A long while back, I accidentally got into architecture. Not as an architect, mind you, just as a spectator. The way some people channel surf to find a good game, I’ll scan anything from bookstores to skylines to find something interesting.
What started it was a Rem Koolhaas exhibition at MoMA, and reading the architect’s classic Delerious New York not long after. If Koolhaas’s architecture was interesting stuff, his writing on architecture is really something; you could tell that this was someone who was interested not only in pretty buildings with his firm’s name on them, but also in the architect’s broader social responsibility. The architect’s firm, OMA (the Office for Metropolitan Architecture) seems to have put out more books on building than the buildings themselves, taking on issues of context, commerce, geography, and pretty much everything else that can be thought and written about buildings.
All of this is a long-ish way of saying that I’m glad I found Studio Wikitecture. The group is a loosely-knit collective of architects and others* that applies the same open-source/crowd-sourced methodology that underpins Wikipedia to architecture. This may not sound like much on its surface, but let’s take your typical architectural project as a basis for comparison. Generally speaking, there will be a competition to draw in designs from a number of top firms, from which a winning design will be selected, and on which basis building can start; from time to time–as was the case with the Freedom Tower–the designs from the first round will be found wanting, and another round of designs will be submitted. The winning design won’t always be re-tooled to take into account the better features of other entries, and so the end result will be built with its shortcomings intact.
The advantage, therefore, of an open-source approach–whether that approach is being applied to a single project, or to urban planning on the whole–is that collaboration isn’t something that’s tacked on, or somehow incidental; it’s something integral not only to the finished product, but to the process that gave rise to a particular building, district, or city in the first place. The end result should, at least in theory, be a better building.
The tools with which Studio Wikitecture arrives at that end have evolved along with the methods of the organization. Early iterations were closer in spirit to a traditional architectural competition, with a series of entries being submitted without much thought being given to how these entries would be harmonized into a working whole. As time has passed, though, the methods and tools have evolved; recent projects have taken shape on the same platform that powers Second Life, allowing collaboration to take place in a three-dimensional virtual space, and providing for the results to unfold and to be modified in real time.
Koolhaas wrote, in Delerious New York, of the idea of programmatic instability: structures outgrow, and eventually out-evolve, the purposes for which they were initially built. Some of his projects, such as the proposed National Library (France), attempted to build a degree of programmatic instability into the finished project by the ambitious and creative use of flex space. It seems to me that what Studio Wikitecture is doing differently is to bring an element of purposeful instability into the design process itself, decentering architecture by de-emphasizing the role of the star architect. If the ideals behind Studio Wikitecture continue to evolve (to say nothing of the tools with which those ideals are given concrete form), it stands to reason that they could have quite an influence on how we look at architecture, as well as what we’ll see in the streets of our towns and cities as a result. What they’ve done so far is a series of encouraging first steps that, one hopes, will find echoes in other disciplines as well.
Studio Wikitecture
Studio Wikitecture blog
*I’m assuming there are others; the organization doesn’t appear to require any kind of credentials to join, appearing to rely on crowd-sourced quality control.