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

(more…)

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 [↩]