The Structure of the

Ordinary
 About the Author
N. John Habraken (born 29 October 1928, Bandung, Dutch East
Indies) is a Dutch architect, educator, and theorist. His theoretical
contributions are in the field of user participation in mass
housing, the integration of users and residents into the design
process.
Introduction: Control and

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Form
According to N. J. Habraken, intimate and unceasing interaction between people and the forms they inhabit
uniquely defines built environment. The Structure of the Ordinary, the culmination of decades of environmental
observation and design research, is a recognition and analysis of everyday environment as the wellspring of
urban design and formal architecture. The author's central argument is that built environment is universally
organized by the Orders of Form, Place, and Understanding. These three fundamental, interwoven principles
correspond roughly to physical, biological, and social domains.

Historically, "ordinary" environment was the background against which architects built the "extraordinary."
Drawing upon extensive examples from archaeological and contemporary sites worldwide, the author illustrates
profound recent shifts in the structure of everyday environment. One effect of these transformations, Habraken
argues, has been the loss of implicit common understanding that previously enabled architects to formally
enhance and innovate while still maintaining environmental coherence. Consequently, architects must now
undertake a study of the ordinary as the fertile common ground in which form- and place-making are rooted. In
focusing on built environment as an autonomous entity distinct from the societies and natural environments that
jointly create it, this book lays the foundation for a new dialogue on methodology and pedagogy, in support of a
more informed approach to professional intervention.
Built environment, in all of its complexity, is created by people. Yet it
is simply far too complex, too large, and too self-evident to be
perceived as a single entity, an artifact like a chair, a car, a painting. or
even a building. Moreover, built environments have lives of their own:
they grow, renew themselves, and endure for millennia.

The very durability and transcendence of built environment is

possible only because there is continuous change. In this respect,
built environment is indeed organic: continuous renewal and
replacement of individual cells preserves it, giving it the ability to
persist.

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Agents Thus, the built environment comprises not only physical forms-buildings, streets, and
infrastructure-but also the people acting on them. If built environment is an organism, it is so by
virtue of human intervention: people imbue it with life and spirit of place. As long as they are actively
involved and find a given built environment worth renewing, altering, and expanding, it endures.
When they leave off, the environment dies and crumbles, pulled back down to the earth by the
ineluctable force of gravity

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The Physical Structure of

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Built Environment
Live Configurations
an architect may describe a house as a composition of spaces. But a builder may prefer to describe it as
an organization of material parts. A painter may describe it as a combination of planes distinguished by
their colors. In describing the same house, a poet may name parts whose properties evoke reference to
things in the past or at other places. Or she may allude to feelings, drawing unexpected analogies that
give it new meaning. Finally, inhabitants tend to think in terms of rooms and places: not mere spatial
entities, but combinations of many types of things-furniture, artwork. views-that jointly make an
environment identifiable.

Human beings exhibit a universal tendency to conceptualize in terms of elements combined and
grouped in various ways. Any such grouping may be called a configuration.

Configurations actively under unified control of a single agent will call live configurations. Any
grouping of parts entirely under control of a single agent, such that their distribution in space has been
determined or accepted by that agent and can be changed by that agent, constitutes a live
configuration. Thus defined, a live configuration "behaves· like a single self organizing entity
Patterns of transformation reveal environmental structure. Long-term observation confirms
that within built environment. change universally occurs within clearly defined levels. These
levels will parallel a given environments hierarchy of control. levels clarify intuitive understanding: for
example, it is easy to visualize how streets (a configuration on one level) jointly define city blocks. Within
those blocks ton a lower level buildings are built It seems natural that within buildings, partitions can be
reconfigured to rearrange individual rooms, within which, in turn, furniture is arranged under the control of
different parties. Street network, building, partitioning, and furniture are different kinds of configurations,
each allowing control and change on its respective level.

Habraken posits that the impulse to hang a picture on a wall or to reorganize the furniture is not essentially
different from the motivation to rebuild an entire neighborhood, but rather that these actions all stem from the
motivation to exert control over a space, or ‘live configuration,’ of the built environment, albeit at different
scales. He says that to understand something as complex as our built environment we must seek what is
common in its many manifestations and constant in its transformations and hence understand the ways in
which we organize ourselves as agents acting upon it. The forces that structure the built environment are
revealed in distinct but interrelated ‘Orders’
RECOGNIZING

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LEVELS
To understand something as complex as our built environment we must seek what is common in its
many manifestations and constant in its transformations.
As with all studies of physical phenomena, patterns of change reveal the laws it is subject to.
At the same time, change is caused by our interventions. Therefore, by learning to see environment
in terms of change, we also learn to understand the ways in which we organize ourselves as agents
acting upon it.

We come to distinguish three 'orders':

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“ Form: Physical order- In this it is observed how we operate on different ‘levels’
of the built environment. The hierarchy may differ from the time and place but
always has the same characteristics.

Place: Territorial order – In this we look at control of space, the territorial

hierarchies different from those found in the physical form, both of which
mutually influence and interpret one another.

Understand: Cultural order – In this he says those who intervene always do so,
in a context of meaning and social understanding. The largely unspoken
conventions are revealed in patterns, types, systems, and other regularities that
can be seen in the environment in endless variety.
Hierarchies of enclosure
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Almost all architecture, we read the space they delineate, and we sense place within the volume they
indicate. The built environment, as a composition of enclosure forms, indicates volumes. Indeed,
space defined by forms of enclosure may be most powerful when the form leaves part of that
volume undefined.

The way of seeing space recognizes that space and material configurations are inseparable. In
observing space, we read material forms indicating its boundaries. In assessing spatial capacity
for inhabitation, we imagine objects placed within. Inhabitation inherently situates spatial
understanding firmly within the order of form, as one way to understand the conjunction of forms
on different levels. This is not the only way space can be understood, but it is arguably the most
universal way. Requiring no particular abstraction, it directly links form with control, as well as
agents with configurations they can transform.

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Assembly Hierarchies
Discussing relationship among forms under the control of agents, we have not yet taken into
considerations how form is built.
Once building is completed inhabitation takes over. Eventually that inhabitation will trigger additional
transformation of form. The act of building then resumes.
Part/whole hierarchy reflects the way complex artifacts are assembled, from the builder’s
perspective Parts are combined to form wholes.
Such wholes in turn can be parts in larger wholes, and so on; make walls, walls make buildings. One
way to break down a building into 3 subsystems;foundation,walls & roof. This breakdown also
reveals dominance hierarchy.
This breakdown alto reveals dominance hierarchy by nature, walls depend on a foundation while
moving the foundation requires that walls adjust, walls-and the doors and windows within them--may
be transformed with out adjusting the foundation. This dependence en directly from gravity.
The two ways of seeing are illustrated. Note that the dominance hierarch 5- do not have the them
building, while in parte representation (5-aa), building is the its of constitent parts.

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 Basic Parts and Materials
Although each environmental level has a distinct and unmistakable identity, they may originate
from the same basic materials: brick both forms building walls and pares sidewalks Hardwood is
used for rough sawn timbers, flooring, trim and furniture.
The bottom of the assembly hierarchy contains basic and universal materials used for many
different assembles: masonry, timber, straw, clay and ceramic tile, gypsum, sand, cement, steel,
glass, plastic and so on. From such humble materials, environmental forms rise like varied
plants from common soil
Each form finds completion in its own assembly chain. Once completed, they functions in the
environmental game, each operating on its appropriate level in the enclosure hierarchy, each
offering an opportunity for control and transformation

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