The design of a rural house in Bushbuckridge, South Africa: An Open Building interpretation

This qualitative study argues that ongoing occupant involvement in housing design, construction, and maintenance processes leads to more appropriate buildings that can sustain their usefulness while undergoing change over time to adapt to dynamic user needs. This is demonstrated by the documentation of the design of a house in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, South Africa that uses Open Building (OB) principles so that the house adapts to the changing needs of the family and maintains its intergenerational value. This project centres on the occupant, not only at the outset with initial consultation but also throughout the lifetime of the project, as the house design is deliberately flexible and aims to allow many authors to participate in its future adaptations. Based on this worldview, we use the following tools: a literature review on OB, an OBanalysis of low-cost housing in general, and an analysis of the proposed design project. We compare low-cost housing projects using four OB principles: 1. how the project involves the occupant'sagency to build; 2. how the project separates its elements to facilitate this agency; 3. whether the project focuses on providing a housing product, or a housing process; and 4. how sustainably the delivered structure canaccommodate the occupant's current and future needs.The paper illustrates these OB principles in the design of a low-cost, rural house project in Bushbuckridge to show that they also have value for the architecture at a small scale, and how a house can be designed to ensure that it adapts to the changing needs and creativity of the occupant. The paper concludes with the implications that OB principles have for the design process. The process no longer consists of a simple sequence that separated design and construction and ends with a housing product. Rather, the design and construction focus on delivering a building process that the occupant can take ownership of, and sustain over the lifetime of the building.