Housing
This section is dedicated to discussing the basic architectural program for the Open House project and the potential building systems and design concepts to accommodate it. The home construction is the core project tying together all other featured building projects. It represents our 'core narrative', its stages of development establishing the basic structure for the documentary.
The basic program of the home is a modest sized two bedroom, one bath dwelling for a couple or small family with optional office or bedroom flex room. However, many special features are included to provide an example of a contemporary home of the near future that functions as an 'engine for unplugging'. These include a potential off-grid energy system, alternative utilities, workshop spaces for both heavy and light fabrication work and a home microfarm based on hydroponics/aquaponics to provide supplemental food as well as Living Machine waste processing. The home will also take a novel approach to environmental sustainability through the use of recycled building materials and a physically low-impact design that relies on pier foundations and a relatively light adaptive overall structure. (as opposed to the more conventional approach of sustainability as based on a choice of heavy 'green' materials like earth)
The overarching feature of the program is that the house must be buildable and demountable by one to a few people with no great skills, relying extensively on digital fabrication as a means to reduce labor using production tools that will later be permanent fixtures of the home workshop. At present our most likely choice of building technology for this is the open source homebuilding system developed by WikiHouse built using EcoBoard or similar wheatboard sheet material combined with the use of a drainage plane and rain screen cladding system and helical or pin pier foundation system.
Alternatively, there is an option to employ adaptive reuse of an existing industrial/commercial space or an open source high-performance structure using the Pavilion design approach noted in the sub-section. This has a great advantage in allowing the use of an urban location and for demonstrating the lifestyle concept of Mobilism with the use of furnitecture designs. However, at present there do not seem to be many open source high performance structure systems and finding a suitable industrial/commercial building may be providential.