Architecture for the People by the People
I covered about Architecture for Humanity's legacy in my previous post. Arriving from the same principle that architecture should not be an exclusive discipline serving only the rich, Alastair Parvin proposes WikiHouse, an open-source design and construction database. The full video of the talk can be watched on TED website of below.
The first thing he questions in his talk is the idea that architecture is all about designing and constructing buildings. I agree with Alastair that architecture does not always have to be about buildings. It goes in line with my previous post about adaptive reuse, that the most sustainable building is the one you don't build. Alastair gives an example of solving the problem of overcrowded school corridors where bullying often takes place. Initially, the clients think that the renovation of the school (that will cost several million pounds) is the best solution. However, the design team comes up with a much cheaper solution that will only cost several hundred pounds, that is reorganizing the bells to ring at different times instead of at one single time so that the traffic can be distributed evenly though different timing.
The second idea is to challenge the 20th century understanding that mass architecture is about big buildings and big funding. The cities should not be built by the few powerful elites, but by "the many of a bit". This idea share the same principle with John Turner's 1976 book: "Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments". The third point Alastair points out is related to economic point of view: designs should work within the social economy, done by the amateurs (people doing it by themselves for themselves).
Assembly of a Wikihouse Open-source design example (zdnet.com)
WikiHouse, after all, is an attempt to shift paradigm from democratization of consumption to the democratization of production. This, as Alastair admits, is an old idea and has been done by communities. For centuries, vernacular societies have been doing this: building their own home and shelters. One of my main concerns with his Wikihouse project (providing open source database of designs and construction methods) is the negligence of local context and specific site context. The autonomous growth of settlements is naturally already happening in cities of the world (espescially in developing countries). There's also some technological barriers: availability and accessibility to 3D printer/CNC machine is being one of them.
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