How to not re-invent the wheel?
I wish structures was an everyday thing, back in school.
It gets erratically wavering between technical-informal from here on.
Last night, when we were designing a house for a particular client, we were stuck on a very simple design we had just finished detailing to the T.
We were stuck on triangles.
My architect wanted to rest 15’ high slant walls on each other basically building a pyramid.
Only to realise later that building all the wet areas into a pyramid of wood will trample all our plans.
So we waited.
You know, for inspiration.
“The last minute deadline”, as the saying goes.
It did not take us long though to realise that we could make a box.
After all that’s what most of us, small time architects do.
It feels like an Udupi restaurant when you imagine a client walk in the office, and the design team goes, What do you want? Big, small, medium, high-rise, long, short, wide, SMLXL? What do you want? So we decided to go cliche.
Only this time, with a twist.
We decided to download files for 311 Fountainbridge, and adapt those to our specific geographic location.
What I mean by that is take a wooden house built in cold-dry-wet-whatever weather of Edinburgh, and plant the prototype in the torrential Indian monsoons.
And Ah! All this, while it is pouring all over you.
Cannot be more of a jerk now, can I?
Building a house in the monsoon season is not easy; granted.
But it is definitely “the” most fun thing to do.
(If you can survive a cold later).
So we decided to give something back.
You guessed it the ability to do so.
We added a bathroom unit to the WikiHouse.
The way I see it, now all you have to do is plonk a cosy warm/cold WikiHouse bath in your space, and add all the furniture you have been eyeing all this while around it.
Dead simple, kinda fun.
Today when we are closer to deploying the process, we figured that using existing designs even scraps or re-sourced material helps keep the time invested minimum, budget on the low, while giving a positive outlook as far as possibility of successful execution goes.
And we found all of these characteristics in what we began with.
Maybe that’s why they say,
“Everything you need is around you.”
So, stop looking.
Reflect instead.