OPEN SOURCE ARCHITECTURE

"Open Source Architecture is ... remaking the world based on structures literally shaped by the needs that inspire them..."

The term "Open Source Architecture" emerged to describe the results, as fixed in evolving, operable code, of an exhaustively inductive approach to developing computing software and environments, based substantially on user-generated protocols and content. Ideally, this kind of software not only supports adaptation of its internal code to consumers' personal needs, but is open to strategic alteration based on their critical input, and by way of tools to which they themselves have access. Frequently a community-based effort, open source programs and commmunication regimes have often yielded superior speed, productivity and ease-of-use.

Since the early 2000's, these ideas have had broad impacts on numerous disciplines outside computing, from anthropology to medicine. Literally applied to the discipline of Architecture, they have a radically transformative potential both in terms of its practice, and for its constructed outcomes. For architects, Open Source Architecture ("OSA") is the project of remaking the world based on structures literally shaped by the needs that inspire them - with both their "clients" and these "needs" defined in the broadest possible terms - and a process of creating those structures organized as an open forum. Whether amateur or professional, participants in an OSA design assume explicit authority to direct or change its basic focus. The needs to which it responds are defined not only by its formal sponsors, but by the entire community subject to its intervention. This is not merely a radicalized version of "form follows function," but a strategic re-ordering of priorities within the profession, and within design in general.

Unlike traditional design practice, OSA doesn't rely on a linear process or top-down solutions, nor trade in discrete answers to narrow questions. Instead, it focuses on expressing and harmonizing the ecology of concerns crystallized and "fixed" by a project. In other words, it seeks to address the full range of potential interactions between a structure, and its physical, social and other contexts, based on their definition by everyone involved. The ultimate goal of OSA is to create individual structures, and combinations of structures, that emerge directly from the convergence of every imaginable influence upon their sites - whether those sites are physically determinate (like a tract of land) or ephemeral (such as a brief cultural performance). By discovering and analyzing these forces, and generating forms directly from them, designers (meaning: "clients," users and professionals, with equal authority) can bring to life the deep realities of a place, those things already inherent in a structure's sponsorship, as well as other, perhaps as yet unidentified voices that are waiting to be heard.

Thus, the term "Open Source Architecture" refers both to a highly logical process of research and analysis, and to a dream of collaborative invention. It is an approach that is at once determinedly concrete in its focus, yet improvisational in spirit. Its results are never just one, nor even a collection of top-down solutions, but rather the embodiment of essential truths by way of disciplined, highly inductive research. Such structures are explicitly dedicated to all of the many voices that might speak through their forms. They arise organically as features of their sites (by whatever definition) rather than merely as figures within them.

In enabling the "autoethnography of a site," an OSA building is primarily a form of action, rather than of representation. Unlike a traditional structure, its design is inspired not primarily by poses to be struck, nor messages to be signalled, but from a dedication to the many other kinds of work that buildings can perform - from basic function to deep symbolism. Its creation is literally a process of consultation with all four points of the compass, the sky and the earth, the past and the future, the inside and the outside - all ten directions, and more. With this bias, OSA points to new sources of information and meaning, rather than existing orthodoxies of process or signification. The results inevitably carry their own politics, but these are as original as the requirements that generate them, and the realities they bring to light.