Beyond Single Use: Looking Back and Looking Forward at the Open Building Movement

Introduction

With the recent passing of John Habraken, and his student Nicholas Wilkinson who founded the OHI journal, we find ourselves at a critical moment of reflection on the intellectual and performance legacies of the Open Building (OB) movement. This call for papers seeks a variety of perspectives on the current position of the Open Building movement and adjacent focus areas. This issue will explore how Open Building overlaps with contemporary concerns of circular economy, resilience, adaptive reuse, and preservation; and the need for computational tools supported by generative AI to plan and develop Open Building projects. Longitudinal Open Building case studies are of particular interest to this Special Issue. The themes of the Special Issue will build on the 2023 Council on Open Building symposium, “Beyond Single Use: Open Building, Architecture & Urban Design,” which featured presentations from noted academics and practitioners from the fields of architecture, urban planning, engineering, and public policy. The symposium picked up on current themes highlighted in recent books about on Open Building including Open Building for Architects: Professional Knowledge for an Architecture of Everyday Environment, Healthcare Architecture as Infrastructure: Open Building in Practice as well as the work of the The International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB) W104 – Open Building Implementation group and a group of practitioners in Holland – OpenBuilding.co.

Open Building provides a formal approach to acknowledging and managing ongoing change in the built environment. Its influence on architectural practice and academic theory has been productive, and may have the potential to further address the unfolding impacts of climate instability, rapid urbanisation, and the need for greater socio-spatial agency.

List of topic areas

• Emerging methods and technologies that improve capacity for change at the building and district scale
• Convergence, divergence, and potential synthesis between Open Building and Adaptive Reuse, Circular Economy, Resilience, Preservation, and other contemporary sustainable design approaches
• The adaptive reuse of buildings for continuous and incremental change processes
• Longitudinal performance-based case studies of Open Building projects
• Analysis of the technical, intellectual, and cultural impact of the Open Building movement during the past 50 years, as evidenced in literature and architectural pedagogy
• Emerging practices and markets for industrialization of construction and construction robotics
• Related UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), as listed below
  • SDG 9 – Industry, innovation and infrastructure
  • SDG 10 – Reduced inequalities
  • SDG 11 – Sustainable cities and communities
  • SDG 13 – Climate action
  • SDG 17 – Partnerships for the goals

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Registration and access are available here.

Author guidelines must be strictly followed.

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to "Please select the issue you are submitting to".

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Click here to submit!

Key deadlines

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 28th February, 2025

Email for submissions: [email protected]; [email protected]