4.4 Law

Extra-legal innovation, Beta architecture

<cesar> Architecture is essentially an enclosing activity. First shelters were built to protect
people, activities and goods. Architecture act just like the whole justice and prison
system : here to ensure a safety distance between the parts on a trial. If we sud-
denly open architecture, we loose all these social safety mechanisms and control
on property for example.
As I developed in the previous “Ethic” chapter, such an open architecture is
conditioned by a radical change in social habits with a major increase in mutual
respect and a redistribution of responsibilities : a beta-architecture I will develop
in this chapter.
As a starting point I want to simulate what happens to a person thrown without
instructions in an open architecture. My guess is that such a space is potentially 
disorientating and one would easily prefer to come back to more constraints.
If open architecture exists, its boundaries are very blurred, anyone perceiving it
already belongs to it, participates to it, may this person want it or not. In some
respect such architecture is quite infiltrative and evasive.
When open architecture takes place, like any other human activity, it has its
activists and enemies. The case of open architecture is very special because even
enemies are participating the “construction” whatever they do.
Toward the end of the chapter I suggest a few existing legal forms that already
permit legally an open architecture and suggest a new nonprofessional one : beta
architecture, which is a distribution of the responsibility of the architect among all
nonspecialist participants. 
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