House Magazine: open source architecture

Abstract

The popularization of new digital fabrication technologies is changing the production practices in contemporary society. The open sharing of information within a new logic of production, has the potential to change the current economic system, and even change the course of the ongoing globalization process. This paper discusses a new open source building system that uses digital manufacturing in the production of low-cost housing. The project House Magazine, developed in LAMO3D laboratory at FAU-UFRJ, aims to feed the renewal of the production of independent houses, inserting a new construction technology in the popular vocabulary and exploring their potential. Based on WikiHouse system, the project combines global knowledge to local production, tropicalizing its content. The project has reached its first prototype in real scale, milled and assembled by graduate students in order to test the quality of the system and its technical feasibility of implementation as social technology. The project proved to be intuitive, of simple complexity and rich in possibilities of manipulation and improvement. Open projects and open source technologies are promoting the extension of uses of the knowledge by new players, generating a dispersion of production. It is up to us architects to recognize this potential and shape its endless application possibilities.