I’ve just discovered that people at MIT are studying how to develop Open Source Houses and therefore Open Architectural Design projects.
MIT Open Source Building Alliance Operation (OSBA) is a project run by the House_n department, and it will operate as an open source organization. A website will be established for idea generation, technical evaluation of OSBA recommendations, and public comment. OSBA members and affiliated academic researchers will engage in research to develop, test, and establish prototypes and test beds.

It is a very well structured project, and it addresses in a clear way the mass-customization aspects and the opportunity to let people modify their homes through time. Also, we should mention that they are addressing a very important issue such as distributed generation (here you can find an introduction) and how it could be implemented in future buildings.
I hope they will address Passive Houses, low technologies and sustainable materials, processes and business too.

This project is a clear sign how we are witnessing now that Open and Peer-to-Peer principles are spreading to design too. They’re still in a stage where there isn’t yet a consciously building of the community, and that’s where the Open Peer-to-Peer Design methodology and the openp2pdesign.org project should find their place.

The 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.¹

Rather than any singular overriding design or vision, this new model aims to adopt what is basically a flexible, mass-customization home design system — one that gives homeowners themselves the tools to design their own living spaces. Think Apple and Dell instead of Toll Brothers.

“The future of housing is really much more of an industrial design process than a craft,” says Kent Larson, an architect and director of the House_n Research Consortium and the Open Source Building Alliance (OSBA) at MIT.

“Ultimately, we’re moving toward an open source (home design) system that’s very distributed. The end user will be empowered with web-based tools and configurators to construct something unique and singular.”²

Under this new DIY design model, architects don’t actually design houses anymore, he says. Instead, they’ll simply provide the tools that allow people to build their own. Similarly, manufacturers will be transformed into tier one suppliers and builders will become the assemblers. Like today’s consumer electronics industry, the system as a whole will be connected with standards to ensure quality and drive down prices.³

In drawing inspiration from the electronics industry, it’s important to note that there will be one major difference in building future homes: turnover. Rather than the planned obsolesce that dominates the CE industry, people will want the homes they build or renovate to last.

As such, upgradability will become even more important as future houses are built. Inevitably, newer, improved materials will emerge. So like swapping out your hard drive on your laptop or upgrading its memory, the home of the future will also be built with the assumption that newer materials will be incorporated over its lifetime.⁴

The MIT Open Source Building Alliance (OSBA) explores this premise:
A web of cross-industry relationships, and tools that allow individuals to craft their physical and digital environment – directly connecting manufacturers to customers – will lead to an explosion of creative energy and path to market for innovative products.⁵

Based on well-established principles of modularity – and paralleling recent developments in the automobile, ship building, and electronics industry – Open Source Building is a strategy developed by the MIT House_n research group for the mass-customization of responsive buildings using modular physical/logical components (rather that the labor-intensive, craft-based approach of conventional construction). It separates a building into a chassis (providing structure, power, communication, etc.), and mass-customized modules (for interior fit-out, exterior facades, electronics, communication, etc.). Component design, engineering, and integration are at the system level.
This allows building designers to concentrate primarily on the unique programmatic and environmental context of a building, and allows individual occupants to focus on tailoring their environment according to needs and values. In doing so, the additional cost, risk, and coordination errors associated with “one-off,” highly engineered complex structures are avoided.⁶

Notes:

1. http://architecture.mit.edu/house_n/projects.html#osba [↩]
2. http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/dual-perspectives/2009/01/20/Towards-the-Open-Source-Home [↩]
3. http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/dual-perspectives/2009/01/20/Towards-the-Open-Source-Home [↩]
4. http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/dual-perspectives/2009/01/20/Towards-the-Open-Source-Home [↩]
5. http://architecture.mit.edu/house_n/documents/OSBA%20white%20paper.pdf [↩]
6. http://architecture.mit.edu/house_n/documents/OSBA%20white%20paper.pdf [↩]