SEH FAQ

Question

Hello Open Source Ecology Team,

My name is Ian Aguilar, founder of Mycelium Technologies, a regenerative housing and materials company currently preparing our first pilot site in Southern California. I’ve been following OSE for years and really admire what you’re building — especially your approach to integrated design, modular construction, and open-source fabrication.

I’m strongly considering attending the December 2025 Future Builders Crash Course, because hands-on immersion in grading, building, utilities, foundations, modular systems, and material production would be invaluable for what I’m doing at Mycelium. In many ways, the experience you offer is exactly the kind of practical, grounded learning I’ve been looking for.

Before enrolling, I wanted to ask one important question to make sure I fully understand the program’s real-world applicability:

How closely do the construction methods and workflows you teach track with standard code-compliant building practices — particularly California building code requirements (CBC) for residential structures? I completely understand that OSE focuses on open-source techniques, local material production, and accessible building systems — and that my responsibility as a founder is to research California’s permitting environment independently. I’m simply trying to understand whether the skills and workflows I will learn (framing, foundations, electrical, plumbing, insulation, structural methods, etc.) are directly transferable to:

conventional building inspections

engineering requirements for hillside or high-fire areas

residential code compliance

general contractors’ workflow expectations

or whether they differ significantly from standard practice.

Again, I’m not asking the program to be California-specific — just hoping to get a sense of how much of what you teach can be applied directly toward designing and building structures that will ultimately go through a formal permitting process.

Everything else about the course aligns beautifully with my goals: I want to become more technically grounded as I lead my company into its first real build, and I believe learning by doing is the best way to gain that competency.

If there’s someone on your team who can briefly speak to this, I’d really appreciate it.

Thank you again for everything you’re doing, and for making this level of open-source education accessible.

Warmly, Ian Riccardo Aguilar

Answer

Hi Ian — great to hear from you, and thanks for the thoughtful note. Really appreciate what you're building with Mycelium Technologies. You’re exactly the kind of founder we built this program for: people doing real work who want grounded, hands-on capability across the whole stack.

To your question:

We haven’t looked specifically at the California Building Code, but we do build to the IBC, IRC, NEC, and UPC. Everything we teach is meant to pass inspection under standard code frameworks. What we do is not alternative-lifestyle or off-grid fantasy construction — it’s conventional, code-aligned construction delivered in an extremely efficient way.

How transferable is what we teach?

100% relevant to standard construction. If you build using the standard options in our system, you're following normal practice: conventional foundations, standard wall framing, standard mechanical/electrical/plumbing, normal inspection sequences, etc. Nothing exotic required.

Where our methods differ: We offer optional high-efficiency systems — like our stabilized subgrade foundation, modular wall fabrication, in-shop assemblies, material production, and parallelized workflows. These save massive money and time, but because they're nonstandard, they require engineering sign-off. We're working on open-source engineering packages so people can pull permits with minimal cost.

Hillside and fire-zone applications: We haven’t done engineering packages for hillside or high-fire areas yet. So I can’t comment directly on applicability there.

Workflow with inspectors and contractors: You can follow a standard step-by-step inspection timeline if you want. But if you adopt our “24-person extreme parallel build” model, you’d need a third-party inspector on-site because the house would be done before the municipal inspector arrives. For reference: we haven’t yet run a full 24-skilled-person build — that’s launching with the apprenticeship — but the system is designed for it.

Cost and efficiency: If you stick to conventional methods: everything aligns with current GC workflows. If you adopt the engineered high-efficiency options: you gain radical speed and big cost savings. For example, in our region a standard 1,000–1,200 sq ft build is ~$180k all-in; we’re around ~$100k even before engineering optimization and material production are fully dialed in. CA will have different numbers, but the principle holds: capacity + engineering = near-zero marginal cost.

Big picture: Everything we teach is meant to be used in real, permitted construction. The difference is that we also teach the engineering and material-production layer underneath so you can innovate responsibly — not by bypassing code, but by meeting it with hard data and open-source reference designs.

Happy to talk further if you want to go deeper. And if you’re building a regenerative housing company in California, the Crash Course will give you exactly the technical grounding you’re looking for.

—Marcin (source [1])