The Congress of Residential Architecture

The FreeGreen.com web site - this is the one that produces green home designs and offers the plans for free, and also hosts the OpenSource home plan market place where designers can offer home plans and set their own price - they are sponsoring a home design competition intended to promote the Open Source Platform. You may have noticed the Greenburg Kansas home design competition that recently wrapped up - this was created and run by them as well as a "Beta" of sorts to get the web platform for the competition up and running.

Its called Who's Next, and involves two resident profiles that you can design for. The competition is designed to be a marketing platform for the entrants, and the to assist moving the entrants towards creating a house plan product from their design. It is for promoting the designers, not for the benefit of a contractor's association, or a building component supplier.

The competition is completely electronic and you submit your entries via the internet. There is a public voting component, and a jury panel of FreeGreen staff. So in the course of the competition your design will be on exhibit for thousands of people to see - not shuffled away in a private judging place. This is not anonymous judging, so your name will be posted with your design entry. Even if you do not win your design will gain exposure to thousands of potential customers - for the entry fee of $50 you will gain much more in marketing. You retain all rights to your design and surrender nothing.

What do you win? There are prizes for the top 3 choices. The winner receives a cash prize of $5,000. Now I have complained elsewhere on this messageboard about a competition that awarded a small sum like this for the expectation that the winner would develop the construction documents. Not so here. The First Place winner gets the cash prize, and the top 3 winners all have their designs developed into construction documents for them by FreeGreen. That's right - they do the work for you, CDs are yours. What is that? A $10-20,000 "value"? I can vouch for the quality of their documentation as I've examined their plan sets quite closely. Your only obligation is to post the design and plans to OpenSource for sale, posting fee is waived. You receive the normal compensation for any sales of your design - FreeGreen's terms are 70% to the designer, 30% to FreeGreen. Anybody who has sold house plans through a publisher will know that this is the best royalty offering in the industry.

So lets summarize what this design competition is about:

- This is a Designer centric competition, for designers, by designers, to promote designers, and ultimately to make designers money.

- The Competition is designed to be a platform for you to market your work on the internet. You can expect your design to be viewed in the neighborhood of 3-400,000 times.

- You retain all rights to your designs.

- The top 3 winner's designs are developed into Construction Documents for free - you retain all rights to the plans.

- The First Prize winner also receives $5,000

- The winners also receive free posting of their design to OpenSource and actually MAKE MONEY FROM IT, like for ever! What a concept!

- Other entrants are encouraged to develop the CDs for their designs and post to OpenSource in order to convert some of the interested viewers into sales.

Details are here:
http://www.freegreen.com/whosnext/contest/index.aspx

I'm in.

Yep, I signed on as well. Should be a good chance to do what some of us started out trying to do (& blogged about) almost a year ago in designing a small home for the masses.

BTW, has anyone done any research into straw bale construction? I saw a program via hulu recently (although I think it's on you tube as well) called "Building Green" in which they built a 4000 s.f. house in California using a red iron structure with straw bale infill. It was quite interesting with a fairly decent final product. I've been fascinated by the construction technique ever since- I'm thinking about designing the house for this competition with this technique.

I've signed up as well.

I've begun planning out my design. Right now I'm shooting for a 3 bedroom house in about 1500sqft. Very compact, very energy efficient. I'm blogging the process as well to make the most PR out of the whole effort.

I wish I had time to enter this one, but time is not on my side right now!
I did just finish my entry into the Residential Architect Design Awards.
Best of luck to you guys.

Designing with one hand and blogging with the other! Sounds like you're saying you can design this with one hand tied behind your back there showoff!

I'll actually spend much more time blogging about the process and promoting than I will designing. For better or worse thats what its come to.

It looks like it is going to take something pretty modern to win this. The judges clearly favor modern and the people most likely to visit the site and vote are more likely to be young modernists.

I said before I didn't see much good design from the Greensburg competition but I must have missed the winning house because it is actually not that bad. It probably was actually the best out of the group so I think the judging was well done.

Chris - I'm not sure how you can claim some insight into what the judges may or may not like. If you are looking at the Greensburg contest for insight then you are wrong - its not the same jury panel. But if you want to believe that, be my guest.

No -I looked at the work of Zero Energy Design (ZED) the same people who now run Freegreen

You should look at the designs Freegreen creates for their own plans - these are the people who will be judging.

Yes I have seen them -I still think that they and the people most likely to vote will have a bias towards modern. That being said I don't personally believe that there is anything wrong with that. (we always need to design with the client in mind)

I will say that for the contest we would expect the older couple to favor traditional design. -I Think I will pick the younger couple though.

James, I see entries are not due until March -so you should have plenty of time to win another one

Deadline for this years entry package was Dec. 16 Got it in with one day to spare......

I think the entry deadline is actually December 31, 2009 for anyone still considering.