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Open Source Housing
No_Weak_Heart writes "The latest issue of Metropolis magazine has an interesting look at the house of the future. The primary focus of the article is on MIT's House_n project and its offshoot - the Open Source Building Alliance. The article discusses potential benefits of adopting a modular, component-based, everyone's-invited approach to building. Houses built via interactive design stategies and mass-cutomization vs. single-purpose structures driven by one ideology."
Didn't Japan try this a few years ago.. I never head that it had gone anywhere? Anyone have more info on this?
Read this and think of the Hobbit Holes project?
There are hundreds of millions of people who can't even buy houses.
We are very lucky to even be living where we are.
Research should be going into cheaper builiding materials, and house effeciency.
If we use open source housing, soon all the burgulars will know the vulnerabilities of your house and be able to break in easier. Only by keeping housing plans secret can we keep them secure
I just read the local newspaper about a guy who breaks into peoples house when they are away - lives there for a couple of days (watching videos, sleeping in your bed, using your toiler and shower) without stealing anything concrete. Then, when done - he moves to next house. He has done this to dozens of times already, and has not been caught....now that's true open open source housing .)
but if you go to work in a modular cubicle do you really want to go home to a modular house? say what you will about functionality, but there's a certain amount of art to architecture that unless they make giant legos (which is a bad ass idea in itself) cannot really be translated into modular components very well.
That said, it sounds good to me...I'd love a house that I could network without cutting drywall. But regardless, I think a giant house made of lego would be awesome.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
How many times are they going to try to make our appliances interactive before they realize that it's just not something most people want. I want my kitchen table to be - just a kitchen table. If I need a personal reminder to take my "medication" (no jokes please, allergy pills only), then really an organizer wall-fixture would be much more appealing.
Granted, a living room table with an LCD or something would be cool, but please... the last thing I need while I'm trying to enjoy dinner is to have a bunch of flashing messages and (likely the next bright idea) advertisements floating under my coffee cup.
Oh, and strike the talking chairs too, most people wouldn't care to hear "cripes man, go hit the thigh-master, yer crushing me!" when sitting down.
Another great idea that will be decades in coming, if ever. Like open source software, something like this would be anathema to the housing industry. Like open source software, there will only be commercial support *after* it's already taken off. Unlike software, however, building a house requires significant capital investment.
I would love to see this model applied to housing (and many other things), but the economics make the realization highly infeasable without dedicated, zealous support and significant monetary investment.
What's next? Open-sourced surgery? Open-sourced legal representation? Open-sourced sex!?!
_______
2B1ASK1
I've seen some ghastly web pages created by 8-year old AOLers and housewives who sell knit mittens from their home in Montana. Can't imagine when we have some real winners designing their own house :)
Seriously, though. Seems like technology combined with the homes systems is not only a great idea around for a while but will be more unavoidable.
I;ve always thought that having one fiber optic line with phone, broadcast tv, inet access all accessible through on line. An having a central master computer controlling everything from programming tv shows (tivo-like) to the security system to controlling lights, heating for optimum energy savings (even depending on inhabitants current position in home and habits, by maybe even using integrated systems like the motion detection from the security system).
Combined with solar/alternative fuels and increasing affordability of technology, it seems promising.
Computer! Beer me!
why run from Vincenzo?
According to this, the only way to contribute is to either take classes at MIT or a related school, or give money. As a footnote, there's an "everyone else" category, but it doesn't look all that interactive.
I was getting all set to rant about how Open Source doesn't apply to housebuilding, until I realized that Open Source doesn't apply to this article, either.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
I'm having trouble seeing the difference between what this article is describing and a mobile/"manufactured" home, other than the technological aspect.
I can see this kind of mass-produced housing being useful for apartments (like Bruce Willis had in The Fifth Element), where the goal is basically to cram as much functionality into as little space as possible. There was a prototype apartment building in Japan, for example, that was basically a framework that all of the living pods bolted to. The idea was that you could take your module with you when you moved to another city, but it would also be handy to be able to replace individual units in case of a fire or whatever.
I really don't see this happening for individual homes, though, other than in the existing market for trailers and other "manufactured" living. If I'm going to plonk down a sizeable amount of money for the land to live on, I want a one-off house. One that I can customize by knocking down/building walls, and so forth. When I read this article I think of a family where I grew up who had a big old trailer of a home, which had moveable plastic walls. I'm hardly Dr. Debonaire, Professor of Style, but that's just way too tacky for me.
I *can*, however, see standardized electronic modules that are added to new and existing homes in the same manner as appliances, hidden in ceilings and crawlspaces, or built into walls like an ATM. The difference to me is analogous to androids vs. cyborgs. One is a simulation, and the other is an augmentation.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Do we all have compact fluorescent lights in our houses? Or some other type of energy efficient lighting?
Do we have proper insulation in the walls? It's surprising that many houses do not.
How about a fuel cell electricity generator that runs off natural gas?
Or maybe even something as simple as kitchen cabinets that are big enough, and not made from particle board?
Cat 5 in the walls?
Front door security camera, with a truly secure way to access it from the Internet?
Stereo sound in every room?
A bathroom fan that actually will clear the stink out of the room?
I don't want the house of the future: I just want what's possible with the technology of TODAY.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Dear Sir:
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Hell, if I can get it through the GPL and I can have it be from a woman... :-D
Karma whorin' since 1999
Oh, I can just see it. Housing wants to be FREE! When you think about it, free housing is just as sensible idea as free software.
The common suburban development consists of a few basic floor plans and personal customization involving the selection of a few of the details from a list in a catalog. What this article is suggesting seems to me to be an attempt to use technology to make more things customizable, but it isn't going to solve a lot of the big problems.
Architects tend to not like suburban development. The very idea of taking a prefabbed structure and replicating it in multiple places goes against one of the cornerstones of good architecture, which is responsiveness to the environment. Simple things like building orientation can have huge effects on the design. The thought of even spinning a building around on its site would be attrocioius to an architect concerned with energy efficiency, or sustainable design. I'm not sure what sort of technologies they were implying when they said they could manage different climates with one design. It seems like the wrong kind of problem to throw technology at. Good design would be a much cheaper and better solution to a lot of these problems. There are generations upon generations of buildings which had to deal with these problems before things like electricity. Technology caused us to forget the lessons learned there. Piling on more technology might not be the best answer.
I don't think many architects dream of some sort of perfect pre-fabbed house design that will solve all of our problems. I don't think they'd really want it anyways. It's hard enough making money in the profession as it is.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Might be cool, but I wouldn't want to bring my kids up in a place like this: Kowloon's Walled City.
If you want an idea of how this concept could come together in the future, read "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling. It's only an underlying part of the environment that the book happens in, but there's some really cool stuff about distributed building construction.
Basically the way it works in the book is that each component of the building is labeled with little electronic tags. A computer system knows how each part needs to fit and so it instructs each person on what piece to put where. It's designed such that somebody with no construction skills can build most of a building without expert assistance.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
After all, open source housing requires vulnerability disclosure to work. If you live in one of these houses, you may find yourself homeless next day because someone discloses how its security can be compromised.
It may be possible, because their are design patterns/proportions that they understood in the past (and some understand now) when building a home. But the idea that you can just tack on a kitchen willy nilly has resulted in the mass of ugly, community-destroying garage-scapes we have today.
Then it better damn well be mine.
the heart of House-n is a chassis with an "infill" of cheap sensing devices like LEDs, speakers, displays, automatic lighting, heat sensors, and miniature cameras that can be plugged in at any point and upgraded on the fly.
You place a videoconference call that follows you up the stairs (projected on the walls) and then decide to exercise: a table retracts, a wall panel moves, and a life-size image of your favorite aerobics instructor appears.
We have a large community of open-source housing here. Every few months though, the neighbors start to complain, and then the city makes them pack up the tents and fold up the cardboard boxes and move underneath a different bridge to stay out of the rain. No big deal, we got lots of bridges to keep moving them to.
Shantytown's much smaller now than it used to be, I think maybe they're all wintering in Arizona? In their time-share vacation boxes....
How about P2P Girlfriends?
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Did anyone else notice the irony in this quote from the bottom of the page and a story about new construction?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Bathroom fans are to remove excess moisture from the air, not to remove stink. Without the ventilation provided by a good fan, you would end up with much more severe problems than shit-smelling bathrooms. You'd get mold and mildew and all the problems that go along with that.
I think modular housing would be really cool, especially if I could move the walls and windows.
I thought you might be able to come close in a loft-type space with "walls" that were similar to cubicle walls, but mounted on hidden casters. The walls would be of a couple of varying widths (1/3, 2/3, full width), heights (1/2, full) and a doorway module (1/3 to 2/3 width, accomodate varying door styles -- normal, double, swinging, etc). There's a whole laundry list of specialty modules -- closets, etc.
Power would be a problem as your floorplans would have to accomodate whatever your physical space's power plan was, but would be eased by having the walls pre-wired for power and daisy chainable, as well as having maybe a good grid of floor jacks.
Plumbing and gas are the big obstacles, since any real modularity would require you to move as needed the kitchen and bathrooms. The kitchen is half easy -- go with electric appliances and come up with some modular cabinets that can be removed/inserted into some caster-mounted work surfaces following the 1/3, 2/3, full width wall rules. Water supply and sewage/drainage are the real challenges, with the only "solution" to movability being supply water coming from overhead. Sewer and drain water *might* be something you could pump out overhead as well.
You could go "down" if you wanted, but in a loft space you generally can't dig into the floor. A false floor would solve this (3ft raised ala data centers).
With a big enough space you could really do some interesting floor plans and traffic flows. There's little reason a house couldn't be done the same way, and having control of the entire building might even solve some of the plumbing challenges by allowing you to go "down" more easily, by putting preset sewage and water lines in the floor for the modules that need them.
It's not "real" architecture, but it would be really cool space planning. "Re-arrange the furniture? I'm gonna re-arrange the *house*!" Having just spent 40 some hours re-arranging my home office, though, I wonder how often I'd really feel like moving around the entire contents of my house. Maybe if everything was on casters and one level...
posting as AC to try to get your own post modded up is just lame.
There's a pretty interesting architecture book called "The Timeless Way of Building" by a guy named Christopher Alexander. I read it because it's the book that introduced the idea of a pattern language, which inspired the talk of patterns in software design.
One of the ideas of the book was that these modular buildings, where everything is the same, don't "live" in the way that many older buildings do. His argument is fairly complicated, and I'm not sure I've mastered it well enough to summarize it here, but it has a lot to do with the way things get put together, the process of building, and how it fits in with the community, the site, the culture, and the way human beings work.
The "house n" page linked in the story has a quote from Le Corbusier, and Alexander makes a pretty good critique of his work, I think. It's kind of sterile.
The basic point is that if you're approaching housing from a starting point of modular components, instead of from ideas about how buildings and open spaces affect how people live, if you go for modular housing because it can be mass produced, you're going to end up with a pretty soulless neighborhood.
The best way to understand this, for me at least, is to think about the places you've been that struck you as being particularly nice, and to think about how those buildings and neighborhoods got put together.
It's not necessarily a money thing -- I was in Duluth, of all places, a while ago, and the houses in the hills overlooking lake superior were all incredible. It was just a nice place to be. The houses weren't lavish or excessively luxurious, they just fit into the hill and into the neighborhood.
I don't see how places like that could come into existence with these proposed methods.
a word of warning, for anyone who thought this ass-clown might have something funny to say: he doesn't he's just another angry loner with not one original thought in his tiny brain. just a sheep, your bus is leaving, you fuckstick.
why run from Vincenzo?
This is already a reality in many large cities. The technology is known as 'refrigerator boxes and duct tape'.
Rock is dead. Long live scissors and paper!
So true. user posting as AC trying to get his post modded up is truly lame. kudos to you sir.
if you look at this post carefully, you can see these two above anonymous ppl are both the same person
"Hey, how do I use the stove?"
"RTFM, fscking noob!"
BOOM!
the way of the future, then Alabama and Mississippi are on the cutting edge. We southerners have been developing and using modular homes for quite some time. As a matter of fact, I have a double-wide! Eat yer heart out, Bill Gates! You no longer have the home of the future!
I went to college for this?...
Don't we have enough sameness with those everything-looks-the-same villages, where entire suburbs are built to one of a small number of very similar plans?
I value the uniqueness of my home, I enjoy the quirky nature of it's surroundings and in knowing that my apartment is very different from those around me. These are things which can't just be achieve by lighting and furniture - it's architecture.
We're living in a pre-fab world where everything from music to cars are all starting to look and sound the same - do we want to do this to our dwellings? I value difference and individuality, thanks very much!
Shut the fuck up.
If you want to live in the forest and eat grubs, suit yourself. Don't stand in the way of everyone else's progress.
Hi. Didn't you already post this message? first slashdot, now the users are reposting their own comments. pathetic.
where is the soviet troll?
...where I live, it is just not practicle. I love reading about all these new ideas, but really, what I need is practicle, affordable housing. As it is, I am looking at cutting down a bunch of trees and assembling a log cabin out of it, in part because I can't bring myself to borrow a huge sum of money, and pay a bank 10% or more of that borrowed amount, just to build a stick and board house of someone elses ideas. I realise that there will be a large labor cost involved, but I will be more secure knowing that if I get on a bender or take off for a year and go to Tierra Del Fuego or whereever the bank won't come and move me out into the frozen earth. I guess what I need is a robot that can: cut the trees, strip the bark, plane the logs, score them, and maybe even set them up. Ahhh, dreams.
Unless you're wealthy
Capsule Rooms
Until that nut is cracked, the rest of this stuff is just a pipe dream.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Open-sourced software...
:)
Open-sourced Housing...
What's next?:
Open-sourced Government?...
Well the russians used to have something a little like that, going back a bit, in the past and all, and we liked to call them communists. In fact we liked to call them "pinko bastards" but that's neither here nor there.
Simply put a yen for open-sourcing is a yen for communism. Pinko bastards!
(If you can't spot a joke.. then... well.. reply, it'll be funny to watch
Second the article confuses two separate issues - construction and fittings. Construction is probably the harder of the two as the trades are resistant to change as are also insurers, building codes, and other consumers. There are literally hundreds of proposals and dozens of demonstration buildings out there showing off some "revolutionary" construction technique or another out there. Few have any success as individuals and society are (not suprisingly) just plain conservative when it comes to these things.
The flip side is the fittings. MS is on their umpteenth iteration of their "Smart Home", the electronic message-board 'fridge is a cliche, "wiring" one's home means something different to everybody and and all are likely to become obsolete in a decade anyway. Frankly the smartest investment is running conduit with room for more cables wherever possible and realizing one won't see much back on it in resale value. Most of the future services are only of interest to the tech-obsessed anyway or require complicated/expensive retrofit kluges to already pretty good systems.
Lastly the article is just plain crappy. Aside from being badly written it is poorly researched. For example their home listings is grossly incomplete and even then wrong (Disney's Monsanto home was not torn down in '67, it lasted much longer then that.) A term paper from any architecture student would be better then what's been passed of there.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
...walls that tell us to take medicine, furniture and wall panels that move aside automatically...
How about putting cute little programs in our word processing software that pop up and help us, say, write a letter or a resume? Or a doohickey on our TVs that figure out what kind of shows we like and record similar ones? Or...
Seems like these devices that are supposed to make life easier end up pissing people off. I'll take the old, non-interactive home for now.
"If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization" - Gerald Weinberg
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Yep, I say screw a modular/manufactured home.
1 &q =strawbaleguide.pdf&btnG=Google+Search
Why?
Because the shit that goes into the construction of a modular mass-produced home is nasty.
When they burn or catch fire the least bit, they produce toxic smokes and serious greenhouse gases.
It's much simpler, cheaper and more environmental to use the by-products of farming as a building material or to use natural substances when you can.
Like Strawbales or adobe.
"Straw as a building material excels in the areas of
cost-effectiveness and energy efficiency. If used to replace the more traditional wall-building system of brick and block, it can present savings of around £10,000 on a normal 3 bedroomed house. Of interest to the home owner is the huge reduction in heating costs once the house is occupied, due to the super insulation of the walls. Here the potential savings are up to 75%
compared to a conventional modern house. Building
regulations are changing next year (2002), bringing the allowable U-value of domestic external walls down to either 0.35 or 0.25 (the European Union would like to see 0.25) which is challenging the whole industry to meet these requirements. A typical bale of straw has a U-value of 0.13 - significantly better thermal performance than will be required."
"Over 50% of all greenhouse gases are produced by the construction industry and the transportation associated with it. If the 4 million tonnes of surplus straw in the UK was baled and used for local building, we could build at least 450,000 houses of 150m2 per year.That's almost half a million super-insulated homes, made with a material that takes carbon dioxide and makes it into oxygen during its life cycle. Coupled with vastly reduced heating requirements, thereby further reducing carbon dioxide emission (greenhouse gas) from the burning of fossil fuels."
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-
I'm building strawbale in 2003 or 2004.
"modular component based housing"??? Could anything sound scarier than "Track Development"?
Sounds extremely terribly ugly and disgusting. Please keep this sort of thing to yourselves way out in the 'burbs.
Thanks
mje0w!!!1!
Architects use 3D CAD programs to design houses, but these tools are basically merely drafting tools and a lot of time consuming work has to be done to translate the design into blueprints and materials lists. Besides which, the CAD tools don't understand esthetic relationships. I've always wondered why no one has yet developed a 'house compiler', which would make it a lot easier to design homes. Just as silicon compilers allow someone to specify a chip design, and then the compiler does the hard low-level detail work, or code compilers take HLL code and create the low-level instructions, a house compiler would take 3D design ideas and physical specs and output a complete, checked, blueprint. An object-oriented house compiler could take prebuilt objects and put them together to form a house, checking for correctness of module interfaces (i.e., this pipe goes through a wall, must reroute it, etc.). Anyone at MIT want to get me a grant to do this?
to be just like the Jetson's.
I was a carpenter in a previous life. I helped build the house I'm living in now. I *like* the fact that my house was crafted not by the sharing of blueprints and computer-aided customization, but by real (as opposed to fake) people working on-site, making adjustments as construction progressed. A message to the OSBA: Don't take craftmanship out of building.
because you already posted this, asshole.
They are against prostitution.
Haha.. That's one of the funniest things I've read all day.
Thanks for the laugh.
Oh, that wasn't your point, was it?
If you think strawbale "simply burn" down, then you've not done too much research on it.
Typically, you stucco or adobe the walls, which make them quite fire-resistant.
1. The article mentions that the home building industry is 'conservative and clinging to tradition.' Well, there's a reason for that, first off, traditional building materials (wood, brick, stone, glass) are traditional because they seem to have a certain 'life' to them, whereas skyscrapers and cubicles tend to lack that life. Christopher Alexander, an architect and expert on 'seeing the life in material objects'has written books and has a website (http://www.patternlanguage.com.)
2. Also, the article says that this new technology will give more power to the architect to design house skins and 'engines.' BULLSH1T! An architect's job is already to design the thing. This article makes it seem like what people will actually do is order the house off of a website and it will be shipped to a location, cutting out the architect completely, replacing him/ her, in fact.
3. The whole premise of making 'customizable' homes has been around since, well, homes WERE BEING BUILT. The House-n is trying to standardize and upgrade the technology in the house. Great, no prob, easy wireless for me. But what house-n is forgetting is the importance of the house's eventual location. Half of a house's job is, afterall, to integrate well with its surroundings. whenever I look at a row of prefabbed suburban houses, I can tell that they were not built with the location in mind, they were designed to be easy to manufacture, and cheap, at the expense of looking unique, original, and full of life.
just my 300 Yen, err, $0.02
True. Exclusive image of the guy. He could only be identified by a three letter recursive acronym written to the walls of all houses he has lived.
There is also the issue of bank loans to pay for new homes - it's my understanding that many banks are generally quite unwilling to lend money for, say, a dome-home or other unusual construction because they are perceived as "unsellable."
The housing industry is one of the world's largest, and the people who run it like that homes cost so much, the money is going to them.
Normally competition would stop this but somehow it doesn't. It's too regionalized. It can cost $500K to build a house on a lot in silicon valley when you could get the whole house and land for $250K elsewhere. Makes no sense but it happens.
Part of the reason is corruption, a strong and nasty resistence to something that would end the gravy train.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
How many houses have you built exactly?
I'd be happy to even just see GnuLicensed blueprints for home designs...some nice web site repository. Hmm, maybe it exists? Anyways, the plans aren't the horribly expensive part. If only the local governments would except something other than cold cash...maybe PostcardWare or something?
Holy shit, you'd better watch out! The New Digital Media Entirely Outrageous Paradigm Police will be hot on your trail, now that you've uncovered their simple yet dastardly plan to cram more and more expensive, breakable, fault-intolerant electronic crap into previously reliable objects that really, really don't need it.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
--remember the drought this year and last year, and how huge humongous areas of the US west burnt down? I have no idea how many millions and millions of trees lost to fire. Too bad they couldn't have been sanely and selectably logged, turned into lumber for homes and furniture. Instead we got a zillion tons of particulate soot, CO2 and etc, plus, the lost homes and businesses-humans hopes and dreams-lost work and lastly the firefighters who lost their lives. Remember the firefighters-all young people, pretty new to firefighting, who burnt alive because the government wouldn't allow water to be taken from a stream because of some minnows, until it was too late?
Anyway, there's one source of housing going begging, all so that primarily well meaning and well intenioned but sorta naieve city people can "feel good" about the environment. "Feel good"-itis causes as much famine and lack of affordable housing as anything else. Both extremes are blatantly flawed here, massive rape styled clear cutting is wrong-and so is this opposite of severely restricting normal human activities in a rural setting. Farming, ranching, logging, mining-all are necessary human activites. They provide goods-food, building materials, the raw materials from which everything is made. You can't have it both ways, you can't have a world with "enough" for all unless it's "allowed" to do those things necessary to bring it about.
Houses built via interactive design stategies and mass-cutomization vs. single-purpose structures driven by one ideology.
*****
That's not a complete sentence, its a clause. Have we forgotten our grade two grammar, people?
Check out http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Habitat_67 .html
for some ideas of how integrated and modular construction can be at the same time.
I lived in Montreal at the time and it was a great idea that showed great promise. The structures even looked good (still do on Montreal's rejuvenated harbor) as well as being easy to build, cheap in volume and the interlocking of units where part of the roof of one unit is the patio of some unit on the level above creates a surprisingly livable architecture.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
japanese architecture, or many east asian forms of architecture, or many ethnic european forms of housing... good modular architecture is not obviously modular. this would be like saying, i want custom code. why is your problem so unique that it deserves a unique solution?
e xt.html) spent most of his career talking about the validity of non-professional architecture. his books, a pattern languge, have had far reaching effects on many professions including computer science.
we all want something unique, which winds up being unlivable. christopher alexander (http://www.math.utsa.edu/sphere/salingar/Chris.t
Somehow I think this is going to end up as one of those interesting topics that nobody will remember in a year or two, coz most people just don't care about PDAs and cellphone presenting "urban narratives" of their life.
And as far as "the problem of our epoch" I am sure we can all think of things of more concern than integrating our GPS with intelligent building components.
Frank Lloyd Wright tried this with his modular "Usonian" homes.
e ct s/wright/uson.html
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CLASS/am483_95/proj
Cool homes, but feature creep increased costs somewhat. But the modularity allowed reuse of design elements in many homes while still allowing customization.
Also, in many cases furniture was built in as well, reducing total ownership costs.
The law says we must have them, so we just install extra incandescent bulbs on another switch and never use the fluorescent lighting. Lights should not make noise.
The notion that there is "great housing for the people" is nonsense. Its just a way of ramming the worst modern ideals in architecture down socety's collective throat.
Over the years we (myself, wife, two kids, a cat, and a ginuea pig) have accumulated the usual amount of "stuff". Facing a move, we're getting rid of stuff we don't really need: donating old books to the library and either discarding or giving away junk (and yes, that includes a lot of computer/electronic related junk, on my part). But that got me thinking: "Why have all this stuff in the first place?"
Of course, as a geek, I've always wanted to serve music and movies from a central server to client machines around the house. Recently, I've been able to accomplish this, but the real motivating factor lately has not been the "neetness" coefficient in doing this, but the pleasure in not having to have "media" cabinets in entertainment areas, with increasing amounts of media (CDs, DVDs, and legacy audio and video cassettes, and vinyl albums) that threaten to overflow the capacity of the cabinet -- in my younger and perhaps more foolish days I had a solid-oak and granite cabinet designed, with a modern look, to accomodate 240 CDs, 90 cassettes, and my B&O Beosystem 5500. Looks great, even 15 years later, but what happens when I get CD #241? At least now, it makes sense to archive the actual media, possibly refreshing the content to more dense media over time, serve the content from hidden servers, who's capacity can grow with technology, and generally upset the ??AAs because of the unscrupulous applications of the means to do this.
Homes appear to be designed to accomodate "stuff", more or less depending on how much material wealth one has. My take on this is that they should be designed to reduce the need for "stuff", in the first place. To be sure, proper networking to accomodate information and entertainment data is part of this (heck, even my bills arrive electronically, and I get an end-of-year CD from PayMyBills, instead of ever-increasing file storage), and a large part, and a lot can be achieved with a "data" headend and appropriate wiring in even a modest home, but it's just the start.
Clothing, kitchen, and garage storage has got to be among the most inefficient use of space there is. Why do we need wardrobe cabinets and dressers? Why not simply provide enough closet space in bedrooms? Or "bench"-style storage, kind of like Captain's beds, but all around the room walls, modular, and the right height to put things on, much like a dresser. Wouldn't take more space than a dresser, and, most importantly, it would mean that you don't need to own a dresser for each bedroom. Modularity in such units (rather like kitchen cabinets) would be most welcome. If you want to go all out, eliminate the bed foundation: build it into the room, needing only a mattress and box spring, with sufficient modularity to accomodate single, double, queen, and king. Unless you really want your bedroom to be a second living room, with a certain "style", a bit of a "cookie cutter" look, if it saves on the need for furniture, would be great -- you sleep there, after all. Personalization can take the form of wall hangings (posters, paintings, photographs, LCD or plasma displays, etc). The place for style and traditional furnishings, IMHO, is in the more public areas of the home: living, dining, and family spaces. Personally, I'd be happier with smaller, more functional, bedrooms, with the reclaimed space added to the other areas of the home.
On to kitchens.
Cabinets... can't have enough kitchen cabinets. Why? Because there's no standardization when it comes to kitchen utensils and plastic storage containers. Take a cutlery drawer: one usually has a plastic insert that holds forks, knives, table spoons, teaspoons, forks (regular and desert). All the odd-sized "infant/todler" stuff, garlic presses, tea infusers, chopsticks, hand can/bottle openers, etc. get dumped into the "miscelaneous" part of such an organizer and invariably overflows into the reset of the drawer. What a mess. While the basics are taken organized, the rest piles up. There should be a "standard" kitchen set, designed to be stored in a modular insert for a standard kitched drawer that accomodates 95% of the most common kitchen items. Oh sure, you'll always have the rarely (or less-rarely if you like to cook) used implement, but there is something wrong when a kitchen drawer insert's largest part is for miscellaneous stuff, and it's too small.
Plastic storage containers. The round ones really waste space, and the square/rectangular ones don't fill cabinets to a decent packing density. Cabinets, fridges, and plastic leftover storage containers should come in standard sizes (the first two probably do, but that doesn't help the latter). I'm thinking like 19" racks with 1-3/4" spacing per "U" -- except, call them "K"s, for kitchen: you'd have 10, 12, 16, 18 "K" cabinets in various widths (multiples of, say 4-1/4") to accomodate 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. "K" storage containers in multiples of the same standard width. Drawer inserts would conform to this standard too, so you can have the extra cutlery for 8 stashed in a cabinet, perhaps.
Kitchen cabinet shelves: make them slide out, dammit! And fit in the dishwasher (being dishwasher safe, of course). This is probably most important for pantry shelves, which accumulate bread, cookie, sugar, salt, pet food, and other debris, but, as we all know, the pantry overflows to an extra cabinet (at least it does for cat food in our home). Naturally, they should be adjustable-height. Modern kitchen cabinets come close, but, while removable, and adjustable, they are not designed for this to be done on a regular basis. Oh, and while we're finishing up in the kitchen, standardise the sizes of canned goods to match the pantry/cabinets.
Laundry Rooms. Every house needs one. My first two had just had the washer and dryer in a corner or closed off section of the basement, and the last one (built recently) actually had a separate small room. The latter works well, but gimme storage space for all the cleaners to keep there (not just detergents). Two storey homes really need a laundry chute -- bring it back. And, oh, a dumbweiter to take the folded laundry back up. As long as we're on the subject, why haven't we solved the problem of the bursting washing machine hose, huh? Yes, one should always turn off the main taps when not in use and not keep constant pressure on the hose (or rather the washers, which are what tend to give when you are 3000 miles from home), but who remembers to do that? (Well, I do, but my wife doesn't. /me ducks). Why the @#$%^$# don't washing machines have standard control signals for fail-safe water solenoid-controlled valves instead?
Living/Dining/Family rooms: here's where the style of the home/occupant should show and really be the only place where "furniture", in the classic, non-modular sense, should be needed.
Garage/storage: why ultrasonic bumper ranging devices aren't standard, with large LED distance readouts, or at least red/yellow/green "traffic" lights, I dunno. I guess people really do manage to park their monster vans with 1" to spare front and back, without difficulty.
Interior walls: repeat after me: should be movable. Within the limits of structural integrity, most interior walls, separating sleeping areas from each other, and from other living areas, should be removable. Yeah, this is asking a lot, espescially if it is to look O.K. without any ugly attachment points on the walls/floor, ceiling. But it would be real nice to change a 2 master, 3 bedroom house, into a 1 master, 4 bedroom house, when the second kid comes along.
Of course, these are just my thoughts, off the top of my head (or, depending on your opinion, pulled out of my a**), but I definately think there is room for improvement and some degree of modularization/standardization in the house building industry.
You could've hired me.
hey, great idea - the soviets had that idea, too - now there's millions of awful buildings spread across the former soviet block....
The modern form of his vision for a sturdy, economical mass-manufactured structure is, IMO, the modified Quonset huts such as here. All the parts bolt together, and they nest, so that materials for an entire 30 x 50' structure, 14' high at sides an 18' at peak, can be shipped on a single 3' x 13' pallet, total weight 4,500lbs. But maybe you want to insulate? There is a system, but it looks ugly. Perhaps build a wood frame inside to hang sheet-rock. Oops, goodbye modular construction.
And any such modular building will need a foundation, most likely poured concrete and rebar. It will need plumbing for water, sewage, it will need electrical wiring, modular architecture doesn't help with this. Even an injection-molded bathroom as found in hotels and some apartments in Japan, still needs to be wired, plumbed on site, although certainly some labor savings. So I don't see what help the modular theorists can give.
We have been renovating an old wooden home for two years, and based on this experience, I would say that building with wood sucks because it is way labor intensive. Even though the strong point of wood is easy processing, you see in a wooden house you need a piece to trim around every seam at every window, every door, along floor. You need it to hide otherwise unsightly joints, and to seal out access to bugs and rodents--very important here in the tropics. That means hundreds of cuts, hundreds of pieces each unique, some with defects that need filled, each needing sanded and finished with least two coats-- definitely not what the modular ivory tower folks have in mind.
Wood has problems reflecting its natural origin such as warpage and knot holes. Plywood has thickness variations, can't just screw down a bunch of 3/4" sheets and expect to have a flat subfloor. You'll be bondo'ing and sanding quite a bit. Definitely not modular--except as convenient shipping of plywood in containers and transport by forklift--that part is 'modular'.
So frustrated with the high outright cost of wood, its expense in processing, quality problems, and environmental costs, we've decided our next home will be mostly concrete. Concrete requires rebar and forming. We hope to get around forming with wood by using expanded metal lath to define the surfaces. The lath would be wired to the rebar. We are consulting with a concrete expert who uses a lightweight concrete with air mixed in for some purposes. This material can be screwed or nailed.
Concrete is not exactly modular, but it can be preformed into many more interesting and functional shapes than the hollow-core block so widely used.
The poster who mentioned military barracks look for modular homes is right. You can't have a beautiful home that fits into the landscape without expending a lot of effort on the details.
Oh great, Yet another way to stand out as a geek.
Table-ized A.I.
compact flourescents are quiet. .. yes but quiet.
new flourescent fixtures are quiet. flicker
I was wondering why MS called opensource a virus.
Now I understand....
nbfn
The brick!
People are capable of building well designed housing that suits their needs as long as they are able to build using materials they can work by hand and modify themselves. Truly great buildings (Think Spanish villages hanging off cliffsides or the Colleges at Oxford) accrete over time from a series of small changes done to improve the building from the perspective of the individual.
Any system of modular components has to allow people to create and use those components easily. Brick's are OK but still require a fair degree of expert knowledge. Strawbale is very easy to source and very easy to work with. You can find hundreds of accounts of people building their own houses out of strawbale, same with mud brick, wattle and daub, and various kinds of earth construction.
People who live in a society where building your own house out of these base level modular components will naturally come to learn more and more about what constitutes a good dwelling. And most of these things aren't high-tech gizmos or communications systems. Things like placement of windows, ventalation, entrances and pathways.
This requires a new approach to how builders build houses and banks lend money of course - and while I'm wishing, I'd like a pony.
Fluorescent lights will never be in my house despite how energy efficient they are. I use halogen lights exclusively. I want my light to be white.
You could always buy a manufactured home. (The term "manufactured home" refers to homes that are designed using CAD, assembled in a factory, and then transported to the site. Oh, and they used to be called "mobile homes" before the term got associated with trailer park trash.) Manufactured homes *are* mass produced, and are relatively inexpensive--and, oddly enough, people only live in them if they cannot afford any better.
Honestly, a lot of prefabrication and labor reducing technologies are slowly making their way into the building industry. From prefabricated trusses to standardized door frames and prefabricated window frames, quite a bit nowadays is being assembled at a factory and shipped on site, rather than being built on site. Even "custom" cabinets are being built in a factory and installed on-site, rather than being built on site. Further, technology is making its way into the toolbelt of most builders to reduce the amount of time needed in construction: air compressor-powered nailers, for example, reduce significantly the time to frame a house.
That a bunch of eggheads want to somehow speed this up--and by changing how houses are designed, rather than how they are constructed for heaven's sake!--strikes me as a loser of a proposition.
I appear to have been wrong about the details of local building codes, but you do acknowledge that local authorties do manipulate things to protect the local building industry. Some of these things mean that we won't see certain sorts of potential economies of scale and large scale competition in house building.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
When I used to work for a startup back in 1988, I met the Apple Architectual Design "Evangelist" who, over lunch with a bunch of other people, told me how she invisioned Apple taking over the architectual design industry. Amonst other things, she told me of a future where, due to efficiencies in design and communication, house construction could begin while plans were in plan check at the building departments because the plans needed for construction could be sent over to the job site before the required documentation for plan check could be finalized. What a wonderful world this would be that we could speed up the construction of a house by the two or three weeks a house spends in plan check, by using Macintosh computers to speed up the process so that construction and plan check could happen in parallel!
I asked her what would happen if a set of plans failed plan check.
"Excuse me?"
What would happen if a set of plans failed plan check because a hallway was too narrow? Wouldn't the builders be up shit's creek if the cement foundation they just poured last week had to be jack-hammered up because the hallway nailers and forms were placed wrong, because the hallway was drawn too narrow?
She assured me that architects never made that kind of mistake. I told her that architects made that kind of mistake all the time; my mother (who was a drafter for an architect) had made that very mistake at the start of her career--the architect she worked for didn't catch the mistake either. That's why plans sit in plan check for two to three weeks!
Stupid woman. But it does explain why we see so few Macintosh computers in architectual drafting offices today...
The article reminded me of her because the article cites some similar rather stupid blunders which I would consider "overestimating the architects." My favorite quote:
n their paper "A New Epoch," Larson and two MIT colleagues suggest that mass customization finally allows architects to play a significant role in the design of houses for the mass market. Larson himself knows from experience that house commissions currently come only from "adventurously wealthy" clients. But with a Web-based design system, architects can become involved in the earlier stage of creating design "engines" from which modest-income customers could develop their own permutations. It has a faintly Modernist, and solidly idealistic, ring to it: architects would no longer be designing forms as the expression of technological function but algorithms that produce expressive skins, each offering a variation from the next.
First, let me state that as the child of parents in the building industry (and who made spare money running plans to the city of Fresno for plan check while in High School), I have known quite a few people in the building industry and in the housing industry. So I think I'm speaking from a little bit of experience here.
And let me state flatly that most of the architects I've met couldn't even pronounce the word "algorithm", much less be able to quantify their design skills into one.
Second, let me state that the statement "Larson himself knows from experience that house commissions currently come only from "adventurously wealthy" clients." is misleading. What is expensive in a custom home is not the custom architectual design, which in my neck of the woods runs around $2/sqft (which, for a custom 2500 square foot house would be about $5,000), but the construction costs and the profits made by the building contractor who builds your house. (Most of the guys out there who run building contracts won't even look at your set of plans unless they figure on a $20,000 profit, minimum) The expensive part is not the design, but the construction. And even if altering the design of the house could somehow make the construction costs significantly less, the builder will just attempt to pocket the price difference anyways.
Furthermore, the statement is misleading in that it suggests that architects are not involved in the design of tract housing. The truth is that what makes tract housing awful is that the architect who designs the tract housing generally has few incentives to design good tract homes. Generally a contract for tract housing goes like this: the developer knows he wants to knock off a few hundred homes, and so he approaches the architect and says "give me 8 house designs, around 1600 to 2000 square feet, and make them easy to build." And, like a soup that is prepared without someone tasting the concoction to make adjustments along the way, with most architects you get 8 rather soulless designs, because he's being paid regardless of the quality of the designs, so long as they meet the construction parameters that were set out.
Tract housing is cheap, by the way, not because the construction techniques are any different from custom homes, but because the developer, in building a lot of homes, has more incentives to "turn and churn"--that is, he has more incentive to cut corners, both in the quality of the construction materials, cost of cabinets, appliences, etc., and in reducing his margins, so he can sell the houses as quickly as possible. That's because most developers who build houses and then sell them (as most builders who build "spec houses"--that is, houses built on speculation that it will sell) generally take out a "construction loan", and have to pay the bank interest in that loan for every month the builder holds onto the house. And when the entire profit margin for a spec house can be eaten in interest if the house remains unsold for 15 months, and for a tract house in something like 7 to 8 months, that means the developer is better off selling the house the first month rather than the 5th--and that means keeping costs (including profit margins) down.
None of this has squat to do with architectual design, by the way.
Hopefully the musings of these MIT eggheads will go the way of that Apple Evangelist. Or, at the very least, they'll figure out how the building industry *really* works, so they can at least devote their energy into making things more efficient for the builders--such as, for example, figuring out a faster and cheaper way to build roofs than prefabricated truss systems...
Has someone already made that joke?
I had this idea that I called "podular" living. The idea is my house could be dismantled and re-assembled in new configurations as a family's needs changed. The modules would have "pod-like" ports that could be plugged together like Hamster-Habi-Trail tubes.
Ofcourse I was going to make the pods more stuble than Hamster tubes. The interfaces would be large rectangular sections on the sides of octagonal modules. Floor and ceiling ports for stacking would be octagonal and house spiral staircases.
A typical pod could be unsegmented, segmented in quarters, configured as classic living room/dining room/artic entry way with an optional balcony. Basically the starter pod would be an efficiency house/apartment in a geodisc. Additional geodiscs could be attached or a garage pod added. A basement pod could be buried... ect. The whole thing would be easily disconnected and mounted on earthquake resistant foundational pylons.
The "landing gear" supporting the pod would fit into coaster like ports on the foundational pylons to provide more earthquake resistance. The exterior frame would be steel girders and wood paneling since they hold up to earthquake stresses better. The walls would be curved and very thick for heating efficiency. Think tomato shape with window steeples around the top.
The pods would also be independantly heated so that when a pod was not in use you could seal it off and turn off the heat. Think blast doors. Squat sturdy construction would help them withstand hurricane force winds and storms. All metal versions could withstand wave forces and be constructed to be nearly water proof.
*LOL* guess where I'm from. All that thought about earthquake and weather resistance... heh.
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Yes, the MIT people are using a "modular house" for their laboratory of how people use homes, but I don't feel that they're proposing modular houses at all. The lab home they're using is modular so it'll be easier to manipulate conditions between (within?) a participant's stay...
...that sort of thing.
The ultimate goal being an open-sourced (yeah, right!) expert system that can generate a modular design: one of a few kitchen plans is shuffled around in relation to the other rooms based on how the "client" says he lives from day to day. That plan gets passed off to an uberhomebuilder, who can buy the components for the four different types of kitchens... and the three different master bedrooms, and the five different living rooms... all in bulk and use them on different houses.
This, instead of having eight high square-footage unalterable house designs that get spawned all over the same subdivision. I think it would be a great middle ground between picking a set-in-stone plan out of a limited catalog, and retaining an architect from start-to-finish. <cynical>I also think this'll be realized somewhere between useful voice recognition and true artificial intelligence.</cynical>
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
While driving to work the other day, thinking about those neat jet-engine driven cars that store energy in a flywheel, and how I haven't heard much about them since I read about them a few years ago, I wondered if open source development applied to designing something like this could do for automobile manufacturing what open software has done for computing.
Those cars sounded neat, and I think they might have built one prototype or something, but it was really expensive. The idea was that piston engines are very inefficient, and the jet engine would be a major improvement in fuel efficiency, but I wonder if trying to do something that different in the face of an entrenched industry is doomed for failure when using the traditional "I'm going to do it all" approach. That's when open source seemed like a good way to get new technology off the ground, by letting people that cared about the issues at stake do the design and build the various components of the product, demonstrating the alternative to the status quo.
Instead of users writing code, you'd have engineers designing the open source specs, and companies or individuals willing to manufacture a part or an assembly for the car, manufactured to the open specs, which would specify the interfaces between the various components, such as the engine to transmission coupling and flywheel to frame mount.
I'm sure at first it would be for serious hobbyists only, but after enough grass roots support was there, and you had people building the cars in your neighborhood and selling them, it could become a real alternative for eco-people. I mean, once your average environmentalist gear head's showing off his new jet/fly rod down at the health food store, the demand's going to be there.
My point is, does anyone know of any other viable and seriously needed applications of open source to manufacturing, particularly in the case of helping start up environmentally friendly alternative technologies like minimizing or replacing fossil fuel use, etc? I can imagine it happening, but only if there were one product that enough people would be passionate enough about to bring an alternative into existence.
Who in their right mind would want to live inside a giant PDA, riddled with gizmos? This "future" -- like so many others -- has built into it all the assumptions of the present. A more appealing vision of the future is something like this: Earth Ships -- energy-independent, passive-solar, captures and cleans its own water, and it's built out of old tires. That's our future, here in the industrialized west -- trying to figure out what the hell we're going to do with all this trash.
You can get a manufactued home shipped and installed on your concrete slab for ~ $40,000.
The good thing is that they are not mobile homes.
It's interesting, I remember seeing a TV show about homes being built by volunteers on a Native American reservation...
w .balewatch.com/
Using *straw bales* as the primary building component. The straw was (of course) stuccoed to provide strength.
A quick Google search returns the following:
http://www.strawhomes.com/
http://ww
These seem a bit higher-end than the homes built on the reservation, but an example of how straw (a very cheap building material) can be used as a building material. One of the big advantages of using straw is that it provides extreme levels of insulation, in addition to its low cost.
I also passed by a homebuilder's expo a year or so ago, and a number of vendors were advertising a construction technique for making building walls that involved erecting a styrofoam mold and then filling the mold with concrete. That would probably also be a pretty cheap approach, although it would be hard-pressed to compete with cinderblocks.
Straw-filled cinderblocks might work quite well...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Simple. Demand for land is high in such places, and as a result, land is extremely expensive.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
See subject, idiot.