Open Source House

URL = http://www.flickr.com/groups/opensourcehouse/

Description

"In 2006 Rahm Rechtschaffen, a former architecture student at the Catholic University in Washington DC, based his thesis project on the open source ideology. He developed the design of a house together with over 20 other people that directly contributed to the project.

In Rahm’s words:

‘Open Source House is an experimental architectural design project. The goal is to design a house while making the design process and design documents available to all potential users of the house for comment and contribution.’

People participated since early design stages, like site analysis, all the way to construction feasibility and final details like sound system selection for the home.

Rahm states:

‘I believe that the direct application of open source principles to architecture would not work well. Software and architecture are too different to transfer a process from one to the other without significant modification. (…) Despite these difficulties, architectural design can be enhanced and enriched through the use of open source design principles.’

In Rahm’s vision of open source applied to architecture the architect still keeps control of the project:

‘I envision an architectural open source project to be one in which the users contribute to but do not actually design the end product.’

Rahm’s project is very unique and I would have liked to found in the project’s Flickr group, the interface where the project was developed, some final comments or analysis of the whole experience after it was finished. What were the difficulties he encountered? What could we learned from the process? Would it be possible to make an open source design together with other architects instead of end users?" (http://www.iaacblog.com/2008-2009/term02/s3/?p=1226)

More Information

To see the process itself and the very interesting way he coordinated the project go to: http://www.flickr.com/groups/opensourcehouse/