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 qualities apply — producing a specific, testable behavioral expectation at every intersection.

The order of the domains

The domains are peers. Unlike the qualities, which form a hierarchy of dependency, no domain rests on another — and the standard ranks none above the rest. The sequence is a reading order, following the resident's relationship with the building from its most frequent interaction to its most ambient: entering happens hundreds of times a month, deliveries arrive daily, shared spaces are used weekly, help is needed episodically, transitions come rarely — and all of it takes place inside a building whose own state is the constant background.

Which domain carries the greatest weight is a property of the building, not the standard. In a villa community it is Access; in co-living, Spaces; in student housing, Lifecycle — the building-type pages read the same standard through each type's center of gravity.

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.

How activation enters a building's declared scope — and how it interacts with a conformance claim — is defined in Conformance.

Reading the expectations

Each domain opens with a brief introduction that defines its scope. Then each quality 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.