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."

Comments

I like the idea of unplanned housing

[Dancin_Santa]

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.