Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
You've touched on what is one of the most important criticisms of modernist architecture, and could even be used against a lot of contemporary work. Buildings are too often not designed around the way people lived, but around abstract architectural ideas. Modernist architecture is sort of the poster child for this, where you get all these smooth continuous planes and very careful compositions that you see photographed empty, because as soon as you throw in some people or move some furniture around, it all ceases to work. Le Corbusier actually was very concerned about how people lived, but rather than just observing and reacting to them, he wanted to create a whole new way for people to organize their lives, and tried to invent architecture that would force certain patterns onto them. None of his ideas were really implemented at the scales that he proposed, so it's hard to say for sure that his ideas were all failures, but the sort of haphazard adoption of different things that he said has caused a lot of problems. And for better or for worse, his work has had an amazing amount of influence on architecture since his time.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
--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.
Its just a way of ramming the worst modern ideals in architecture down socety's collective throat.
:-)
We've already done, and are doing, that. We just haven't dicussed it much. Wolfe made some very vaild points but times/ideologies change. Perhaps it is time to seriously again look at what this "dogma" can produce.
modernist ideal in architecture.
Neither this view nor its anithesis should be holy ground here. We're talking about efficient, affordable, suitable housing. We're not talking about a critics "views" on what is "good architecture". I've seen mud huts that I would live in
Stoptional
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.
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...