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Open House International (OHI) has come a long way towards its recent accreditation as one of the leading academic journals in the field of Architecture and Environment. The journal has a focus on decision-making processes, which enable the various disciplines dealing with built environment to understand the dynamics of development and housing and so contribute more effectively to it.

The 40th year of publication of Open House International is now complete. That means one hundred and sixty manuscripts have been published since the journals inception forty years ago. To keep standards high we impose strict regulations for writing and we wish to see that there is always a clear and understandable focus to the subject at hand. In the application of this approach approximately seventy five percent of the manuscripts received are rejected each quarter whilst the remaining twenty five percent continue on to the production and final publication stage.

Three years ago Maarten Cleeren from Elsevier in the Netherlands wrote about Open House International as a fine journal stating that “ in recognition of the high quality and relevance to the scientific community of Open House International we are pleased to inform you that your publication has been selected for coverage in the Elsevier Bibliographic Database Scopus as of 2007”. This was therefore added to our two other database connections namely EBSCO PUBLISHING and Thomsons ISI database including all their products, The Social Science Citation Index, (SSCI,) the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, (A&HCI), Social Scisearch, Current Contents/Social & Behavioral Sciences,(CC/S&BS) and the Current Contents/Arts & Humanities, (CC/A&H) and Journal Citation Reports/Social Sciences Edition.

These are Working, Learning and Living. The first and last of Working and Living have been addressed in some of the previous issues of the journal. ‘Working’ has been supported and developed by books, journals and projects. User decision making processes lie central to these concepts.

This is an ‘open’ issue but with a very special message in it. More than a week ago now Arch. Catalina Gandelsonas died of cancer. This sad news was relayed to me via Prof. Pat Wakely in London. Catalina was a remarkable woman. From the days at Lefke University (North Cyprus) she showed herself as a person who was very clear as to what she wanted and was most helpful and careful in achieving her aims. In the early nineties Catalina later became a member of the Open House International Board of editors. Her refereeing was always to the point with brevity. I wish to convey my condolences to her daughter and other family members and hope this message speaks for many of our other friends who also knew her. She was a remarkable person with much goodwill and a great energy and in addition to that she had a very endearing character.

VR is a new term to me. With a couple of words in brackets immediately after the abbreviation, (Virtual Reality) all is clear and well. Thank you to a colleague of mine. (See manuscript title CREATIVITY IN THE INITIAL PHASES OF ARCHIECTURAL DESIGN. Page 29 On the same level use of the abbreviation CD is more well known than the use of its actual meaning of Compact Disc.

The Support and Infill concept has been generally accepted and adopted by the design disciplines as well as the construction and manufacturing industries. Support and Infill were developed as an alternative to mass housing (Habraken 1961) The author argued that mass housing made no sense because of the absence of the user as a player in the housing process. This led to all sorts ills and wasted opportunities. This was mainly a relationship problem between the inhabitant and the dwelling itself resulting in identical units in identical blocks in identical neighborhoods which never changed nor ever moved until the mass demolishers came in to make way for something better which often was ‘supports’. Overlapping with this concept, Open Building emerges describing decision making levels of the urban tissue, supports, infill and all their spatial and physical properties and components. Now Time Based Architecture (TBA) (Leupen 2005) has come to the front. It is, as the name suggests, an Architecture which does not resist change but which embraces it. It is something close to Supports and Open Building but slightly different. All Supports are TBA edifices but not all TBA edifices are Supports? To explain this it is perhaps sufficient to say here that Supports did not deal in flexibility per se but with restructuring the building industry, to re-orientate decision making and also a large amount of attention was paid to modular co-ordination. TBA addresses this but also crosses borders into high tech buildings, flexibility and explores the use of contemporary materials and the flexible nature of glass and steel construction.

This first issue of 2005 contains a selection of some articles from the recent Open Building conference on Sustainable Environment held in Paris at the CSTB headquarters in September 2004. This issue signals the start of the regular publication of material dealing with Open Building projects either as additional articles in theme issues or as full open building issues twice a year. After more than thirty five years of experience Open Building is a recognizable part of mainstream Architecture in housing and in health care and renovation projects found in many different countries of the world. Open Building projects in general show how users are indispensable decision makers in the design process and act as forces of change and adaptability over time.

We continue our policy of theme issues and open issues twice a year. This particular open issue contains manuscripts on Community Participation, Real Estate Development, Housing Poverty, Dual Usage Sociability, Formal and Spatial Contemporary Transformation, Experimentation with Hanoks in Korean Housing, Infill Renovation and Post Ecological Architecture. These are based in a range of different countries from Hong Kong, Shanghai, Jordan, Turkey, Korea, to Japan. The inquiries are deep and thorough, maintaining a firm grip on subject matter and focus.