Freegreen.com is challenging you to develop affordable green home designs that fit contemporary lifestyles. There are a lot of people who want a new home but don’t want a generic suburban McMansion. The American dream is not one size fits all. Our dreams are changing, and FreeGreen is challenging, you, the residential design community, to develop new ideas for people who don’t dream of the generic.

 

The single family home is the most commonly built building in America, but less than 5 percent of the homes built in America have direct involvement with an architect. The challenge of the Who’s Next competition is to re-envision the typical suburban home in an ecologically conscious manner that also reflects today’s modern lifestyle.

 

Everyone wins. Materials companies get advertising that's more targeted than anything else — a big allure, since these firms previously had only a vague sense of how to reach their potential customers. (Ads in places like Dwell or Metropolis don't really cut it, because so few of the people reading those magazines are actually in the market.) Consumers win, because the plans are free (membership to access some of the plans is fairly cheap; full-on custom homes are as little as $1,900). And the green movement wins, because the specific ideas — and the potential benefits — find their way away from just rich people and into the broader market.