10 House is in the news! We've appeared on treehugger.com as well as nowpublic.com! Wahoo! Thanks for the coverage and support!

***For people who are interested in joining the project add your name and email (name (at) address (dot) com) to the Members page. Soon an mailing list will be created as well as conference calls.***

Introduction

This project codenamed "10 House" (10K for a perfect 10 house, aka the "wiki house") will be a repository of information, methods, and materials to build a green house for approx. $10,000. Can it be done? The goal is to find out. After we've hammered out the costs on paper the next step would be to have one built!

The first step is identifying what we want our house to have. What is a reasonable goal? A bathroom, kitchen space, social area, and bedroom area? I say area because the spaces may bleed into each other rather than being seperated by walls.

The sky is the limit! Feel free to jump in!

My name is Paul and all of what you'll find here currently is what I came up with within a period of day. So pardon the disorganization and lack of direction! ;) Personally I'm still in the brewing phase of dreaming solutions and projecting futures in my mind. This is part of other ideas I've been attempting to develop within the past few years which I hope to post about at some point in the future.

Forecast

On a side note, I could imagine this site or one spawned from it as a recipe book for green living. Based upon the specified budget we can construct green living arrangements that fall within that budget. So later on we could make a listing of housing solutions based upon price, location, and other factors. I can imagine a website where you plug in certain variables and it pops out a recipe for a green building solution. Perhaps different kinds of buildings could also be classified and easily searchable. For instance, if I wanted to build an eco-friendly shed or greenhouse for $1,000 what are my options?

This site may also move soon if it is felt that the project warrants it's own more official home online. A wiki was made here in order to initiate the process instantly with available tools (Which is highly recommended to anyone with a good idea). I've already found some issues with the wiki software which makes using this site a bit annoying and cumbersome.

Roadmap

• After the initial foundation is laid conceptually on this page, organzing the site will be necessary.
• I think a good model of future development would be to follow the "design thinking" process as defined in wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking)

1. Define
2. Research
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Choose
6. Implement
7. Learn

Sources of Inspiration

After this site was posted on Hugg.com the immediately a news article was posted about a man who built a house for 20,000 US dollars! Talk about Synchronicity! And not soon after another article was posted about people making homes out of sheds for approximately $12,000! Now we're getting somewhere! Not that I think living in a shed is the answer to affordable housing but it brings up several novel ideas:

1) Holonic housing arrangements
This means bringing the idea of modular to a whole new level. A holon is a whole made of parts that are also wholes made of parts (think atoms, molecules, humans, etc.) This could translate into assessing the costs of different structures that where designed for different purposes and could then "plug-in" to each other. Using established standards or creating new ones these holons could be built as a family or a community expands. This would also be beneficial for another reason . . .

2) Development based on available resources
This basically means via using the method of a holonic housing arrangement the building party is capable of building based on current funds and build upon the structure as more funds/resources become available. But this has even larger implications where if multiple people where sharing costs they could build a structure that benefited both of them such as a communal bathroom or kitchen space that was seperate from the more personal living quarters. And this could prove to be an interesting social catalyst which brings us to the next point.

3) Redifining ourselves and reinventing community
In a time where people hardly know their own neighbors it's needless to say that as the postmodern society progresses there is a tendency torward increased narcissism and isolation from the true sense of community and being a responsible participant in a community. What if through the holonic clustering of housing and utilities we created situations where individuals shared common spaces more frequently therefore we would feel firsthand the impact our lives have on others in realtime, through the degree of responsibility and care we bring to our holonic community? An article was recently posted as LiveScience.com (http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/060623_close_friends.html) that stated that people are losing touch with close friends. Quoted from the article:

“The evidence shows that Americans have fewer confidants and those ties are also more family-based than they used to be,” said Lynn Smith-Lovin, professor of sociology at Duke University.
“This change indicates something that’s not good for our society," Smith-Lovin said. "Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action."
The findings are published in the June 2006 issue of the journal American Sociological Review.
The research also showed that people who talk only to family members about important matters increased from 57 percent to 80 percent over the two decades, while the number who depend totally on a spouse rose from 5 percent to 9 percent.
The results are based on responses from more than 1,400 American adults to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1972.

Shared utilities would have another added benefit:

4) Environmentally sound living systems
Throught the decrease in repeated utilities, buildings, and more the burden of maintaining those resources is distributed more throughout the community and lighten the load on each family/living unit as well as lighten the environmental impact of each unit.

The small-budget housing can be found here:
http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/

One design candidate is the Hexayurt, a small materials-efficient building design which is already in the public domain.
http://10house.wetpaint.com/page/Hexayurt