Rural Open Building: The Design of a House in Bushbuckridge, South Africa

Abstract

This qualitative study documents 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 is especially important to bridge the wealth gap from centuries of dispossession policies under colonial and Apartheid rule. This project uses two OB principles. The first principle is to ensure that the building’s functioning is flexible to give the family greater agency over how they use and adapt the house to their changing needs. The second principle facilitates this by separating the structure and systems of the house into primary and secondary structures that can function independently from one another. The approach of this project is to centre the occupant in the design and construction process. It considers the house to be flexible and conceived by many authors. Based on this worldview, the authors use the following tools: a literature review on OB; an analysis of the project site and its context; developing a brief of the family’s current needs; an analysis of the design’s potential future scenarios; and the design for disentanglement. This way of working allows the family to have more creative design input as they can inhabit the primary level and make design decisions in the space, rather than making all the decisions on paper before construction. This paper applies OB principles in a low-income, rural house project to illustrate 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.