Open Building
About the Book Series
The Routledge Open Building Series is a library of titles addressing the Open Building approach to architecture and urban design. It offers an international perspective, providing theory, design methods, examples of construction techniques, manufactured products and many realized projects. These titles augment a growing literature in sustainability and resilience in the built environment by focusing on the fourth dimension.
Open Building advocates separation of design tasks: the design of what is shared and what will last, and the design of what belongs to individual occupancies and is expected to change more quickly. This is both a social/political and a design skills issue. Urban design projects, office buildings, shopping centers and laboratories are examples of separation of design tasks. The same should become the norm in multi-unit housing, healthcare and educational facilities and other project types making up our everyday world. The Open Building approach addresses how to establish the boundary between what is shared and what is decided independently; how to separate the distribution of utility lines between the two; how to evaluate a building’s or urban design’s capacity to accommodate a variety of interventions initially and over time; and what shared patterns, types and systems help designers cultivate coherent variety. More generally, Open Building helps design professionals work with change and to cooperate in the flowering of everyday environment.
This series provides answers to these questions, and more, and is designed to be the go-to resource for anyone seeking to understand and practice Open Building.
Open Design in Practice
1st Edition
By Frans van der Werf
December 02, 2025
Architect and urban planner Frans van der Werf discloses in this book his own experiences as one of the pioneers of the worldwide Open Building approach. He designed as a practitioner Molenvliet, the first executed housing project that fully exemplifies the Open Building philosophy and methods. In ...
Open Building for Architects: Professional Knowledge for an Architecture of Everyday Environment
1st Edition
By Stephen H. Kendall, N. John Habraken
December 22, 2023
Open Building is an internationally recognized approach to the design of buildings and building complexes with roots in the way the ordinary built environment grows and regenerates. The Open Building approach recognizes that both stability and change are realities to be managed in the contemporary ...
The Short Works of John Habraken: Ways of Seeing / Ways of Doing
1st Edition
Edited
By Stephen H. Kendall, John R. Dale
March 31, 2023
This book offers, for the first time, access to the chronological arc of John Habraken’s writing in a single collection. Few architects or scholars have so consistently and patiently pursued such a humane and culturally vital set of radical questions related to the behaviour of the built ...
Residential Architecture as Infrastructure: Open Building in Practice
1st Edition
Edited
By Stephen H. Kendall
November 30, 2021
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 ...
Healthcare Architecture as Infrastructure: Open Building in Practice
1st Edition
Edited
By Stephen H. Kendall
December 06, 2018
Architects and healthcare clients are increasingly coming to recognize that, once built, healthcare facilities are almost immediately subject to physical alterations which both respond to and affect healthcare practices. This calls into question the traditional ways in which these facilities ...