A project from the sixties (not one of the best) was begging for a major rehabilitation but the neighbourhood had become so boring that the inhabitants' only wish was to abandon it as soon as possible. The comparatively wealthy Dutch inhabitants fled, and were replaced by Indonesians, Surinamers, Mollucans and finally by drug rings and criminals. Everyone knew it would take between 10 and 20 years to manage anything and that it would soon pass beyond repair: it would then have to be demolished (what an ecological waste!). But no one dared to admit the problem publicly. Except for the courageous leaders of the social housing company "Woondrecht," who decided with the help of the municipality of Dordrecht, to improve the scheme intelligently. They organized a little competition, and we won it by saying that we could not conceive anything without engaging with the inhabitants. So, we began, without any precise program (happily, without the guidance of the city's Technical Services, because they immediately sterilise any movement).The program emerged step by step in a process of working with the inhabitants, through discussions, workshops, drawings, models, etc. For us, it developed as usual. We set out to establish the following qualities: tight mixing of uses, adding shops, a social centre for the neighbourhood, an open school (studied, but later dropped), and most important of all, mixing the social and ethnic character of the inhabitants (at first impossible to achieve but later it came by it self. There were to be partial demolitions and "remolitions", some apartments to be finished by their tenants (CASCO is a well known Dutch procedure) allowing all possible personal choices (avoiding a formal modern organisation of interior space) in the orientation, the terraces and balconies, the sizes, and finally also the choice of the facade's forms and materials. But in the end the timescale made this detail unrealisable: next time, probably… So nearly a hundred apartments were to be totally different, and the other forty followed three variants. The ecological and physical necessities were scrutinised as deeply as possible: healthy materials, daylight, energy, personal control of ventilation and heating, sparing of natural resources, use of renewable materials fabricated with low energy content, etc. We added green roofs with large private gardens to produce quite a lively skyline. The new landscaping is not yet done: we searched for the ancient network of canals and paths to add to the modem necessities. And we added as many trees and plants as possible, protecting both existing and new ones. There were some unpredictable but happy results. For me flat roofs are always building sites wich ignored their potentiality: so we proposed to build much bigger units on them, and these were the first to be sold! A lady wanted an apartment of 150 square meters on the condition that she could buy a further 250 square meters to use for a fashion show. This was unexpected: the mannequins share the common spaces and the elevators with the poorer people: it was beyond anything we had anticipated. It was difficult to convince the engineers to allow such complexity but, after a while, they became passionately involved…The transformability was deeply studied: the structure is built for centuries while the infill is replaceable. It is not necessary to demolish the whole building lo follow changing needs or fashions. But the most important target was that the interned organisation of each apartment could be preserved before, during and after the building work: all the techniques allowed it (Open Building Organisation). Study of the details took us nearly two years. For us, the principal ecology was the human one: our answer was the complexity of the built landscape. Honestly, for different families, I feel the architect has no right to impose identical models: it is a crime committed against the expression of a "non military" society.. . A rule for me is that no apartment should be identical to any other. It is finally some sort of post-modern organisation that allows an urban landscape to be self-built, as in all ancient spontaneous cities.