![]() Instead, he positioned his intervention as a critique of and response to the majority of postwar housing construction throughout his country, the Netherlands. Unlike most of them, however, he has not confined his analysis exclusively to the living conditions of poor or vulnerable communities. Like many of the thinkers whose work I study, Habraken has dedicated his career to investigating and advancing models of user participation in housing environments. On King’s Day in 2022, I went to visit John Habraken, an architect whose life’s work has contended with such issues, specifically the question of how to design flexibility into multifamily residential architecture to accommodate the diversity of household needs.ĭetails from “The Twin Structure,” fold-out poster produced by the SAR to explain the methodology of support and infill ( inbouwpakket means “infill”), 1967. ![]() Yet, while you can always easily pass along a child’s crib when she grows into a bed or a large dining table when the kids move away, you can’t so easily move old walls when teenagers want more privacy, or carve an office out of the living room when you need to start working from home. Habraken has made it his life’s work to design flexibility into multifamily residential architecture, to accommodate diverse household needs.ĭifferent households have distinct needs, of course, and those needs change over time. Imagine a cross between Oktoberfest and the Fourth of July that comes with a tradition of garage sales and neighborly hand-me-downs: revelers throng impromptu flea markets selling toys and candy, and the clothes, books, records, and furniture that households inevitably outgrow. Everyone wears orange clothes and drinks all day. Each year, King Willem-Alexander chooses a town to visit and celebrate his birthday publicly. Festival grounds pop up in cities and towns, thick with music and beer. King’s Day is a Dutch holiday in late April that celebrates the ruling monarch of the Netherlands. Here you can see the themes that have fascinated me for so long: growth and change, the continuation of patterns as results of human action the way living urban tissues are developed out of many small, individual entities and, above all, the underlying structure, the relatively constant holding the relatively ephemeral the unity and diversity the beauty of the extraordinary that compliments the beauty of the ordinary - the leaves and flowers that speak of the same tree. Demonstration model for housing with moveable interior walls, developed by architects in the Stichting Architekten Research (Foundation for Architectural Research, or SAR), 1969-72. ![]()
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