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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."

4 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.

  3. 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...