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Machine-Grown Housing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the architecture-as-art dept.

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."

7 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. I like the idea of unplanned housing by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Essentially, you build as you need. So if you need a shelf in a certain spot, then you build it there. You can't know everything about how you will use all the space in your house, so the key is to wait until it becomes obvious that something will always be done in a certain way and build to that "spec".

    I believe that they did this in UC Berkeley. Instead of building sidewalks, they put some sod on the quad and let the students "create" the trails across the grass. Once the paths were established by thousands of students walking on the grass every day, the school built sidewalks on top of the paths and that is how the sidewalks on the quad at Berkeley were built. No one uses those sidewalks anymore, though, because the grass is so much nicer to walk on than concrete.

    So the key is to build as you need, but not to build to the point where you start to avoid the thing you were building it for in the first place.

    1. Re:I like the idea of unplanned housing by UniverseIsADoughnut · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Not a bad idea.

      I think students have been trying this as schools all over the country. They walk were it makes sense, and you can see the beaten paths were they go, thus were the sidewalk should be.

      Unfortunately the school i went to, Penn State, decided that if students make a path across an area, that the best solution is to put up a drooping chain fence, or to put some scrubs at the ends of were they walked. Instead of just getting rid of the paths no one uses and moving them to were they do. Unfortunately many sidewalk were designed purely for style and zero function. Making something look good is nice, and should be attempted, but making it look nice but functionally suck is no good.

      Oh, and if a PSU sidewalk person is reading this, asphalt is not a sidewalk material! Nor is concrete sidewalks made with forms that were put down by a drunken OPP guy.

  2. Robotic Termites? by RockDork · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Randomly constructed, on demand buildings. Sounds like the makings of a termite mound....

  3. Freeman Dyson's anecdote by StefanJ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Freeman Dyson gave a talk in Portland last year. He presented several case studies on how technology planning went right and wrong.

    One of the anecdotes was about a research team he was invited to join during the Carter administration. A multidiciplinary team of eggheads got together to come up with ways to make housing cheaper.

    They analyzed the factors that made housing expensive, and came up with a list of proposals to make homes cheaper. Factory building components, standardization . . . it all came together nicely.

    Before they delivered their findings, they decided to look them over . . . and realized that they'd reinvented the Mobile Home.

  4. Basically, it's a stereolithography machine. by jcr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I believe that I read about this something like two years ago. It amounts to a 3D printer, but it's using concrete instead of the liquid polymers that stereolith machines do.

    This has the potential to drastically cut construction costs, since you can basically eliminate the labor cost of framing the structure. You can even have the robot leave channels in the walls for plumbing, electrical conduit, etc.

    Once someone gets around to building an excavation robot to dig foundations and footings, building a house could become a two-man, three-day job (or less).

    I hope they get this tech on the market soon. A lot of people could use it yesterday.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  5. Not a good idea by dasunt · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From the article:

    He's exploiting ideas that make perfect sense in computer-driven fabrication but have never been applied to architecture. Imagine a building where the needs and desires of its inhabitants are hot-wired to the shapes of walls and floors, which can be extended and updated ad hoc, ad infinitum.

    I have an old book around here that talks about 1890s Japanese housing, and how certain walls would be removed or replaced in the homes according to need:

    What would be a parlour in the day would be divided into sleeping rooms at night.

    There is the obvious problem with this: In Western architecture, rooms tend to hold big, bulky objects called furniture. Western culture doesn't tend to sit on tatami mats and sleep on shikibutons.

    In our culture, changes to living space tend not to be frequent: We don't convert bedrooms to living rooms daily. When we do want to remodel our homes, we tend to hire builders and remodelers. I suspect that this will be significantly cheaper for quite awhile.

    It sounds like he's trying to be innovative for the sake of being innovative.

  6. how to get arround it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Move to Houston, or an incorporated area of Texas. Many fairly urban areas of Texas are unzoned, and Houston is the largest unzoned city in the world.