Wikihouse
Wikihouse guidebook
What if with a little bit of ingenuity and without the need for formal training, you could simply design a house of your own? This is the question that WikiHouse sets out to answer. The installation features in the forthcoming Gwangju Design Biennale in South Korea and will be the culmination of a long period of debate and development, both physically and virtually, in line with the Biennale’s desire to question what design means today. The event goes under the provocative theme ‘design is design is not design’.
WikiHouse, part of the community section curated by Beatrice Galilee – the London based curator, writer, critic, lecturer, and partner of the Gopher Hole – takes a position on what constitutes a community of design and how communities enforce and re-enforce notions and paradigms of design (and) examines the word ‘community’ from as many different perspectives as possible and abstracts community from place and replaces it with things like networks. WikiHouse emerged when Galilee invited architects 00:/ to respond to the brief of ‘Open Source Communities’. “It was really an open brief”, states Alastair Parvin of 00:/.“In a way, there’s a paradox in a single architecture office responding to such a brief, and we thought for a long time about how to respond to it.” They approached it with two ideas in mind. The first was to be open to collaboration from the outset. The second was to address open source and the open design movement by doing something that would engage with people, not only visiting the exhibit at the Biennale, but more crucially with a global online community of potential collaborators irrespective of design experience.
00:/ re-established long standing working relationships with Espians and Momentum Engineering, who they had worked with on a number of projects, and set about creating the broadest framework for the physical entity of the WikiHouse. They also created the virtual open design environment in which a lot of activity will take place, when people can take part in downloading software and designing their own house.
Full feature in Issue 24 Autumn 2011 click here
Words by Robert Pike
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Wikihouse
