Open-Cube: Towards an Open-Source Architecture

Abstract

Architecture is a means of production, a means of spatio-temporal intervention, a use of force against what already exists in natural and cultural environments. “In addition to being a means of production,” as Henri Lefebvre subtly puts, architecture is also “a means of control, and hence of domination, of power.” Architecture thus, is ontologically a political endeavor in the original sense of the word politikos, since it simply affects the everyday life of citizens and the way they interact with their social and spatial environments. ABOUTBLANK’s experiment in this regard, is positioned in the liminal space between architectural design theory and practice. The experiment is, (1) about overthrowing the problematic structure of power and the elitist hierarchy inherent in the profession among spatial actors, (2) about dissolving the antagonistic relationship of architecture with time, change, and movement, shrouded by its fetishistic preference for atemporality, inertia, and permanence, and finally (3) about a radical pursuit towards an Open-Source Architecture which, contrary to the exclusionary nature of the conventional profession, empowers all spatial actors to become creative architectural co-producers within a horizontal, performative, and process-driven network. This theoretical framework was tested in Antalya, Turkey as an open-source architectural experiment during the summer of 2013, under the code-name “Open-Cube.” It was attempt to defy the logic of pre-determined function, allowing users to activate cubes according to their needs and desires, to defy the logic of pre-determined static composition, allowing users to move, relocate, and displace cubes as mobile containers, and to defy the logic of pre-determined hierarchical power organization, allowing users to get rid of their subordinate position and empower themselves as egalitarian spatial actors in the architectural milieu. In Antalya, the participating spatial actors of this experiment started to realize in a preliminary but promising way, in good old Nietzschean terms, the transvaluation of architecture’s problematic conventional values.