Prefabrication experiments - 107 - Open-source architecture for mass housing

The benefits of industrialized building techniques combined with skeletal frame structures and an intelligible design strategy complementing its users’ changing needs or evolving lifestyles helped found the enduring values of flexible planning. Le Corbusier’s generic flat slab DOM-INO housing system and Walter Gropius’ expandable house system showcased early 20^th century architectural variability. Later, experiments like Herman Hertzberger's "in between spaces, or spaces interpreted by their users" offered a type of systemic adaptability through common infrastructure.

N.J. Habraken referred to personal alteration of a generic infrastructure as the natural relationship for MH (mass housing). Borrowed by open building theorists as their common framework, the ideal of nonspecific adjustable/flexible/modular systems is developing into more than just adaptable housing but into a model of open-source sharing of housing concepts for design and construction. Wikihouse and Paperhouses both offer public permissions and argue in favour of sharing designs or systems and maintain the principles of individualized adaptability.

Contrasting with the traditional idea of the «architect» designed original one-off building, Chilean Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena of Elemental architecture has begun distributing cad and pdf files of four adaptable housing projects on a creative commons license. Individuals can download, use, modify and pursue each project according to their personal needs. Revising the traditional criteria for authorship, Elemental Achitecture publicly shares its vision for mass housing. Their «abc of incremental housing» makes a case for open-source distribution and for adaptable, simple and densely organised housing concepts. Of the four open-source projects, the Villa Verde project designed in 2013 for 484 Chilean families most emblematically represents the ideal of a generic infrastructure. The open frame composed of a folded surface plane defines a cross section that can be inhabited from 57 to 85m2 paralleling a family’s evolution.

Based on precepts developed in projects such as Avi Friedman's grow home in the 1970’s and 1980’s the incremental housing strategy is on-line and ready for download. The creative commons license allows users to engage with professionally designed work. This open source ecosystem is set to change the way we think about sharing information. Knowledge is valued above authorship; a major change in Architecture’s singular building tradition.

Villa Verde open-source housing project