Slashdot Mirror
Machine-Grown Housing
Eric Harris-Braun writes "Over at Wired, Bruce Sterling has a story about a new way of looking at architecture and building. In fact, computer sculpting of housing is already being done, and non-planned building as an architectural philosphy, is as old as we are, as you can read in The Hand Sculpted House."
This tactic allows him to avoid hidebound European safety regulations when he proposes, for instance, a steel footbridge whose design, sketched using industry-standard CAD software, has been radically distorted by a computer virus. Ask Europeans to cross a buggy footbridge and they'll balk, quail, and consult the 80,000 regulatory pages of the EU's acquis communautaire. Tell them it's art, and they'll flock to it in droves, sit on it, and drink Beaujolais nouveau.
And when it collapses under the weight of that flock...
wtf... this dude is nuts.
*yawn*
Another example of utilitarian design being not the best method would be the early Intersates in the US.
At first they were built as vast point-to-point straight lines miles and miles long.
This design led to very boring drives, and consequently people fell asleep at the wheel.
Modern highways the world over tend to have gradually sweeping or rising and descending layouts as a result of this.
To UGLY and BROKEN houses and buildings. There's a large percentage of
... Oh, and my family is about 60% architects.
architecture as a human activity that involves creativity and the ability to
solve new problems as they come up.
If you tell me you can help design a bridge or a road with the aid of software,
then i'll buy it, but designing homes (what architecture is about) is way beyond the cold structure design.
Where I live, there's some kind of rivalry (sp?) between architects and what
in my country is referred as a "civil engineer", which is an engineer specialized in structural design and buildings. Both are able to build a house,
but most of the times you can easily spot the difference between a house built
by an architect and a house built by an engineer: Houses built by engineers look "clunky", and while they may be built correctly from a structural point of view, they ocasionally suffer from design flaws such as having bedrooms too close to the kitchen (which means the odor of food being cooked invades other parts of the house). Put simply, the engineer knows about functionality. They
don't know about "aesthetic design". And this is something a computer will never be able to learn either.
There's this joke:
- What's an architect?
- An architect is someone that isn't man enough to be an engineer, but not gay anough to be an interior decorator.
I think the joke sums it up nicely.