Regular readers of course know that I am an amateur fan of what's called "sustainable architecture" -- it's not only a set of guidelines and technology to make modern buildings more ecologically friendly, but also a philosophy for making one's life less complicated and less filled with empty consumerist "stuff." And to that end, I've ended up getting really sucked into this website I lately came across, run by the Open Architecture Network (OAN); it's a fairly new organization started by Architecture for Humanity's Cameron Sinclair after winning the "tell us how you'd change the world" prize at 2006's Technology Entertainment Design (TED) conference. Basically, the group acts as a storehouse and dissemination machine for all kinds of cutting-edge theories and plans for sustainable housing, by a variety of smart architects and builders around the world; unlike other such storehouses, though, plans sponsored by OAN are released under a Creative Commons license, allowing others to not only use the plans for free whenever they want but also to legally modify and build on them.

Perhaps what's most interesting about the OAN website, though, and what will suck you in for hours at a time, is that a whole global variety of different projects can be found there, created for an entire planet's worth of different goals and needs; some are mobile temporary structures specifically for refugees and disaster victims, designed to be implemented in the thousands and then packed up again, while others are spare sheds for rural areas that can be built out of junkyard pieces, while yet others are entire community centers for third-world villages, where all the structures seen can be built out of such cheap local material as straw and mud. In effect it addresses one of the few drawbacks of most of these prototype showcase organizations for sustainable architecture, which is that they tend to focus on sleek cutting-edge Scandinavian Modernist projects that can only be afforded by wealthy members of the creative class; I love such projects, don't get me wrong, and OAN definitely has its share of such projects, but with them also mixed in with surprisingly sophisticated structures made for literally pennies out of natural materials in poor rural areas, which is what makes its website such a fascinating destination.

Oh, and speaking of sleek Modernist experiments that can only be afforded by wealthy members of the creative class, no visit to OAN is complete without special mention of my absolute favorite structure found there, the "Sustain MiniHome" from Canadian cutting-edge architectural firm Altius. It's a "100 percent green material" home that is designed to create as small an ecological "footprint" as possible (or that is, to impact its surrounding environment as little as possible); the smaller version seen above manages to pack in a full kitchen and bathroom, dining/work room, living/entertainment room and upstairs loft bedroom in a mind-bendingly small 400 square feet, using a plan that allows it to be simply hooked to a truck and hauled like an RV, and even with it stylistically being the envy of all your IKEA-collecting friends. Granted, it's $119,000, making it actually attainable only to particularly successful ad-agency directors who have inherited rural lakeside plots in the past and don't know what to put on them; but still, it's an extremely cool project to at least check out, plus has given me lots of interesting ideas for my actual crappy studio apartment here in Chicago, which is roughly the same size as the MiniHome seen here. Stop letting the American consumerist machine have such a control over you! Check out both OAN and Sustain/Altius for lots more ideas on how to simplify both one's life and surroundings.