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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."

3 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.

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


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

  3. 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.