Kristijan Markoč runs the Swiss studio Plana Architecture. He has published Plana House, a 42-square-metre timber home, and made the full drawing set free to download. The structure sits on screw piles or simple concrete pads, follows a plain grid and uses standard off-the-shelf materials, so that a local contractor, a small team or a private person with practical help can actually build it.
The reasoning is on his own site. For most of human history, making a home was part of everyday life; people built with what was at hand and passed the knowledge on. Building has since become specialised, expensive and removed from the people it serves. The drawings are shared so the design can be studied, adapted or built, and explicitly not as a finished answer. An architect is treating the drawing itself, rather than the commission, as the thing worth giving away.
So…:
What do you know that would be worth more given away than sold?
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