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What to you get if you mix Bill Clinton + Brad Pitt ?
jejejeje, no, well yes but think again…
Although they might seem not to have too much in common, by mashing up some of their ideas it is possible to design a replicable model for sustainable habitat in emerging communities.
Let me explain. One of Clinton’s greater achievements is the reorganisation of markets related to healthcare in Africa, Rwanda to me precise. By doing so his foundation has manage to lower costs of medicines down to 10 times its original value, (thus saving 10 lives for the same price). They are now working in other areas of economies.
Brad Pitt, at other hand commissioned 13 low cost houses to rebuild neighbourhoods in New Orleans.
Take a look at WeeHouse a prefab solution by alchemy architects that can send you a complete solution starting from US$65,000.
But that is still to costly for the budget we have to rebuild Tabasco after the floods?I read somewhere (i cant remember where) that the cost per house should be US$5,000.
What if ? Â
What if we took open architecture principles by cameron sinclair to share and adapt designs to local requirements AND we reorganise the markets involved in construction to lower the costs ?
While i can’t assure that it will be possible to lower the cost to a tenth of its current costs, i can assure than open architecture market reorganisation can leverage tabasco’s reconstruction.Â
Low cost doesn’t mean lack of design, Actually a good design can evidently help improve the life-quality to families that so much need it after their tragedy.
I might even risk myself to say its probably the ONLY right way to rebuild it in a long sustainable plan in mind.
so…
Open Innovation + Market Reorganization = affordable sustainable growth  Â
makes sense doesn’t it ?
December 11th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
We’ve been working on wee and not-so-weeHouses using prefab production in the last 4 years, and I couldn’t agree more that one should be able to produce quality housing much more affordably. Unfortunately, our experiences have also highlighted the difficulties in dealing with codes, municipalities, customization, etc, in various areas and their impact on the time really required to produce buildings using anything other than the typical process. There is also the social acceptance of buildings that might look a bit different than people are used to, on all sides of the producer-consumer spectrum.
Regardless, I do believe that offering SMALL and EFFICIENT housing options (and not just Big Architecture that pays the bills) is going to eventually move the conversation toward sustainable models. As we standardize our houses while retaining flexibility and move toward doing more houses, we also move toward actually realizing developments that leverage quantities of scale. That really can bring the costs down, but one has to have an apparently long view. We’ve got our binoculars out!