I’m not an architect, but I play one in virtual worlds like
Second Life, where gravity and materials costs don’t count, but beauty,
information density and usability do. And as such, I live at the crossroads of
software and ... well, buildings, which is becoming a very, very busy
intersection—one I recommend to anyone who buys, sells, manages or creates real
estate or facilities for business.
Two ideas dominate at this crossroads. The first is what you might call (and
one group actually does call) Wikitecture, which is a vision of using social
virtual worlds and related Web tools to socialize ideas and achieve stakeholder
consensus around the myriad stylistic, functional and utilitarian choices
required to move an architectural project forward.
The idea of socializing architecture and urban planning has been floating
around for a long while—it’s implicit in various forms of utopianism, in the
new urbanism of Lewis
Mumford and in the work of innovators at the crossroads of computing and
building like Christopher
Alexander, among many others.
Meanwhile, the need to socialize architecture—particularly in the fraught
domain of large-scale public works, where stakeholders may include elected
officials, career government personnel, architects and engineers, banks and
underwriters, the affected general public, and the broader electorate and tax
base, and where billion-dollar projects with 10- and 20-year lifespans are
often in play—has never been more clear, nor have the difficulties of achieving
(and preserving) reliable (and auditable) concensus among all these groups been
more starkly evident. Public meetings, walk-ins and reams of related paperwork
form expensive but essential line items in the budgets of A&E firms
undertaking projects, and communities funding them. Smaller groups and
projects, too—from construction of a co-housing development to building of a
next-generation office "hoteling" center—require deep consensus if
they hope to achieve acceptance by users.
It took two brilliant architects, however, to stop talking about this and
start actually doing it. Ryan Schultz and Jon Brouchoud started Studio
Wikitecture a few years back—their goal being to graft social virtual
worlds like Second Life and wiki group-editing technology together with ideas
from social networking (like the ability for stakeholders to vote components of
an emerging design "up" and "down"), creating an open platform
(Wiki Tree) that lets groups of professional and non-professional stakeholders
collaborate on complex architectural projects. The Wiki Tree system has since
been used to design several real-world structures, including a tele-medicine
center in Nepal—the
collaborative design effort around which Studio Wikitecture won a Founder’s
Award from Architecture for Humanity in a competition organized by the Open
Architecture Network.
Yesterday, Linden Lab, creator of Second Life, announced that Studio
Wikitecture had earned the 2009 Linden Prize for an “innovative inworld
project that improves the way people work, learn and communicate in their daily
lives outside of the virtual world.” In our opinion, well-deserved.
So hot tip No. 1—if you’re contemplating an office move, redesign or build
and want an incredibly cool, cost-effective, low-friction means to make sure
you’re extracting maximum idea horsepower from employees and design
contractors, give Studio Wikitecture a call.
The second “big idea”—as the Wikitecture team will confirm—is the notion of
open-source architecture: opening up the formal problem-solving process of
structural design and project implementation to stakeholder groups or even
(depending on the project) crowd-sourced communities; and creating a library of
"free great ideas" for overall designs, structural components, materials,
vendors and sources that anyone can use. As noted above, the Open
Architecture Network is one community dedicated to this proposition, and
you should visit and join it on basic principle, even if you aren’t looking for
brilliant solutions at any scale for creating affordable, green, humane
structures.
