Six Domains

The qualities define how you judge building behavior. The domains define where you look.

A resident's relationship with their building happens through six recurring activities. These are anthropological constants — they will not change in fifty years. People will always enter buildings. People will always receive things. People will always share spaces. People will always need help. People will always go through transitions. People will always live inside a physical environment.

Where behavior happens

Each domain governs a distinct area of the resident's experience. Within each domain, the six qualities apply — producing six specific, testable expectations per domain and thirty-six across the entire standard.

Domain activation

Not every domain applies equally to every building. A building without shared amenities has no expectations around Spaces — they simply do not apply. A building without environmental monitoring has a narrower scope in Environment — but the core expectation remains: the building communicates when its own infrastructure fails and does so before the resident discovers it.

The principle: the expectation does not change. The implementation does. A 30-unit building in Helsinki and a 400-unit tower in Dubai face the same behavioral expectations. What they have to work with is different. The standard scales with the building's capabilities — the standard of care does not.

Reading the expectations

Each domain opens with a brief introduction that defines its scope. Then each of the six qualities is applied to that domain, producing a page that defines what the building does (the expectation), what is required and what is recommended, how it looks in practice, how it fails, and how to test it.

Select a domain from the navigation to begin.