Open Source House design competition

The challenge is to design a sustainable, flexible and locally embedded family house for a specific location in Ghana. The modular construction should be suitable for local implementation and affordable for its future owners. The winning design(s) will be built in Ghana.

Participants all over the world are challenged to design a house for a family in a coastal region in Ghana. The basis for designing is a framework of 8 OS-House principles in which houses and specific elements can be designed, developed and implemented. Some of the judging criteria are: How strong are the 8 principles implemented in the design? How feasible is the design? How well is the structure embedded in the urban context?

OS-House conducted research in Ghana to get a better understanding of Ghana's housing situation. These research findings contain essential information that will help you create a design with higher social, technical and economic viability.

Deadline and submission format.
May 17th, 2010. Before this date all designs must be submitted digitally. Contestants are asked to deliver designs considering all house components -foundation, structure, floor, facade, roof- and its set of connections. The winning designs will be chosen by a professional jury and announced during the awarding ceremony of the Open Source House which will take place on the 18th of June, 2010.

Pilot
The winning design(s) will be built in a pilot project in Ghana, to test the technical and economic feasibility as well as the social perception. Joining the competition is your chance to establish your name as an architect while witnessing your design being built and used by its new residents.

The Open Source phase
To generate content for the OS-House platform we start with the Ghana design competition. However the aim of OS-House is to provide knowledge and choice. Therefore all submitted designs are published on the OS-House platform after the competition.

After this first competition and pilot project OS-House will continue to promote the implementation of more OS-Houses, challenge platform members to improve available designs, organize new competitions and stimulate local parties to take designs and adapt them to their local conditions. Our goal is to realize a 100.000 OS-Houses before the year 2020.

http://www.os-house.org/english/os-house/design+competition