Скачать или смотреть china ob 20251207 072536 Meeting Recording

This is a presentation prepared for an Open Building conference in Nanjing, China. This is a special occasion, December 2025, it being the 40th anniversary of the first CIB W104 Open Building Implementation conference (Nanjing 1996). (Important correction - Arevena and the Elemental project are in Chile, not Peru!). The following people are acknowledged:

Earthworld architects and Andre Eksteen for the video of the Africa Campus in Pretoria.
Louis Oosthuizen, a research assistant on the SARChI project who manages our community engagement work.
The bottle and crate metaphor is attributed to the designers of the INO Hospital in Bern, Switzerland.
Linelle Visage, Tebogo Ramatlo and Calayde Davey for the diagrams of the building OB analysis - they have all worked as research assistants on the SARChI project.

An accompanying text is provided here:

I am an architect with an interest in cities: how they come to be and how they are inhabited. In the South African context, the aim is towards achieving mixed residential environments in terms of tenure, typology, income groups, functions and densities. Open Building as a tool to manage complexity and diversity; the built environment should function as a total ecosystem.

South Africa is a divided nation with divided cities as a result of its political history. Open Building studies in South Africa promote the idea of complete, integrated, sustainable, human(e) settlements and multi-layered environments, but also to realise them through alternative mechanisms of delivery, finance and design that acknowledge built environment levels and diverse agents of decision-making.

The production of space and the built environment is understood as a social construct and people and society are an important consideration in an understanding of the built environment where built form and space are seen to help manage social structures and relationships to the benefit of all. Open Building thinking and practice in the global south enables decision-makers to manage risk and uncertainty while accepting the distribution of control (and responsibility) across levels of intervention.

Open Building dissolves the distinctions between the urban level and the architectural level – making decisions across the two levels simultaneously in some cases, but also acknowledging the dominance of the higher-level decisions in other cases.

Community engagement is a mechanism for empowerment and increased agency. Open Building is seen as a mechanism for ensuring on-going participation, distributed control and increased agency, achieving synergy between government and communities.

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.

The built environment should function as a total ecosystem – thus promoting the idea of complete, integrated, sustainable, human(e) settlements and multi-layered environments. At the core of this way of thinking is the concept of levels/agents of decision-making and the management thereof through ideas of “disentanglement” of building systems.

Open Building is about people and society and about understanding/supporting social structures and managing relationships in the built environment, explored at many levels, from building/neighbourhood project-level innovations to city/policy higher-level decision-making.

In Open Building thinking, buildings are not strictly defined functionally. Open Buildings are not tightly integrated with programmes of use and may transform over time. These buildings are able to offer spaces of great architectural quality, spatial and technical capacity. Open Building assumes that functions are largely unpredictable. Habraken argued that housing must always recognise two domains of action – the action of the community and that of the individual inhabitant.

I believe that, like passive design, economic design, good design, Open Building should be the way in which we practice architecture. Open Building is linked to concepts of sustainability, participation and inclusivity. It should not remain as a niche area in the field with a few proponents internationally – and hardly any nationally – but should rather become the way that we teach and practice in the field.

Open Building achieves a balance between order and choice, the government and the public, process and product. The concept of Open Building is timeless and its principles are universal; they continue to relate to the state of the built environment globally and have special resonance for Africa and countries of the global south. The principle of distributed decision-making offers a mechanism by which voices that may have been side-lined, excluded and unheard may regain decision-making roles.