A Slight Delay

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. (more…)