun to deliver advanced FIT-OUT systems both for new construction and for retrofitting existing buildings, demonstrating the economic advantages of 'the responsive, independent dwelling.' This book also argues that the 'open building' approach is essential for the reactivation of the existing building stock for long-term value, because in the end it costs less.

The book discusses these developments in residential architecture from the perspective of an infrastructure model of built environment. This model enables decision-makers to manage risk and uncertainty, while avoiding a number of problems often associated with large, fast-moving projects, such as separation and distribution of design tasks (and responsibility) and the ensuing boundary frictions.

Residential Architecture as Infrastructure adds to the Routledge Open Building Series, and will appeal to architects, urban designers, researchers and policy-makers interested in this international review of current projects, policies and business activities focused on Open Building implementation.

Part 1Residential Open Building projects in a number of countries

DOI: 10.4324/9781003018339-1

This part of the book explains how the basic principles of infrastructure design can be effectively applied to the design of large residential projects. The word infrastructure is familiar, although in architecture it refers only to the utility systems, not the entirety of a building. Chapter 1 explains how the basic principles of infrastructure planning – which are equivalent to the Open Building approach – can be extended to support the design of large residential projects.

The chapter then highlights a selection of recent projects in the Netherlands, Finland and Russia, and the global South. The cases all address the conundrum that while Open Building is often mistakenly understood as a technical methodology for building design and construction, in which the term ‘flexibility’ is too often used, it is also a socio-political issue. While the approach does address technical issues (such as ‘disentanglement,’ ‘capacity analysis,’ ‘interface standards’ and the like), in fact the approach is more focused on two basic tenets: separation of design tasks, and cooperation among designers. This suggests new roles, attitudes, methods, governance structures and business opportunities, which are briefly outlined in each chapter.

Chapter 1Basic principles of an infrastructure or Open Building model of residential architecture

Stephen H. Kendall

DOI: 10.4324/9781003018339-2

In the early decades of the 21st century, breakthroughs in progress toward Open Building implementation are urgently needed to assure the capacity of the residential building stock to regenerate itself, cell-by-cell or one-dwelling-at-a-time. This is the best way to achieve the sustainability and resilience of the everyday environment.

To achieve this goal, each dwelling in a multi-occupant or attached building typology needs to be fully independent. This is not a matter of so-called flexibility, which is a largely technical way of describing things. Rather, it is first of all a matter of separated design tasks, which, because we are discussing buildings, inevitably involves technical matters, but is fundamentally about new patterns of decision-making. Independent dwellings mean that each should be able to adjust, be replaced or altered independent of other dwellings in the same building. This is the same independence we take for granted in detached dwellings, the most prevalent typology everywhere in the world. Detached dwellings are attractive in large part because they are independent and enable independent action and responsibility in the context of community norms, conventions and regulatory instruments, with reduced points of friction between neighbors. With increased density, more technical, social and legal boundary frictions arise. Enabling the independence of each dwelling in large projects helps to establish dwellings as the basic cells in a living everyday environment.

Residential architecture is arguably the most important application of the Open Building approach – and evidently the most difficult to achieve. It concerns the bulk of the built environment; it most directly touches the daily lives, habits, attitudes and aspirations of all of us. Residential Open Building is also the most complex among all project types, both organizationally, economically, socially, and technically. Large multi-dwelling projects have more territorial subdivisions, more regulatory burdens, with more interwoven and usually entangled mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems per m³ than other building types. People need (and want) to live together, but also need their autonomy, sense of personal space, achievement and responsibility, while also living in a supportive ‘commons.’

There is overwhelming evidence that the seemingly innate need to shape our personal environments to suit our individual preferences remains alive even if it is suppressed or denied. This need is evident, if we just look around, independent of income, household structure and culture. Achieving a balance between individual responsibility and a supportive commons is never easy, because change – and expressions of individual preferences – can be unsettling, the more so in large buildings inhabited by hundreds of households where consensus and predictability are also needed. In contemporary societies in most countries, finding this balance can often be the source of tension and conflict, particularly in times of rapid social and technical changes. In part this is because of the hegemony of professionals who do not want to relinquish control of the design of the built environment once they have gained it. But it is more than that: fear of ‘the different other’ also accounts for some of the difficulties in living close together. Recognizing these difficulties, the default response of those who invest in, design and manage multi-occupant buildings today is to institute regulatory measures and make design and construction decisions that thwart dwelling independence – and that block or greatly inhibit incremental change and variety – even while installing more amenities in the ‘common’ sphere in what I consider an implicit strategy of pacification. Sometimes this strategy is explicit. The Open Building approach offers a way to release some of these tensions, and to save money in the process.

Others have sought to make each dwelling unit in a multifamily structure independent (e.g. Boosma, et al., 2000; LeCorbusier and Jeanneret, 1946; Matsumura, 2019; Parman and Bender, 1976). However, as far as I know, only the adoption of the Open Building approach has succeeded, producing countless projects around the world. Many of those initiating such projects do not even know of this worldwide phenomenon and use various names to describe what they are doing.

The perspective put forward in this book asks readers to set aside the long-held concept that large multifamily housing projects are best produced as unitary entities or investments, designed and accounted for as a whole. This unitary way of seeing such complex buildings is obsolete and too costly. It is a remnant of the now obsolete functionalist ideology. In the interest of a regenerative built environment, in which independent dwellings find their place in the normal functioning of everyday built environment, this book hopes to contribute to the ongoing work of many practitioners and clients alike to cultivate a sustainable, resilient built environment, planned for incremental change.

We should think of our homes as a legacy to future generations and consider the negative environmental effects of building them to serve only one or two generations before razing or reconstructing them. Homes should be built for sustainability and for ease in future modification.

(From Healthy Housing Reference Manual, National Low-Income Housing Coalition, USA)

A central premise of this book, explained in different voices and in varied contexts, is that individual freedom and responsibility normally associated with the detached dwelling need not – and indeed cannot – be allowed to be forfeited under the pressures of density and the forces pushing for uniformity. With world population expected to grow from 7 billion in 2020 to 9.7 billion by 2050, societies across the globe will need to build more compactly and more sustainably and more affordably, with a greater commitment to equity and long-term value. In doing so, societies will have to harness the initiative of individual households at all income levels in more effective ways, as well as the power of industrial production, matched by action of both public bodies and private entities, to lower the cost of housing. We will need everyone’s active involvement to balance individual enterprise with collective action to make the built environment thrive, and to reactivate existing environments for long-term value.

A radical proposition

This book adds to the growing literature on the Open Building approach to the design of large and complex buildings. This approach springs from the book Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing (Habraken, 1972), as noted in the Preface, first published in Dutch in 1961, in English in 1972 and 1999, and reissued in 2020 (Routledge Open Building Series – Revivals). Supports offered a fundamentally new insight: a way of seeing the built environment and of the role of professionals – and everyday citizens –in its cultivation. John Habraken had the ability to imagine a different world. That book and the ideas in it, written by an architect, are unabashedly political, because they deal with governance or decision-making, that is ‘who controls what, and when’ in the making of built environment. Habraken asserted that the housing shortage for ordinary citizens, which the ‘mass housing’ of the time sought to overcome, could not be accomplished until dwellers were reintroduced as active decision-makers. He proposed not another design solution, but a redistribution of control. This was radical at the time and was widely condemned as being impractical and too expensive, although no one would argue against the idea of people deciding on their own dwellings.

As an answer to ‘who controls what, and when’ in housing, Habraken suggested the distinction and separation of two design tasks. One was the design of supports, having to do with all that is shared among many inhabitants of a project. The other task was the design of independent dwellings in such supports. This is not to be confused, as it so often is, with the ‘initial construction phase’ and the ‘completion of a project,’ a technical distinction in the building process that has no bearing on decision-making matters.

Habraken proposed that the full power of industry could best be exploited in housing processes when independent dwellings could become a new market and could drive industry’s productive power in a new, disintermediated way (Ryan, 2000). He argued that the uniformity and rigidity of ‘mass housing’ was not a technical problem but resulted from marginalizing users/inhabitants. It matters little if this marginalization occurred in government or private market housing processes producing large housing projects. The elimination of independent dwellings in large projects, he argued, thwarted the exercise of household economic decision-making power, thus inhibiting the full potential of industrial capacity to meet that individual demand. This ultimately suppresses competition and raises costs.

This formulation of an approach to large housing projects – two distinct design tasks and the full utilization of industrial capability serving individual demand for independent dwellings – constitutes what is usefully understood as an infrastructure model of built environment. In fact, a diagram of a highway viaduct and the vehicles that use it appeared in one of Habraken’s early essays. This book aims to show that an infrastructure model extended into the very fabric of large residential buildings can be the basis for inspiring and varied arch...