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The Walking House
What is 10' tall, has six hydraulic legs, and is powered by the wind and solar panels? The prototype pod house built by art collective N55 in Copenhagen, Denmark. With the help of MIT, N55 built the pod over a two-year period at a cost of £30,000. Designers say it provides a solution to the problem of rising water levels as the house can simply walk away from floods. One of the designers says, "This house is not just for travellers but also for anyone interested in a more general way of nomadic living." It won't be long now until the Japanese make Howl's Moving Castle.
Its only about the same size as the back of a transit van. Hardly a house or worth the ridiculous price tag. Caravans etc beat this hands down in every way.
Modern art is pointless.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
... like it'd go well with a Darth Vader suit.
This alters the playing field of going home drunk considerably.
You can either have your house follow you.
Or your house could just not be there when you go home.
called "wheel". Very handy for moving things around. Check it out!
You've awakened the house, and it catches you and eats you.
That big piece from the Star Wars Lego set is not a house. Despite what you stuff inside of it. Form follows function. This would be a great tool for FEMA. But it's not a house. How about we stop building houses on the lowest parts of alluvial flood plains? There's a bright idea.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
So... the pic shown in the front summary story is actually relevant?
I don't like it. [shakes fist]
...them housey thingumies is up on the back field again."
"Boy, fetch my shotgun."
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Home goes you!
Instead, their project has cuboctahedral modules that join onto each other via round portholes that are at about 30 degrees off vertical. I don't know what it is about architects that gives them such contempt for the actual users of their buildings. Everyone else designs to co-operate with the eventual users. Architects design to be clever, where 'clever' means lots of big geometrical shapes that reflect sound and carry vibration and have nowhere to sit down. Metal-walled buildings are pretty grim anyway from a temperature/moisture control/vibration point of view, but making it cuboid, corrugating the surfaces a bit and avoiding welds (in favor of joins that provide some damping) would be a start.
I think the acid test for innovative housing ideas should be: do they have to resort to silly futuristic shapes, or is there a chance they have some actual ideas for creating nice places to live?
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Howl's Moving Castle (the book) was by London-born Diana Wynne Jones. The film based on the book was a Studio Ghibli production, with screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki.
-- Soruk
I work on 6th Degree of freedom (6 hydraulic legs) flight simulators and there's one thing that all the hydraulic ones have in common. After a few years they start pissing oil all over. No matter how well they are maintained, they always eventually leak. Part of it is the weight they're under, part of it is the seals start to wear.
I wonder how environmentally sound it would be to have a house that sags on one side and pisses hydraulic oil everywhere it goes. Not to mention that the owner would have to maintain the locomotion systems.
I'm the "MIT engineer" who worked on this and thought I'd mention a couple of things.
First, the Telegraph article is just silly reporting; the whole "runs away from floods" thing is pop media spin. For the original motivations for the project, read this: http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/WALKINGHOUSE/walkinghouse.html
Second, yeah, it's contemporary art, not a piece of raw engineering or product design. N55 works entirely non-commercially, so the "pricetag" is not very relevant; you won't be able to buy one of these from us, but hopefully we will document things well enough that you can build something similar yourself if you'd like. The tetrahedral legs are of a unique design (as far as I know) that we want to share and the control software/hardware will all be explained and made available online in coming weeks. Art can be nerdy, too.
Third, I know it's slow and small and funny shaped. That's part of the point: to get people questioning the status quo of how we live and what we've been given to live in during recent times. But don't be so dismissive of radically different ideas... I can assure you that hexagonal prisms and truncated octahedrons are far more comfortable shapes than your boring ol' cube any day.
There's also a video on Youtube of it doing it's thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvxIB83Y0PA