Los Angeles Air View Georgian House, Montgomery, Wales Amsterdam Canal House French 'Bastide' Town, Montpazier, Dordogne

About this talk

Running time: 28 minutes

The Dutch architect N. John Habraken was born in Indonesia and trained at Delft University, where he also taught from 1958 - 1960. After five years of practice in Holland he became Director of the Architects' Research Foundation (SAR) in Eindhoven. Concurrently he was Chairman of the Department of Architecture and Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Eindhoven's Technical University, until he left for America in 1975 to become Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was still working in 1985.

He is author of several books and many articles on urban design and mass housing, in which he proposed using prefabricated "support structures" which could be individually filled in and given identity by the users. It was to further these ideas that the SAR was formed.

His studies have continued in America, and in his talk he discusses the built environment and identifies the three ways in which it can be seen. One has to do with territorial order, one has to do with enclosure and resources, and one has to do with personal expression; three networks of social inter-connection that are inseparable and that need to be understood.

Please note that a transcript of this talk is available - please contact us for further details.

N. John Habraken


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