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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."

9 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. there's a reason for safety regs by j1bb3rj4bb3r · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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*
  2. 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 10000000000000000000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:I like the idea of unplanned housing by Genda · · Score: 3, Informative

      The problem with most authoritarian mindsets is that they think that it's their job to force people to do what they want, when they want, as they want. When you get good at riding the horse in the direction it's already going you can cause all kinds of interesting results.

      The next step for Berkeley is to pave the footpaths with something that feels as good as grass, is more fun, and easier to keep up. Take old rubber tires and cut them into 1 cm. chunks. Mix that with a slury of earth and a white polymer, and you get a cool, soft, inexpensive material that is waterproof and resilient. It'll give as you walk on it, and feel good to the bare footed. It'll last years and can be chewed up and reused if, and when the paths change.

      By making the spaces conform to human use, and by making the space intelligent enough to conform as humans use the space, you eliminate space as the primary constraint to human creativity and imagination. This is the evolution of the conscious environment. This is the trend, creating places for human beings that honors our need for shelter, but removing the artificial limitations of social construct. We're genetically predisposed to tribalism. Our religion and societies have worked against that. It'll be interesting to see what happens when the forces that shape our interactions begin to yield to the fundamental designs of our own humanity. I for one welcome the change.

      Genda

      -- The best way to teach a generation to think outside the box, is to eliminate the boxes...

    3. Re:I like the idea of unplanned housing by Spunk · · Score: 3, Informative

      As a roadgeek, I must point out that's a myth.

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


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

  4. This is the key... by El+Gordo+Motoneta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To UGLY and BROKEN houses and buildings. There's a large percentage of
    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. ... Oh, and my family is about 60% architects.

  5. the way houses are built is insane. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    no offense but essentially every home is built onsite in a custom manner.

    Huge portions of home building could be done in large factories, and equally huge strides could be made standarizing the hookups to electricity, communications and plumbing.

    i'm not talking about crappy mobiles...i'm talking about the absurdity of custom electrical, plumbing and framing on hundreds of millions of homes.

    the endless permits etc...people complain about software but if software were as absurd as home building you would have to get several CDs from various licensed contractors, get a permit from the state to install a computer, have the computer inspected as it is installed and each CD of components is inserted, etc...

  6. 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.