Editorial

Some architects are still somewhat careful in embracing open building for two reasons. Firstly they see the design responsibility of ‘the plan’ being taken away from them and secondly they worry at having a third party who is not an architect to ‘design’ his or her own floor plan. This could occur in health, educational, residential or office environments and since the third party is likely to be a lay person and not someone from the design disciplines it is deemed as unprofessional. This is largely a misunderstanding because the role of the user is not a design role in the professional sense of the word. Rather the users are making their priorities and relationships for various functions in the form of a plan but more likely expressed with a dolls house type of model or by computer modeling. This can be applied to the work place, health care, educational buildings and many more types. It is often engrained in the mind of the professionals that they must perfect the plan, work and work on it, polish it, defend it, the plan is theirs and where the physical structure only relates to that specific plan. Any change in the plan brings about a change in the structure. This really is a negation of open building. Such a one to one correlation of structure to plan leaves no room for movement or any alternative plan. This was the horror of some nineteen fifties and sixties tower blocks for council tenants where four or even six units per floor were shaped by the vertical structural sheer walls and columns. These could be holding up to twenty five stories and at the same time these monolithic structural concrete walls formed the plan configuration of the flats on each floor. The characteristics of this approach were standardization and the complete inability of the building to respond to change. Timelessness rather than time-based would be the best description of such buildings.