Today at Home Depot I saw one of those home building magazines, with 25 different plans and lots of great ides for living space. It’s been awhile since I have wanted to look at anything like that. This one was focused on small houses. I love house plans but it just is not in our immediate future to build a house. Well so what, I can dream. One day we will build, one day. I love this concept from MIT called House_n,
Open Source Building Alliance (OSBA)
House_n teamThe goal of the Open Source Building Alliance is to develop key components of a more responsive model for creating places of living where: (1) Developers become integrators and alliance builders to offer tailored solutions to individuals, (2) Architects design design-engines to efficiently create thousands of unique environments, (3) Manufacturers agree on interface standards and become tier-one suppliers of components, (4) Builders become installers and assemblers, and (5) Customers (home buyers) become “designers” at the center of the process by receiving personalized information about design, products, and services at the point of decision.
I would love to see a distributed network of builders and suppliers reinvent ways to build with components. I dream of components that could be used like Legos, Drawn up on a computer or website and shipped to your site, assembled by me. Open standards mean that the materials could be produced by a myriad of companies and I could order them from all over. As long as they conform to the standards, complete interoperability.
One company, Bensonwood, in working on a concept called Open Built.
Becoming an Unreasonable Man 