Design Indaba: 10 x 10 Housing Project Challenge

In 2008, for the first time in recorded history, fifty percent of the World's population will be inhabitants of the earth's urban environments. The dense population of these cities has created a great need for low-cost housing. The Design Indaba Conference, celebrating its tenth anniversary, recently launched the 10×10 Housing Project Challenge to promote the South African design community. The project gathered ten architectural teams, consisting of one South African and one international architect and asked them to provide cutting-edge designs for homes in the low cost housing region of Freedom Park in Capetown, South Africa, that would dispose of the perception that housing for the poor has to be dull and absent of innovation. Some pretty arresting designs by the likes of Tom Dixon, Shigeru Ban, David Adjaye, Thomas Heatherwick And Klein Dytham resulted from the project, but that's not the end of the story; the last step is for the ten houses to be constructed and for a users manual to be given to the Minister of Housing. The manual will ‘provide open-source prototypes for the future.’ Perhaps their vision of the future involves flying cars…a boy can dream, right?