Housing For The Millions, John Habraken And The Sar . - 1960-2000 - Review - book review

Architectural Review, The, May, 2001 by Nabeel Hamdi

Edited by: Koos Bosma, Dorine van Hoogstraten, Martijn Vos, Rotterdam: NAi. 2000. NLG99,50

This book is a welcome tribute to John Habraken and the Foundation for Architectural Research (SAR) which he helped set up in 1964. Habraken's work and ideas have profoundly influenced the practice of housing. They have helped shape new theories of design and production which he first articulated in his book Supports -- an Alternative Mass Housing published in Dutch in 1961.

In Supports and in his subsequent and prolific work, Habraken was critical of mass housing which he saw as professionally controlled, anonymous, socially inappropriate and unresponsive to change. His proposal was to differentiate clearly between what he called 'Supports' and 'Infill' and associate with each discrete decision-making responsibilities. Families would be responsible for deciding house plans while housing authorities, with producers and communities, the layout and design of supports.

This differentiation, he argued, would enable the industry to take full advantage of the cost benefits of standardization, without the uniformity that gives much housing its institutional form. As testimony to the freshness and currency of his ideas, he offered a basis for understanding stakeholder participation in the design and production of housing, and an insight into new partnerships between people, authorities, manufacturers and architects.

Housing for the Millions tracks historically and in lively narrative style Habraken theories and his career with SAR, at Eindhoven Technical University, and then at MIT. The book is based on three years of research into archival sources and numerous interviews with friends, colleagues and critics. It collates valuable critique of Habraken's ideas -- some threatened by an undermining of the creative and professional role of architects, others by an ideology which seemed to play into the hands of big industry -- an anathema in the ideologically heady days of the '60s.

The setting for the book is naturally and substantially Dutch. The title, with its FOR rather than WITH the million is ambitious and dates the book unnecessarily. However, it is an important historical document, easy to read, well referenced, well presented and an excellent source of information and ideas.