Crowdfunding modular architecture
Description
To the average American citizen, the thought of constructing a public building is completely unachievable. With price points in the millions of dollars (Building Journal), average citizens rely upon the government, wealthy individuals, or corporations to construct the communities they live in. However, the contemporary landscape of financing buildings has provided an alternative: crowdfunding. Crowdfunding, or the pooling of money from a large number of individuals in order to collectively reach a larger funding goal (Davies), injects a democratic system into the traditional construction process, allowing individuals to vote on projects they support by either choosing to fund or not to fund the project. At this time, buildings that use crowdfunding strategies are designed in the same manner as those funded from traditional sources. However, this reliance on traditional design methods is proving to be detrimental to crowdfunded projects with 70% of all projects failing. By divorcing crowdfunded buildings from e design methodologies that are used to design traditional buildings, a new mode of design can be created that is more beneficial to crowdfunded projects. This new mode of design will capitalize on the differences in how these types of projects and traditional projects are funded. Crowdfunded projects are formed through the accumulation of resources over a length of time whereas traditional projects are given all of their resources at once. In order to take advantage of this rate of accumulation, crowdfunded projects should be defined by the aggregation of individual parts which can be funded independently. As parts are funded, they are added to a growing whole. While the final form will be unknown to the advocates of the project and the project designer, they will be responsible for designing the elements that will amount to the building and composing the strategy for how the elements will be organized. This process will allow the project to adapt the resources at hand and the desires of the community, gene ting a manifestation of the project's support by the community in real time.