Usman Haque - Open Source Architecture

August 1st, 2005

Our constructed environment, with its direct impact on people every day and its constant transformation through use and reuse, is a collectively designed project. It incorporates vastly different and sometimes conflicting logics. The issues arising from people’s differing perspectives and approaches will have significant consequences on the way architecture in general evolves in the twenty-first century. Computer terminology has borrowed much from the discipline of architecture; here, we borrow back some analogies
from the computer world to suggest ways that architectural evolution could occur.

Traditionally, architecture has been thought of as hardware: the static walls, roofs and floors that enclose us. An alternative approach is to think of architecture as software: the dynamic and ephemeral sounds, smells, temperatures even radio waves that surround us. One might also consider the social infrastructures that underpin our designed spaces. Pushing this analogy even further, we can think of architecture as a whole as an “operating system”, within which people create their own programmes for spatial interaction……..

Interesting paper about the Ideas of Open Source Architecture Read Here

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