<Cesar>Every time you raise a dogma, gets isolated it from the rest of the legisla-
tion, you create a new status</Cesar>
<Usman>Well this is interesting because you know the open source licence was
finally given a bit of validity recently, you must have heard about this court case
: a company had made use of some code which had been released as an open
source licence. The person whose code belong brought an action against that
company and was successful in it. So in a sense, when you write a piece of legal
text, a licence or anything, it means nothing until it actually stands up in court. So
the Urban Versioning System is not going to mean anything until somebody chal-
lenges it.</Usman>

<Cesar>So if you want this to bring some progress to architecture law, in fine it
has to be illegal, as a starting point at least.</Cesar>
<Usman>Well, that’s an interesting way to put it. Let’s not say “illegal” but
“extra-legal”, meaning it is outside of the legal framework and eventually gets
subsumed somehow.</Usman>
<Cesar>If Open Architecture is extra-legal now, it is likely to become legal later.
In software intellectual property, the status of “beta” allows the software company
to discharge its responsibility in case of failure of the product. The company still
holds the intellectual property on the code, the group of developers and legal ten-
ants cant be prosecuted. This allows frequent releases of software versions, forking
(create a derivate of the product. Some softwares remain in eternal beta, means
they are accepted as continuously improved, some software are even qualified “al-
pha” which means that are working but they are being tested before wide public
release. We could very well do the same with architecture. </Cesar>

<Maxime>And this is where it is becoming “interesting”, you have to play with
the rules to their limits. You can trick everybody, making a collapsible house, with
containers, mobile, without having to submit a construction permit. Since you
do something mobile, you are not doing architecture no more. Another example
: “La maison du Chaos” of Thierry Ehrmann, a Freemason (maybe that helps
when you talk to a juge) bought a 19th century house he completely dismantled
it, and he said “this will be the chaos house”. He is working with artists, himself
he does a lot inside... The place is devastated, completely chaotic. Because he was
not allowed to build what he built he declared it as an art piece, and it became a
case. So it is not an architectural construction, even if he is living in there, have
his company legal hosting, it is still an art piece.</Maxime>
<Cesar>In order to permit the legal construction of an open architecture before
it becoming a new legal status, we could just apply it a suitable existing status.
We could also say Open Architecture is “in progress”, “under construction” which
allows much creativity but also implies a clearer distribution of the responsibili-
ties. We could also use “temporary” or “event Architecture” which is more strictly
regulated but would allows us a to occupy public space and be more welcoming
to visitors as long as we comply with legal regulations. We could also use the “a
vehicle” or just say “open Architecture is art” or a “scientific experiment”.
Open Architecture may be the legal framework of our activities, it should never
be made into a dogma, a political constitution, or autonomous political operat-
ing system (that is my personal ethical commitment). If open architecture was to
become an exclusive organising constitutional force, it would re-create a form of
omnipresent panoptical totalitarianism, and it is not its nature.</Cesar>

La demeure du chaos