Open Source House: On the road

The last 2 months we have gathered a lot information about the manner in which barrios are built. Which in the last 50 years has consolidated to something you could call a tradition of construction which is passed down through word of mouth, based on a trial and error process.
We have learned what the predominant building materials are, where they’re from, and how they are used to build.
We noticed also that a lot of professionals and institutions are busy with creating innovative strategies on improving their housing quality in the barrios, but the dispersal of this information, structurally lacks. A very important issue is that the enormous existing and self-constructed housing stock is absolutely not resistant against seismic earthquakes, long and heavy rainfalls, and structurally lack many other services.
So besides building better new houses, many existing houses are in need of immediate of improvement.

The three questions we got out of this were:

How can you spread knowledge?
How can innovation reach the barrios?
How can you help people reinforce their houses?

Open Source House is an internet based knowledge network. The only problem is that the people for who Open Source House could be useful, in the most of the cases don’t have internet, and if they do would never think of using it for this purpose.
Basically, this means that the information will never reach them.

The proposal: “How to built my house mobile”.

The idea is to make a distinct mobile vehicle which once in a while goes around to barrios with professionals, volunteers and in our case governmental organizations. This mobile should include knowledge, books, materials, toolkits, maps etc.

The collaboration of institutions that will run the mobile-project should structurally be in contact with the international world and for example Open Source House thus, introducing innovations like new materials, construction methods, water and waste systems etc.

Our Focus:

Our architectural assignment will focus on a retrofit-kit to reinforce houses against earthquakes, which is the biggest threat for Venezuela. At the end we want to design a kind of a toolkit which includes all the materials, tools and explanations so people can reinforce their casa or rancho themselves.