Residential open building
By Stephen Kendall, Jonathan Teicher

Throughout North America—and increasingly, throughout the world— non-residential buildings are constructed in an Open Building (OB) approach. Office and retail developers, their design and construction teams, and the associated regulators, lenders, owners, tenants, and product manufacturers are reorganizing the building process.

They routinely work according to principles and methods that have developed over recent decades in direct response to extraordinary and accelerating change in the shaping of environment.

Regardless of style, typology or construction, commercial base buildings are now customarily built without predetermined interior layout.

Upon leasing, demising walls and then interior partitioning are added, as spaces are fitted out to suit individual tenants.

Each tenant may install unique interior spaces, equipment and systems to suit organizational and technical needs. When older commercial buildings are ‘revalued,’ demolition exposes the existing building shell, which is then retrofitted with upgraded facade and interior systems.

Even in ‘build-to-suit’ office facilities, base building construction is made as generic as possible: its long-term value is increased by providing capacity for changing requirements, including eventual tenant turnover and future sale.

Developments in commercial construction are now moving into the residential sector.

In Europe, Asia and North America, residential Open Building principles, variously known as OB, S/I (Support/Infill), Skeleton Housing, Supports and Detachables, Houses that Grow, etc.—are now spear-heading the reorganization of the design and construction of residential buildings in parallel ways.

Residential Open Building practices are rapidly evolving throughout the world.

As new consumer-oriented infill systems appear and become more widely available, governments, housing and finance corporations and manufacturers are joining developers, sustainability advocates and academics in endorsing and advancing a new open architecture.