future change, real estate decisions will begin to represent sustainable investment and sustainable architecture in the large sense. This perspective of a building ...
Open Building: An Approach to Sustainable Architecture
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Open Building: An Approach to Sustainable Architecture
Stephen Kendall
O
NE of the most urgent issues in contemporary urban architecture concerns constructing buildings with the inbuilt capacity to adapt over time to changing uses and preferences, with minimal conflict. Such buildings would be stable, yet they would accommodate new technologies and also allow for changes in the organization of work, in the life-styles of building occupants, and in the shape of households those occupants form. When buildings are constructed for both present requirements and future change, real estate decisions will begin to represent sustainable investment and sustainable architecture in the large sense. This perspective of a building stock with planned stability and capacity to change is fully complementary with the pressing issues of environmental ethics, cradle-to-grave embodied energy, recycling, use of non-toxic materials and other vital issues in the worldwide sustainability agenda. Achieving a sustainable built environment, while complex, concerns at minimum a new set of professional skills and attitudes by architects, designers, engineers, and builders. But a sustainable built environment will also depend upon modifying regulatory and investment rules and incentives concerned with the design, construction, and management of buildings with built-in capacity for change. It is well known that many buildings constructed since 1920— under the modern movement’s “functionalist” approach to design— Journal of Urban Technology, Volume 6, Number 3, pages 1-16. Copyright © 1999 by The Society of Urban Technology. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 1063-0732 print/ISSN: 1466-1853 online
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are now obsolete and cannot be economically revalued to meet contemporary requirements. Many are thus destined for less than optimum uses, very costly refurbishment, recurrent vacancy problems, or demolition. These buildings were designed to meet thencurrent standards of “function” and technology. As a result, they were so tightly value-engineered, optimized, and integrated to current “programs of use” that now they are incapable of being adjusted. This is particularly the case with the multifamily and attached housing stock, but it is also the case with significant numbers of nonresidential buildings, particularly ordinary office buildings. This is not a matter of “style.” More importantly, the problem concerns a misguided attitude that sees the built environment as a rigid artifact made up of finished, single-use buildings. This view posits that if buildings are well designed by scientific research and professional know-how to begin with, “good” buildings would not need to be changed, except cosmetically. Additionally, designers of single-use buildings bury many pipes, conduits, and cables inside concrete walls and floors, or hide them deeply within wall and floor cavities, thereby so entangling a building’s infrastructure that a change of one subsystem implicates many others. Such entanglement, as we know but do not fully recognize, causes conflict among the technical systems and among the various parties controlling the subsystems. An approach more congruent with the principles of sustainable development and good architecture is to view the built environment as an artifact that is never finished, that is grounded in convention, and—especially with residential buildings—that is the responsibility of non-professionals who should take over with care and cultivation when professionals have completed their work. Non-Residential Open Building Although the dominant ideology in architectural circles and in architectural education continues to follow the emphasis on the “singular building expressing the architect’s and client’s wills” rather than on the “cultivation of ordinary buildings in a continuous urban fabric that serves as a setting for the special building,” there are some signs of change. Many buildings today are being constructed following an important set of principles leading—in the best cases—to a sustainable building stock. In international circles, these principles are called “Open Building.” 1 For decades, without fanfare, the best office building and retail facility design, construction, and management practices have adopted
Open Building: An Approach to Sustainable Architecture
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and rationalized Open Building principles, developing along the way a strong but unrecognized working tradition. The practice is as follows: commercial and retail base-buildings in any architectural style and construction type are routinely built by a given party, without determining their interior layouts. These buildings are then “fittedout” by other parties, to suit individual occupants’ preferences. Later, these same buildings are “revalued” by modifications that accommodate the “churn” of occupants, demands for new technical systems, and reorganizations of work. In this process, a strict technical/management distinction is made between the “base building” and the individual “fit-out.” 2 In addition, a strict legal and contractual distinction is made among the parties involved. It is quite normal for the party responsible for the base building to be entirely independent of the parties occupying the spaces inside. (See Figure 1.) FIGURE 1 Base-Building* and Fit-Out Levels**
Base-Building Level
Fit-Out Level
* The Base Building is the responsibility of a certain social group **The Fit-Outs are decided upon and are the responsibility of individual tenants.
This internal restructuring of occupant spaces frequently occurs at intervals of four-ten years in any given tenant space. Even new “build-to-suit” facilities to be occupied by one company are designed for the time when the owner will sell the building and vacate it, making room for multiple tenants who require different interior spaces, equipment, and systems suited to their own organizational and
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technical specifications. At a longer cycle—often in the range of every 25 years—building envelopes and common mechanical systems are removed and replaced. Construction, manufacturing, cost accounting, building design, management, and regulations have gradually adjusted to suit this approach. For example, witness the trends toward
complete “slab-to-slab” fit-out systems in the commercial office market
increased use of wire-management access floors, modular power and data cabling, and modular ceiling and lighting systems for flexible infrastructure increased use of tenant-specified mechanical and air-conditioning systems increased sophistication of building facade systems increased number of construction companies specializing in fit-out. This approach to building has also resulted in a shift in investment patterns that was first noted in the 1980s. To a significant extent, major components of building subsystems and subcontracting are migrating to the more mutable fit-out and furnishings, fixtures, and equipment (FF&E) levels of work and investment. These more changeable parts are classed as personal property, subject to much shorter depreciation schedules, and are not subject to property taxes. Building procurement methods are also changing to match the separation of responsibilities according to base building and fit-out. The practices—both in terms of technical hardware and organizational processes and procedures—are clearly changing. The Open Building process reorders the control and responsibilities of the builders, owners, and tenants of non-residential buildings. While the base building is common to all tenants and would be controlled by the builder or owner, each tenant determines the fit-out of its own space. The Construction Specifications Institute (CSI)3 is a national professional association providing technical information and communication among the nonresidential design and construction industry disciplines. CSI also develops the industry standard for organizing and presenting construction documents and specifications. In the Open Building process, a three-tier model of control distribution can be applied to CSI’s sixteen specification divisions. In that model, there are three tiers of responsibility—for the Base Building, for the Interior Construction, and for the Furnishings, Fixtures, and Equipment (FF&E). Figure 2 offers a hypothetical distribution of work and technology in each of the CSI divisions. There, each “tier” of responsibility
Ventre
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can be mapped according to i.e., the value of work-in-place. Concrete, for example, will be entirely in the base-building tier, while finishes may be part of all three tiers, but mostly of the FF&E tier. Another project may have a distribution different from that presented in Figure 2. For example, it may have more interior construction and less basebuilding work and very little, if any, FF&E work. It may be a project with built-in furniture and few finishes. Again, another project may have very little interior construction, so most work will be distributed between the base building and FF&E work. FIGURE 2 Three-Tier Model of Control Distribution
The interplay between the technical subsystems and the parties controlling them constitutes the critical variable in building design, construction, and management. The possibility of changing one part of a building—for example the FF&E and fit-out—without disturbing the base building is clearly advantageous not only for investors and tenants, but also for the environment. When conditions change, the entire building need not be demolished and the resulting debris put in a landfill. Instead, only those parts no longer congruent with changed requirements must be altered. Increasingly, those parts are becoming
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reusable (such as new types of carpets and systems furniture components), or at least are increasingly made of materials that do not put a burden on shrinking landfill capacity.
Kendall 1998
Residential Open Building At the same time that North American—and international—office and retail projects and management have been evolving toward a model of Open Building, developments toward residential Open Building have been advancing internationally. Led by pioneering architects, contractors, lenders, manufacturers, government agencies, and university researchers, residential Open Building has emerged as one of the most promising comprehensive approaches to assuring that the existing and new residential stock achieves sustainability in the twenty-first century. Residential Open Building represents an important paradigm shift for housing. It is a pragmatic framework, capable of putting into context for the building industry many important developments in product research, information management and logistics, and energy and resource utilization now coming online in other industries. It is a way to reorganize the housing industry toward a more consumeroriented—and efficient—industry. It also represents a new view linking technical issues to social and equity issues that are also important components in any consideration of sustainability. Key International Developments Toward Residential Open Building In the two major incubators of residential Open Building—the Netherlands 5 and Japan6—the idea of constructing residential base buildings (supports) without determining ahead of time the individual layouts of dwellings (infill) has become increasingly practical. Even where the approach is not yet economically viable, government agencies and private companies are reorganizing for Open Building practices, recognizing that it is a good, and probably inevitable, longterm trend for giving new construction the capacity for long-term change. In countries with large stocks of obsolete multifamily buildings, Open Building is being investigated as a way of rehabilitating existing buildings to make them sustainable—permanent and changeable—for the next 100 years. For decades, starting mainly in the 1960s, residential Open Building projects remained experimental, hampered by existing patterns of production and the lack of economically viable fit-out or infill systems. Within the past decade, this has changed. It is now clear
Kendall and Teicher 4
Dekker Cuperus and Kapteijns
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Kendall 1995
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that Open Building can cost less than traditional construction processes. Further, several competing residential fit-out systems are on the market in the Netherlands, interest in more consumer-oriented housing is strong in Finland and the United Kingdom, and there are strong movements toward the development of infill systems as well as more capacious base buildings in Japan. A patented infill system, described below, has been certified for application in the Netherlands and Germany, and is being studied for introduction in China and the United States. In Japan, many construction companies, product manufacturers, and government agencies and ministries are setting the trend by developing products and processes needed for practical implementation of Open Building. The Ministries of International Trade and Industry—focusing particularly on the infill or fit-out level—and the Ministry of Construction—focusing more on the support or base building level—have been funding research and development related to Open Building for decades. The Housing and Urban Development Corporation 7 has been the Japanese government agency working toward Open Building since the early 1970s, and has recently undertaken demonstration projects aimed at new Open Building methods for refurbishing its stock of 750,000 rental housing units around the country. The Osaka Prefecture Housing Authority has likewise taken initiatives over the past decade and continues to do so. One of the most advanced projects in recent years to be realized in Japan was the NEXT 218 18-unit housing project intended to anticipate the more comfortable life that urban households will enjoy in the twenty-first century. It was conceived by Osaka Gas company, and the NEXT 21 Construction Committee developed the basic plan and design. The project explored a number of new methods for constructing urban multifamily housing. Its objective were:
to use resources more effectively by systematized construction
methods to create a variety of residential units that meet the demands of a variety of households to introduce natural greenery to create multifamily housing that is attractive to urban wildlife to treat everyday waste and drainage within the building to ease the burden on the environment to use energy efficiently by such means as fuel cells to make possible a more comfortable life without increasing the amount of energy consumed.
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The units were designed by 13 different architects. Each architect could freely design each unit’s exterior and interior layout, using a system of rules for positioning various elements. Dwelling layouts were also freely determined. The extra floor heights allowed space above ceilings and under raised floors for ducts and piping to be routed independent of structural elements. Main beams reduced the depth in the middle where ducts and piping pass over the beams without use of “sleeves.” The building frame or skeleton, the exterior cladding, the interior finishes, and the mechanical systems were treated as separate building subsystems. Each was considered as a subsystem with a different life cycle, needing to be replaced or repaired at different times. The design of the 18 units began after the building frame and continued as the frame was being constructed. The dwelling unit plans were designed, their mechanical systems determined, and then the building’s entire mechanical system was designed. The entire mechanical services of the project were then installed as one project by one contractor. The building was constructed as a whole, but is designed in such a way that in the future, the various subsystems can be adjusted with improved autonomy. One unit has been completely renovated, including its exterior and balconies, as well as the entire interior floor plan. All work was done from the inside of the unit, reducing disruption to other tenants which would occur if scaffolding had to be erected on the building’s exterior. The project’s second phase includes the renovation of other units, a new group of inhabitants, and continued evaluation of the energy systems. Figure 3 depicts a highly flexible architectural system used in the NEXT 21 project. Its components are divided into four groups, according to the required life of each component and production path. These components are manufactured as separate systems and modules, so that outer walls, kitchens, baths and toilets, and gardens can be moved into or out of one dwelling without disturbing any other dwelling or the common infrastructure. In Europe, a number of similar residential infill systems are on the market or under development, principally in the Netherlands and Finland. The most comprehensive infill system has been used in both new construction and in the renovation of multi-unit apartment buildings, offering a fully prefabricated and adaptable infill for residential construction. The system includes spatial partitioning as well as all technical subsystems and kitchen and sanitary equipment, providing a fully equipped and habitable dwelling unit. Installation does not pose special demands on the base building or the facade.
van Randen
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FIGURE 3 NEXT 21 Experimental Housing Project in Osaka, Japan
Source: K. Itoh
Tiuri Tiuri and Hedman
Thanks to the free distribution of pipes, cables, and ducts, the position of the vertical mechanical systems shafts in the building do not determine the floor plans of individual units. (See Figure 4.) The main system uses subsystems and parts that are readily available on the market such as wall systems, doors and door frames, various finishes, kitchen and bathroom fixtures and equipment, and space and hot water heating equipment. It also can accommodate new developments of such off-the-shelf products. All these subsystems are integrated into an adaptable whole by means of two newly developed products that provide flexibility in design, fast installation on-site, and future replacement without disrupting neighboring units or common elements of the building. In Finland, a series of industry and government-sponsored experimental projects over the past five years has begun to demonstrate the merits of an Open Building approach to new consumeroriented, multifamily construction. Other studies have pointed to
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FIGURE 4 A Comprehensive Infill System
Source: E. Vreedenburgh
needed modifications of the operational modes of the construction industry for the common good, linking directly to Open Building and sustainability. In the United Kingdom, a number of research and development initiatives are underway toward a more component-based, consumeroriented building process. In China, work is moving beyond the experimental stage to wider applications following a dozen pathbreaking projects in the past decade. In Canada, the year 2000 should see a first major experimental Open Building project developed in connection with the “green” building activities there. For the time being, North American residential development remains tied to obsolete practices of entangled and rigid construction. With the exception of some high-end condominium and loft conversion projects, and the notable Banner Building9 in Seattle, residential construction in the United States has not adopted the more advanced methods
Lahdenperä
Gann
Kendall and Teicher
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separating base architecture and residential fit-out. One of these exceptions is Seattle’s award-winning Banner Building. Its for-sale loft spaces have been an economic and social success and a basic ingredient in the revitalization of a run-down neighborhood. Social and Equity Issues of Open Building
Kendall and Teicher
Dekker
The question of income and household diversity in a sustainable environment is recognized as an important social policy goal in many countries. Reasonable income and household diversity is a familiar characteristic of vibrant, enduring, and mature urban neighborhoods. Open Building is a way to accomplish this goal in new housing and new neighborhoods without adding costs to the construction. Figure 5 presents a representation of a traditional supply of housing. Households with differing preferences and economic possibilities are offered largely uniform, standard quality dwellings determined by “market research.” As the illustration indicates, some households find themselves paying for more than they want or can really afford, while other households have to accept less than they want or could afford. For the first group, the housing supply provides excess quality; for the latter group, the housing supply provides less than they could afford, resulting in unused purchasing power, resources that go not into the building sector but instead are channeled into the entertainment, travel, automotive, and consumer electronics sector. In an Open Building approach, a multi-unit building is made in such a way that a variety of occupant preferences is normal and costs a developer no more than making all units the same. (See Figure 6.) Here households share a high quality base building with a long life. The base architecture enables variety at the level of the individual dwelling unit. Each can have a fit-out suited specifically to its budget constraints and preferences. Having been organized from the beginning with such capacity, the building will have sustained use value while the fit-out (space layout, equipment, and walls) can adjust to changing household conditions at a cycle of 10-20 years. At a shorter time cycle, cabinets, finishes, and furniture can adjust as is now conventional. Discussion Despite problems to be sorted out in each place where Open Building is implemented, enough is now understood to recognize that the basic
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FIGURE 5 A Conventional Residential Project: Mismatch between Supply and Demand
FIGURE 6 An Open Building Residential Project: Matching Supply and Demand
Open Building: An Approach to Sustainable Architecture
Fukao
Kendall and Teicher
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principles of Open Building are aligned exactly with the goals of sustainability in the built environment. In a throw-away society, value is placed on short-term gratification and rapid obsolescence at all levels. When this set of preferences is reflected in investments in the design, construction, and maintenance programs of buildings, the results are familiar. Buildings are made to last only a short time in a technical sense, but equally important, investment incentives are even more powerfully arranged for short-term value extraction from expensive real estate investments. In Japan, for instance, the tendency was, until recently, to promote the “scrap and build” tradition. In this way, buildings were constructed quickly, based on strict current standards, with little thought to long-term capacity to change. Of course, this fueled the Japanese building sector for decades, bringing all participants along. Now, this investment strategy is widely questioned in favor of policies aimed at a “stock” approach to building. More emphasis is placed on maintenance and capacity for change according to life-cycle analysis. In the United States, the historic preservation movement was an early indicator of widespread dissatisfaction with the old U.S. tradition of destroying old buildings and neighborhoods in favor of new styles and trends. In Japan, the Century Housing System (CHS) was initiated by the Ministry of Construction in 1980 to develop building systems for residential architecture in which dwellers would be able to live for many years. To solve the problem of durability of structure, cladding, mechanical equipment, and piping, the research team coordinated the interfaces between component groups and the structure. Because open markets of building components for conventional wooden houses existed, the research team tried to make interface rules common to both conventional wooden detached houses and housing of reinforced concrete. In the CHS project, a building is divided into component groups according to “durable years.” The building itself should last a long time, but building components were graded for 4, 8, 15, 30 and 60 years. In CHS, the basic principle is that components whose durable lives are shorter must be installed after the components which have a long durable life. Piping and wiring must not be buried in concrete slabs, for instance. This led to the use of raised floors under which to distribute wiring and piping. Research was carried out from 1980-82. As a result, more than 40 projects were built containing many thousands of units, from detached houses to multi-unit apartment buildings. Open Building makes a significant contribution to understanding the long-term and short-term cycles of value in residential
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architecture. By making a clear distinction between levels10 —based on distribution of control and technical systems—it is possible to make an accurate accounting of value and responsibilities. The separation between base building and fit-out—clarifying the shared parts and the parts for individual choice—is an accounting method applied to the built environment. Such an accounting enables parties with varying stakes in the outcome a way to reach agreements. Open Building methods support the development of “clicktogether” components whose reuse values are higher than those which are destroyed when disassembly is required. In some cases, these products are compatible among manufacturers, a characteristic of true “open” products such as light bulbs that can be used in the sockets manufactured by many companies. This capability has yet to extend up the value chain very far toward higher value-added products, but should. The question of product reuse has direct bearing on the issue of sustainability. Too much of the fit-out of buildings is discarded upon reconfiguration. The office market has addressed this and has made progress in a number of ways. One example is carpets that can be leased and after removal returned to the mill for recycling; or furniture systems that have a secondary market after being reupholstered and rewired. In the residential market and much of the commercial and retail building market, interior reconfiguration for a new tenant means wholesale demolition and destruction of materials and products, which are then sent to landfills. Open Building has a goal of “manufacture and design for assembly, disassembly, and reuse.” This means that product manufacturers will make products compatible with other products having tight interfaces, but which are made by other companies. This goal, however, faces a significant obstacle. On the one hand, manufacturers make many products today that have substantial embodied knowledge and energy in them. They are expensive and durable. They are not commodity products in most cases, but high value-added components increasingly the result of “mass customization” and one-off custom production. They are in most cases incapable of linking to similar or associated products from other companies without significant site work or re-work. For example, Molex’s11 cabling and power distribution system used in Haworth 12 office furniture is not compatible with Steelcase’s13 equally sophisticated system used in its own office furniture. Neither can be connected in a “snap-together” fashion with the AMP cabling system used in the AMP Power Floor wiring access floor system. The present reality is that a Molex cable will not attach to a Square D,
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AMP, or other termination device. While product compatibility in the plumbing and steel industries and other commodity products is advanced, as products embody more knowledge higher on the value chain, they become less compatible and “open.” This lack of compatibility in high-value products is a major barrier to a general compatibility in building systems made by different manufacturers. Such compatibility is essential to creating the conditions for sustainable building. Compatibility among products of different manufacturers depends on increased consumer demand for choice, interchangeability, and quality at no extra cost. In the same way that consumers are no longer willing to tolerate incompatibility between light bulbs of many companies and standard light sockets, or between computer zip disks made by many different producers and the standard IOMEGA Zip drive, it should soon be the case that informed consumers will no longer tolerate the meaningless differences between competitive building products. Instead, consumers will look for compatibility standards, with distinctions among building components according to kind and quality of service. Aside from strictly technical issues, there are questions of social and individual choice and values connected to Open Building. There is good reason to believe that the increasing physical entanglement of the parts out of which the complex built environment is made has become a barrier to the healthy balancing of group and individual responsibility. This entanglement, therefore, thwarts further advances in the evolution of a sustainable built environment. When it is not clear who is responsible for which parts of the physical fabric we occupy and transform, any accounting for common purposes—and the corresponding physical setting—is almost impossible. This is a key point of Open Building and sustainability. Sustainability concerns—in great measure—that which is held in common. It is community values, community interests, and community power to act on its behalf. In this context, individuals act in their best interests in a fully cultural sense of individual freedom. When the community—the commons—is indistinguishable from the individual terrain, how can there be any means to sustain what is shared? In this respect, Open Building is a recognition and extension of principles found in historic environments around the world where we can observe outstanding examples of sustainable built fabrics.
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Bibliography Y. Cuperus and J. Kapteijns, “Open Building Strategies in Post-War Housing Estates, ” Open House International 18 (1993). Karel Dekker, “Open Building for Housing Rehabilitation,” in eds., Preiser, Varady, and Russell, Future Visions of Urban Public Housing (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati, 1994). Seiichi Fukao, “Century Housing System: Background and Status Report,” Open House International 12 (1987). K. Itoh, ed., “Next 21,” SD25, special issue (1994). David Gann, Flexibility and Choice in Housing (London: Policy Press, 1999). Stephen Kendall, “Office Building Fit-Out in the United States,” unpublished technical report prepared for TNO Building and Construction Research, Deft, The Netherlands (1998). Stephen Kendall and Jonathan Teicher, Residential Open Building: International Primer and Status Report (London: E&FN Spon, 1999). Stephen Kendall, “Developments Toward Open Building in Japan” (Silver Spring, Maryland, 1995). Pertti Lahdenperä, The Inevitable Change (Helsinki: CIB The Finnish Building Center, 1998). Ulpu Tiuri, “Open Housing: Housing for Real People,” Arkkitehti Arkitekten 3 (1998). Ulpu Tiuri and Markku Hedman, Developments Toward Open Building in Finland (Helsinki: University of Technology, 1998). Age van Randen, “Setting up a Consumer-Oriented Building Industry: A Challenge for Housing Millions,” International Housing Conference (Hong Kong, May 1996). Francis Ventre, “Building in Eclipse: Architecture in Secession,” Progressive Architecture 12 (1982).
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Live Links 1
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The Construction Specifications Institute, hom epage (September 2000 ) 3
Stephen Kendall and Jonathan Teicher, Residential Open Building: International Primer and Status Report (London: E&FN Spon, 1999) 4
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Molex, hompage (September 2000)
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Haworth, homepage (September 2000)
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Steelcase, homepage (September 2000)
