-Form & Control in the Built Environment
by JOHN HABRAKEN
The text talks about how the housing with density in urban and city area should be designed with active involvement of people in design process. Because of world war-ii, the mass destruction of the buildings in European cities, planners and architects initiated to shape new housing strategy for people. Due to industrial development, the migration of people from villages to city happened. Because of which the need of housing emerged. Modernist housing strategies failed to address social needs of the residents as resultant. “Support dwelling”[1] principle by Dutch architect John Habraken was reaction to industrial housing and solution to postwar European housing problems. Later on, he came up with the alternative theory of form, planning and designing the built environment for people, by people through this text in 1998.
The book is structured in three parts- Form (physical order), Place (territorial order) and Understanding (cultural order). Involvement of user in determining form and configuration makes the configuration live and active. This live configuration has more chances to last long. He advocates the customization instead of mass production through his Support-infill model. The customization with mass production does not produce configuration and leads to catalog model and not the support- infill model. Therefore, the support- infill model is essential to produced architecture.
This customization is categorized in four levels- City, Urban Block, Building, Room and Furniture. Lower level (Furniture) can have more degree of modifications where as the higher level (City) can have less degree of changes as it affects large number of people. E.g. City (support) shall last 500 years and furniture (infill) can last 20 years.
The author comments, “Ordinary growth patterns that had been innate and self sustaining, shared throughout society, have been recast as problems requiring professional solution”.[2] In his principles of mass housing, full public control of outside space in low-rise housing is desired. Unlike in high-rise housing the association of the residents with the street gets lost. “It is… much less simple to develop a close and fine-grained territory than an open coarse – grained territory with the same housing density.”[3] This customization theory leads to have increased level of control and so the social environment.
The other architects argued that the responsibility of an architect does not end with providing the design of the Support only. Hence, the outcome of the design is uncertain in terms of the form. In addition, the time consumed in the process of involving end users would be more. These principles are difficult to implement in the developing countries due to limitations of money and time. The governance is also complicated while following these principles. The positive aspect of these principles is that the end user becomes active participant of designing process, which would establish the strong association of the user with the building.
[1] John Habraken, “Supports: an Alternate to Mass Housing”, 1972 English edition.
[2] John Habraken, “The Structure of the Ordinary – Form & Control in the Built Environment”, MIT Press 2000
[3] Habraken, “The limits of professionalism”