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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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
Movable walls never work. You'd have to move all your belongs, then move all the walls. Nobody would bother.
A lot of people think "hey, if I need more space I can just move this wall out" or something, but then of course you'd be making some OTHER room smaller. That's why movable walls in offices are hardly ever moved.
It's better to have a well-designed home (good designs for homes have been made for hundreds of years) or an office with a variety of existing spaces.
What you are really saying is that a modular house wouldn't work for you. Because you wouldn't bother to rearange it. All you have to do is watch a couple of interior design shows to see lots of poeple who would reconfigure their home on a semi regular basis.
I will argue the statement: "good designs for homes have been made for hundreds of years". House design and construction has changed radically in just the past 100 years with indoor plumbing, modern heating/cooling, insulation, and lighting. I will agree that in hot climats some of the time perfected design features beat many modern building practices. However how we live in, and use our homes has changed significantly. (Note that these observations are based on my North American biases.)
I take particular exception to the verbe "made." While good designs may exist I have yet to find any good houses actually being made. Any new house built in my area is typically poorly constructed, and based on ill concieved plans "designed" to include a list of marketing features that sound good on paper. Above all the houses are universally ugly, monotone, near identical behemouths. You will be hard pressed to convince me that your North American city is any better. I did a bit of travelling this fall and saw the same cookie cutter houses everywhere I went.
I fear that the only way I will ever see a well designed home is to pursue a degree in architechture and design said home myself. (Don't think for a moment that I haven't seriously considered the idea.)