Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-project-to-let-an...

If you could go online, select a home, print the plans for free, and build it yourself for less than $80,000 in a few days, would you? That's the dream behind WikiHouse, an open source home design project that just finished construction of its fourth prototype, a two-storey home that snaps together in just a few days.

Architects have struggled to find a viable model for building cheap, fast, single-family homes since the earliest experiments with pre-fab in the 1900s. It's an idea we still grapple with today, and WikiHouse is its direct descendent: A project to publish open source building plans online for anyone to download, designed to require only the most basic knowledge of construction to create. The average cost of buying a home in America hovers around $300,000—WikiHouse 4.0 can be built from scratch for less than a third of that.