Houses That You & I Can Build

I’ve always loved the idea of building my own house. The problem is that I have absolutely no skill in construction and absolutely no desire to end up in the hospital with some giant nail drilled into my foot. But today, I found out about Wikihouse, an open source construction set. At the Wikihouse website, you can “design” your house, print CNC-milled components and build away. The best part of the system is that two people can build the basic frame in one day with little skill. You don’t even need nails.

Here’s the Ted talk about the project. The speaker is the project’s head Alastair Parvin; he gives a wonderful talk about the role of architecture in the modern world. And it’s only about 15 minutes.