«The first is, I think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings. Actually, a building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to almost any given problem. And fundamentally, design should be much, much more interested in solving problems and creating new conditions.
But what if, actually, it's possible now for cities to be made not just by the few with a lot but also by the many with a bit? And when they do, they bring with them a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live. And it raises really interesting questions about, how will we plan cities? How will finance development? How will we sell design services? What would it mean for democratic societies to offer their citizens a right to build? And in a way it should be kind of obvious, right, that in the 21st century, maybe cities can be developed by citizens.
Most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy in what's called the social economy or the core economy, which is people doing it for themselves. And the problem is that, up until now, it was the monetary economy which had all the infrastructure and all the tools. So the challenge we face is, how are we going to build the tools, the infrastructure and the institutions for architecture's social economy? And that began with open-source software. We're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere, and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone. That really is an industrial revolution. And when we think that the major ideological conflicts that we inherited were all based around this question of who should control the means of production, and these technologies are coming back with a solution: actually, maybe no one. All of us.
And we were fascinated by what that might mean for architecture. So about a year and a half ago, we started working on a project called WikiHouse, and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system. And the idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online, access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in, at the moment, SketchUp, because it's free, and it's easy to use, and almost at the click of a switch they can generate a set of cutting files which allow them, in effect, to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood. And the parts are all numbered, and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit.
And a team of about two or three people, working together, can build this. They don't need any traditional construction skills. They don't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that, and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day. So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source, citizen-led urban development model, potentially.
Don't reinvent the wheel every time. Take what already works, and adapt it for your own needs.
The only difference between traditional vernacular architecture and open-source architecture might be a web connection, but it's a really, really big difference.We shared the whole of WikiHouse under a Creative Commons license, and now what's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it, and it's amazing.
We're aware that WikiHouse is a very, very small answer, but it's a small answer to a really, really big question, which is that globally, right now, the fastest-growing cities are not skyscraper cities. They're self-made cities in one form or another. If we're talking about the 21st-century city, these are the guys who are going to be making it. You know, like it or not, welcome to the world's biggest design team.
If design's great project in the 20th century was the democratization of consumption (…) I think design's great project in the 21st century is the democratization of production. And when it comes to architecture in cities, that really matters.»