OPENBUILDING.CO
BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE
OpenBuilding.co is a group of Dutch architects, engineers and developers dedicated to extending the lifespan of buildings, significantly lowering the ecological footprint and creating healthy communities. Open Buildings are flexible, adaptable, circular and resilient. With distinct architecture, they contribute to a dynamic urban context. The infill is co-created with future users to encourage and consolidate inclusion and belonging.
Open Building advocates a physical division of building components that have different life cycles. In doing so, Open Buildings incorporate not only flexibility to move with social tendencies, climate change and new regulations, but also form the basis for a circular construction economy.
The support represent the most permanent parts of the building, like the structure and can be seen as a bookcase. The infill represents the adaptable part of the building, or in other words the books. - N. John Habraken (1961)
The task for policymakers, architects and developers for the coming decades is clear: we need large numbers of sustainable homes. The Founding Partners of OpenBuilding.co acknowledge that ambition: together we must work on circular, flexible and adaptable structures and anchor them well to the urban context and society. The principles of Open Building offer strategies and scenarios to work towards open and dynamic neighborhoods, affordable and comfortable housing and building innovation and circularity.
Read more about the Open Building principles and our manifesto here.
The ideas of the Founding Partners of OpenBuilding.co find their origins in the legacy of Professor N. John Habraken, who created the basis for Open Building with his book De Dragers en de Mensen (The Supports and the People in English). Habraken introduced the term ‘support’ (or: base building) and infill (customized functionalities). Habraken promoted a radical shift in decision-making for mass-customization in housing and a new way to harness the power of industrial production. In the mid-1980s, the term Open Building was first coined by the SAR (Stichting Architecten Research - Foundation for Architects Research).
Catch the sun or a fresh breath while taking the Open Building Audio Tour Amsterdam