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Open Source Housing 230

Posted by timothy from the blueprints-are-software dept.
No_Weak_Heart writes "The latest issue of Metropolis magazine has an interesting look at the house of the future. The primary focus of the article is on MIT's House_n project and its offshoot - the Open Source Building Alliance. The article discusses potential benefits of adopting a modular, component-based, everyone's-invited approach to building. Houses built via interactive design stategies and mass-cutomization vs. single-purpose structures driven by one ideology."
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Open Source Housing

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  • Modular Housing? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PaybackCS ( 611691 )
    Didn't Japan try this a few years ago.. I never head that it had gone anywhere? Anyone have more info on this?
  • Read this and think of the Hobbit Holes project?

  • I dunno about this one (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pardasaniman ( 585320 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:15PM (#4797294) Journal
    There are hundreds of millions of people who can't even buy houses.

    We are very lucky to even be living where we are.

    Research should be going into cheaper builiding materials, and house effeciency.
    • I bet the architects and people who produce building materials stall these efforts :). Not to mention that any news involving gadgets and multi-million dollar contracts is much more fun when an improved building material...
    • True and I applaud your thankfullness, but a more efficient building process would probably drive down the cost of building houses and make them more accessible to everyone. If not reduced costs, at least people would get a home that that had a better met their needs.
    • People that can't afford to buy houses are already using this approach.
      modular, component-based, everyone's-invited approach to building
      There's a several of these communities in local washes and underpasses already.
    • Once a modular model is widely adopted, it will be much cheaper to crank out modular homes which can then be thrown up for anyone with minimal dollars. It would then be cheap to just have the pieces shipped to whatever 3rd world country a charity organization was funding and have the homes knocked together with much less labor cost than nailing everything together. Of course, to imagine what you would get for your dollar or rupie, check out old Soviet block architecture.

      I've been to countries like India, BTW, and this modular concept has to compete again things like corrugated metal roofing, stacked brick and cinderblock walls, and whatever other fabricated raw material can be dragged home. I'm not confident it can be made *that* cheap. However, if these countries were able to provide financing options to their citizens like what the US government gave returning GIs after WWII, they might be able to reach for something more. That would require those countries to have good finances to begin with and that's another story.
      • It's interesting, I remember seeing a TV show about homes being built by volunteers on a Native American reservation...

        Using *straw bales* as the primary building component. The straw was (of course) stuccoed to provide strength.

        A quick Google search returns the following:
        http://www.strawhomes.com/
        http://www .balewatch.com/

        These seem a bit higher-end than the homes built on the reservation, but an example of how straw (a very cheap building material) can be used as a building material. One of the big advantages of using straw is that it provides extreme levels of insulation, in addition to its low cost.

        I also passed by a homebuilder's expo a year or so ago, and a number of vendors were advertising a construction technique for making building walls that involved erecting a styrofoam mold and then filling the mold with concrete. That would probably also be a pretty cheap approach, although it would be hard-pressed to compete with cinderblocks.

        Straw-filled cinderblocks might work quite well...
    • --remember the drought this year and last year, and how huge humongous areas of the US west burnt down? I have no idea how many millions and millions of trees lost to fire. Too bad they couldn't have been sanely and selectably logged, turned into lumber for homes and furniture. Instead we got a zillion tons of particulate soot, CO2 and etc, plus, the lost homes and businesses-humans hopes and dreams-lost work and lastly the firefighters who lost their lives. Remember the firefighters-all young people, pretty new to firefighting, who burnt alive because the government wouldn't allow water to be taken from a stream because of some minnows, until it was too late?

      Anyway, there's one source of housing going begging, all so that primarily well meaning and well intenioned but sorta naieve city people can "feel good" about the environment. "Feel good"-itis causes as much famine and lack of affordable housing as anything else. Both extremes are blatantly flawed here, massive rape styled clear cutting is wrong-and so is this opposite of severely restricting normal human activities in a rural setting. Farming, ranching, logging, mining-all are necessary human activites. They provide goods-food, building materials, the raw materials from which everything is made. You can't have it both ways, you can't have a world with "enough" for all unless it's "allowed" to do those things necessary to bring it about.
    • Seconded. A group from my church will be traveling about 550 to a town in Mexico (I'm in Texas) to build beds for an orphanage where the children are currently sleeping on the ground. I'm sure Slashdot's Eastern European posters can put this in even greater perspective. Kind of makes you rethink your whole "My life is hell because I can't get digital cable" philosophy, and makes you want to pick up a hammer.

  • As Microsoft would say... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Lord_Slepnir ( 585350 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:15PM (#4797297) Journal
    If we use open source housing, soon all the burgulars will know the vulnerabilities of your house and be able to break in easier. Only by keeping housing plans secret can we keep them secure
    • But, if all your Windows were made the exact same way, a thief knows the easiest way in. The same hammer/hack works.

      If I design my "open source" house with, say, bullet-proof glass, the thief doesn't know this, because it's different and he can't see it, and therefore has a harder time breaking in......

  • True Open Source Housing... (Score:4, Funny)

    by jki ( 624756 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:16PM (#4797303) Homepage
    everyone's-invited approach to building.

    I just read the local newspaper about a guy who breaks into peoples house when they are away - lives there for a couple of days (watching videos, sleeping in your bed, using your toiler and shower) without stealing anything concrete. Then, when done - he moves to next house. He has done this to dozens of times already, and has not been caught....now that's true open open source housing .)

  • Sounds cool and all... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by intermodal ( 534361 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:17PM (#4797310) Homepage Journal
    but if you go to work in a modular cubicle do you really want to go home to a modular house? say what you will about functionality, but there's a certain amount of art to architecture that unless they make giant legos (which is a bad ass idea in itself) cannot really be translated into modular components very well.

    That said, it sounds good to me...I'd love a house that I could network without cutting drywall. But regardless, I think a giant house made of lego would be awesome.
    • next they are going to start 'minitaurizing' homess... Moore's law... if you can fit twice as many people in half the space? why the f*ck not?

    • Modular housing (Score:4, Interesting)

      by swb ( 14022 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:40PM (#4797480)
      I think modular housing would be really cool, especially if I could move the walls and windows.

      I thought you might be able to come close in a loft-type space with "walls" that were similar to cubicle walls, but mounted on hidden casters. The walls would be of a couple of varying widths (1/3, 2/3, full width), heights (1/2, full) and a doorway module (1/3 to 2/3 width, accomodate varying door styles -- normal, double, swinging, etc). There's a whole laundry list of specialty modules -- closets, etc.

      Power would be a problem as your floorplans would have to accomodate whatever your physical space's power plan was, but would be eased by having the walls pre-wired for power and daisy chainable, as well as having maybe a good grid of floor jacks.

      Plumbing and gas are the big obstacles, since any real modularity would require you to move as needed the kitchen and bathrooms. The kitchen is half easy -- go with electric appliances and come up with some modular cabinets that can be removed/inserted into some caster-mounted work surfaces following the 1/3, 2/3, full width wall rules. Water supply and sewage/drainage are the real challenges, with the only "solution" to movability being supply water coming from overhead. Sewer and drain water *might* be something you could pump out overhead as well.

      You could go "down" if you wanted, but in a loft space you generally can't dig into the floor. A false floor would solve this (3ft raised ala data centers).

      With a big enough space you could really do some interesting floor plans and traffic flows. There's little reason a house couldn't be done the same way, and having control of the entire building might even solve some of the plumbing challenges by allowing you to go "down" more easily, by putting preset sewage and water lines in the floor for the modules that need them.

      It's not "real" architecture, but it would be really cool space planning. "Re-arrange the furniture? I'm gonna re-arrange the *house*!" Having just spent 40 some hours re-arranging my home office, though, I wonder how often I'd really feel like moving around the entire contents of my house. Maybe if everything was on casters and one level...
    • japanese architecture, or many east asian forms of architecture, or many ethnic european forms of housing... good modular architecture is not obviously modular. this would be like saying, i want custom code. why is your problem so unique that it deserves a unique solution?

      we all want something unique, which winds up being unlivable. christopher alexander (http://www.math.utsa.edu/sphere/salingar/Chris.te xt.html) spent most of his career talking about the validity of non-professional architecture. his books, a pattern languge, have had far reaching effects on many professions including computer science.

  • Tables that talk? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:19PM (#4797318) Journal
    How many times are they going to try to make our appliances interactive before they realize that it's just not something most people want. I want my kitchen table to be - just a kitchen table. If I need a personal reminder to take my "medication" (no jokes please, allergy pills only), then really an organizer wall-fixture would be much more appealing.

    Granted, a living room table with an LCD or something would be cool, but please... the last thing I need while I'm trying to enjoy dinner is to have a bunch of flashing messages and (likely the next bright idea) advertisements floating under my coffee cup.

    Oh, and strike the talking chairs too, most people wouldn't care to hear "cripes man, go hit the thigh-master, yer crushing me!" when sitting down.
    • Holy shit, you'd better watch out! The New Digital Media Entirely Outrageous Paradigm Police will be hot on your trail, now that you've uncovered their simple yet dastardly plan to cram more and more expensive, breakable, fault-intolerant electronic crap into previously reliable objects that really, really don't need it.

      --grendel drago
    • I think the point is that by using open standards, we can make everything work together. You're right, it would be easier to have an organizer wall fixture than a talking table, but why are we choosing one or the other? If you need those medication reminders, why not have your organizer communicate with your table (or more likely, your stereo system)? Or when you wake up in the morning, how about having your shades raise 15 minutes before wakeup, to ease the transition a little?


      I'm not saying all of these are necessarily good ideas, but once we build the capabilities, there will be bright people who will come up with good uses. The palmtop seemed like a doomed idea (see Newton) until Palm finally built a device that people found useful. I imagine the "wired home" will be much the same way, just a geek toy until some bright, enterprising soul makes it work.

  • Another Great Idea... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by zanerock ( 218113 ) <(zane) (at) (zanecorp.com)> on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:19PM (#4797320) Homepage
    Another great idea that will be decades in coming, if ever. Like open source software, something like this would be anathema to the housing industry. Like open source software, there will only be commercial support *after* it's already taken off. Unlike software, however, building a house requires significant capital investment.

    I would love to see this model applied to housing (and many other things), but the economics make the realization highly infeasable without dedicated, zealous support and significant monetary investment.
    • Unlike software, however, building a house requires significant capital investment.

      I and a good portion of the tech industry would argue that software too often requires significant outlays of cash and not all of your code can be sent out into the wild in the hopes that someone will champion your cause and help you out with some coding. Hiring a good programmer runs me anywhere from $60-$150k/year and benefits are going to add another 20% on top of that. Now, tell me how I can not hire a programmer or two and keep the $120-300k all to myself so I can purchase that Porsche [porsche.com] I have been eyeing? Also, let's not forget the infrastructure costs (and SGI or a Mac per seat and cubicle space), documentation costs with a technical writer, distribution costs etc...etc...etc...

      • In the stereotypical case, this is true, but you *can* develop software with minimal investment (pick up a used eMachine for sub-100 say). Indeed, if you're really cash strapped, you don't even need a computer to develop software. I can remember debugging and coding by hand when the power went out...

        Most open source software did not start out by being funded by a company, it was done in someone's spare time, and at little or no cost (other than time) to the initial creators. The same is not true of a house.
    • Actually this sort of thing has been tried in the housing industry for some time... The 'significant capital investment' actually has come in the past decade from .com boomers, and has led to a influx of 'design/build' companies. Basically construction companies with architects and interior decorators on staff who draw up house designs and build everything while working with the customer to make the house *they* want.

      This only used to be done with/for the super-rich, but is now being done more and more because people are richer, and want alot of choice in their homes. In certain areas and cases it's cheaper because of less overhead and scheduling issues.
      • I don't think we're talking about the same thing at all. A custom house is not an open source house. In open source, I get to use another's designs and plans for free. The further implication, as I understand by "modular," is that I can mix and match vendors with very little need to coordinate between various fabricators because of certain standards (housing protocols, I suppose). So, I can by a bathroom unit from builder X, have my living room built as a variation of plan Y that I downloaded from the Internet, and have my kitchen trucked in in from fabricator Z.

        The fact that semi-custome housing has become more affordable is great, but is only vaguely related to the idea of an open source plans and widely adopted standards.

        The MIT site itself, as oppossed to the post, seems mostly focused on well designed, people centered (as oppossed to materials, builder centered) houses. Again, though, a custom designed house is a separate issue from a *well* designed house. You can have a well designed factory built home, a crappy custom home, or a well designed custom home. It's an orthogonal question.

        Indeed, most "custom" houses (for the upper middle class) that I've seen are really just mix n' match builder houses that draw on their proprietary plans and storehouse of plans, but they are neither open source, nor necessarily good design.

        Still, the increased flexibility of the builders and designers creates a more receptive atmosphere for the House_n and open source housing than if it wasn't there, but it is far from sufficient for what I, personally, would like to see.

  • What's next? (Score:4, Funny)

    by eyeball ( 17206 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:19PM (#4797323) Journal
    What's next? Open-sourced surgery? Open-sourced legal representation? Open-sourced sex!?!

  • Design your own house, eh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by kingkade ( 584184 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:21PM (#4797332)
    I've seen some ghastly web pages created by 8-year old AOLers and housewives who sell knit mittens from their home in Montana. Can't imagine when we have some real winners designing their own house :)

    Seriously, though. Seems like technology combined with the homes systems is not only a great idea around for a while but will be more unavoidable.

    I;ve always thought that having one fiber optic line with phone, broadcast tv, inet access all accessible through on line. An having a central master computer controlling everything from programming tv shows (tivo-like) to the security system to controlling lights, heating for optimum energy savings (even depending on inhabitants current position in home and habits, by maybe even using integrated systems like the motion detection from the security system).

    Combined with solar/alternative fuels and increasing affordability of technology, it seems promising.

    Computer! Beer me!

  • Open Funding, maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Computer! ( 412422 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:23PM (#4797351) Homepage Journal
    According to this [mit.edu], the only way to contribute is to either take classes at MIT or a related school, or give money. As a footnote, there's an "everyone else" category, but it doesn't look all that interactive.

    I was getting all set to rant about how Open Source doesn't apply to housebuilding, until I realized that Open Source doesn't apply to this article, either.

    • Once I went looking for open sourced or free plans and blueprints for housing on the internet. Nothing at all, except for some plans for straw-bale houses from a project in New Mexico.

      Does anybody have a source for free plans?

  • A Buck Rogers double-wide? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by blincoln ( 592401 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:24PM (#4797361) Homepage Journal
    I'm having trouble seeing the difference between what this article is describing and a mobile/"manufactured" home, other than the technological aspect.

    I can see this kind of mass-produced housing being useful for apartments (like Bruce Willis had in The Fifth Element), where the goal is basically to cram as much functionality into as little space as possible. There was a prototype apartment building in Japan, for example, that was basically a framework that all of the living pods bolted to. The idea was that you could take your module with you when you moved to another city, but it would also be handy to be able to replace individual units in case of a fire or whatever.

    I really don't see this happening for individual homes, though, other than in the existing market for trailers and other "manufactured" living. If I'm going to plonk down a sizeable amount of money for the land to live on, I want a one-off house. One that I can customize by knocking down/building walls, and so forth. When I read this article I think of a family where I grew up who had a big old trailer of a home, which had moveable plastic walls. I'm hardly Dr. Debonaire, Professor of Style, but that's just way too tacky for me.

    I *can*, however, see standardized electronic modules that are added to new and existing homes in the same manner as appliances, hidden in ceilings and crawlspaces, or built into walls like an ATM. The difference to me is analogous to androids vs. cyborgs. One is a simulation, and the other is an augmentation.

  • Start with the easy stuff first (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:26PM (#4797374) Homepage Journal
    Do we all have compact fluorescent lights in our houses? Or some other type of energy efficient lighting?

    Do we have proper insulation in the walls? It's surprising that many houses do not.

    How about a fuel cell electricity generator that runs off natural gas?

    Or maybe even something as simple as kitchen cabinets that are big enough, and not made from particle board?

    Cat 5 in the walls?

    Front door security camera, with a truly secure way to access it from the Internet?

    Stereo sound in every room?

    A bathroom fan that actually will clear the stink out of the room?

    I don't want the house of the future: I just want what's possible with the technology of TODAY.
    • Insightful. Good call. If you think about it, though, there were no bathroom fans at all in the 40s. Maybe in 2134 there'll be ones that work.

    • How about a fuel cell electricity generator that runs off natural gas?


      Last time I checked, these cost over $10,000, and the electricity the generate costs 10 times as much as available over the grid. So why would I want one?

      • 50 inch flat televisions also cost over $10,000 for even the cheapest one.

        What? You can find one cheaper than that? Oh hey! My catalog that I'm looking at is 2 years old! What do you know!

        Mass production makes things cheaper.
        • Mass production of electronics makes them cheaper. Last I heard, the major expense in a fuel cell generator was the platinum catalyst, and mass production isn't going to make platinum any cheaper. In fact, quite the opposite: the more fuel cell generators are made, the more expensive platinum will become.
    • Do we all have compact fluorescent lights in our houses? Or some other type of energy efficient lighting? -check-

      Do we have proper insulation in the walls? It's surprising that many houses do not. -check-

      How about a fuel cell electricity generator that runs off natural gas? -um... what?-

      Or maybe even something as simple as kitchen cabinets that are big enough, and not made from particle board? -check-

      Cat 5 in the walls? -check-

      Front door security camera, with a truly secure way to access it from the Internet? -check-

      Stereo sound in every room? -whatever-

      A bathroom fan that actually will clear the stink out of the room? -my shit doesn't stink-

      I don't want the house of the future: I just want what's possible with the technology of TODAY.

      -Build it. It's not hard. Home Depot + $8k on the 'ole Amex, and I managed to make my 70 year old condo livable while inflating its value $60k.-
      • How about a fuel cell electricity generator that runs off natural gas? -um... what?-

        To answer your question: fuel cells that use natural gas to produce electricity are much more efficient than a power plant burning natural gas to boil water to drive a turbine to generate electricity to send over miles of wire with some resistance.

        Generating the electricity locally with a fuel cell is more efficient and makes sense.
    • This makes it pretty obvious why such homes will be hard to design/promote. Many of my values (living space wise) seem to be at odds with yours (not that they are "right", but they are "right for me"). For example:

      Or maybe even something as simple as kitchen cabinets that are big enough, and not made from particle board?

      If you can afford it you need never see another piece of particle board in your life.

      Cat 5 in the walls?

      Wireless all the way... :-)

      Stereo sound in every room?

      Nope. I have a stereo in the living room. When I want to listen to music I sit on the couch and enjoy myself.

      A bathroom fan that actually will clear the stink out of the room?

      I don't have fans... I prefer windows.

      On some of the others I agree with you, and on some I could care less about. But it's interesting to see what different people rank as priorities in their house.

    • The law says we must have them, so we just install extra incandescent bulbs on another switch and never use the fluorescent lighting. Lights should not make noise.
  • Oh, I can just see it. Housing wants to be FREE! When you think about it, free housing is just as sensible idea as free software.
    • Oh, I can just see it. Housing wants to be FREE! When you think about it, free housing is just as sensible idea as free software.

      Let's see...When I buy or build a house, I don't want some "vendor" to insist on a restrictive license telling me what I can and can't do with my house. And I'd like to be able to help my friends build similar houses, if they want them.

      Yes, this kind of "free" housing sounds very much like "free" software, and I'm all for it.

      • Let's see...When I buy or build a house, I don't want some "vendor" to insist on a restrictive license telling me what I can and can't do with my house. And I'd like to be able to help my friends build similar houses, if they want them.

        Don't find a home anywhere in America... state and local governments tend to have very restrictive laws about what you can and can't do with your house, and also laws about helping people build thier own houses, unless you've paid your registration and union dues...
        • Don't find a home anywhere in America... state and local governments tend to have very restrictive laws about what you can and can't do with your house, and also laws about helping people build thier own houses, unless you've paid your registration and union dues...

          Sure, and there are laws about what I can and can't do with my software -- copyright laws, for example. But this isn't the same thing as hiring a carpenter to work on a house, and have him place restrictions on what I can do with the house long after he's gotten his money and gone home.

          And believe it or not, there are places in the U.S. where a bunch of people can build a house without union interference.

  • prefabbed housing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cowscows ( 103644 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:30PM (#4797406) Journal
    We've already got prefabbed housing. That's pretty much what suburbia is. I guess people in general seem to like it, since it's continuing to grow at insane rates, despite its numerous problems.

    The common suburban development consists of a few basic floor plans and personal customization involving the selection of a few of the details from a list in a catalog. What this article is suggesting seems to me to be an attempt to use technology to make more things customizable, but it isn't going to solve a lot of the big problems.

    Architects tend to not like suburban development. The very idea of taking a prefabbed structure and replicating it in multiple places goes against one of the cornerstones of good architecture, which is responsiveness to the environment. Simple things like building orientation can have huge effects on the design. The thought of even spinning a building around on its site would be attrocioius to an architect concerned with energy efficiency, or sustainable design. I'm not sure what sort of technologies they were implying when they said they could manage different climates with one design. It seems like the wrong kind of problem to throw technology at. Good design would be a much cheaper and better solution to a lot of these problems. There are generations upon generations of buildings which had to deal with these problems before things like electricity. Technology caused us to forget the lessons learned there. Piling on more technology might not be the best answer.

    I don't think many architects dream of some sort of perfect pre-fabbed house design that will solve all of our problems. I don't think they'd really want it anyways. It's hard enough making money in the profession as it is.

  • You know, I'd rather live in the Cathedral than the Bazaar when it comes down to it.

    Might be cool, but I wouldn't want to bring my kids up in a place like this: Kowloon's Walled City [flex.co.jp].

  • If you want an idea of how this concept could come together in the future, read "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling. It's only an underlying part of the environment that the book happens in, but there's some really cool stuff about distributed building construction.

    Basically the way it works in the book is that each component of the building is labeled with little electronic tags. A computer system knows how each part needs to fit and so it instructs each person on what piece to put where. It's designed such that somebody with no construction skills can build most of a building without expert assistance.
  • If I can put together a useable, attractive home using "standard components" via a webiste (i.e., Dell) that look like a classic basic craftsman era home [bigelow-springs.net], I'm all for it. But given how ugly new homes are, I have doubt MIT will come up with anything that is worthwhile.

    It may be possible, because their are design patterns/proportions that they understood in the past (and some understand now) when building a home. But the idea that you can just tack on a kitchen willy nilly has resulted in the mass of ugly, community-destroying garage-scapes we have today.

  • One argument fueling the project is that a smart home equipped with sensing networks could help avert the crisis looming over America's overworked health-care system.

    the heart of House-n is a chassis with an "infill" of cheap sensing devices like LEDs, speakers, displays, automatic lighting, heat sensors, and miniature cameras that can be plugged in at any point and upgraded on the fly.

    You place a videoconference call that follows you up the stairs (projected on the walls) and then decide to exercise: a table retracts, a wall panel moves, and a life-size image of your favorite aerobics instructor appears.

    ... All integrated with the Total Information Awareness system for the utmost in security.

  • Not new (Score:1, Troll)

    by r_j_prahad ( 309298 )
    We have a large community of open-source housing here. Every few months though, the neighbors start to complain, and then the city makes them pack up the tents and fold up the cardboard boxes and move underneath a different bridge to stay out of the rain. No big deal, we got lots of bridges to keep moving them to.

    Shantytown's much smaller now than it used to be, I think maybe they're all wintering in Arizona? In their time-share vacation boxes....
  • America works less, when you say "Union Yes!"

    Did anyone else notice the irony in this quote from the bottom of the page and a story about new construction?

  • The pattern language book (Score:4, Insightful)

    by astrashe ( 7452 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:41PM (#4797486) Journal
    There's a pretty interesting architecture book called "The Timeless Way of Building" by a guy named Christopher Alexander. I read it because it's the book that introduced the idea of a pattern language, which inspired the talk of patterns in software design.

    One of the ideas of the book was that these modular buildings, where everything is the same, don't "live" in the way that many older buildings do. His argument is fairly complicated, and I'm not sure I've mastered it well enough to summarize it here, but it has a lot to do with the way things get put together, the process of building, and how it fits in with the community, the site, the culture, and the way human beings work.

    The "house n" page linked in the story has a quote from Le Corbusier, and Alexander makes a pretty good critique of his work, I think. It's kind of sterile.

    The basic point is that if you're approaching housing from a starting point of modular components, instead of from ideas about how buildings and open spaces affect how people live, if you go for modular housing because it can be mass produced, you're going to end up with a pretty soulless neighborhood.

    The best way to understand this, for me at least, is to think about the places you've been that struck you as being particularly nice, and to think about how those buildings and neighborhoods got put together.

    It's not necessarily a money thing -- I was in Duluth, of all places, a while ago, and the houses in the hills overlooking lake superior were all incredible. It was just a nice place to be. The houses weren't lavish or excessively luxurious, they just fit into the hill and into the neighborhood.

    I don't see how places like that could come into existence with these proposed methods.

    • You've touched on what is one of the most important criticisms of modernist architecture, and could even be used against a lot of contemporary work. Buildings are too often not designed around the way people lived, but around abstract architectural ideas. Modernist architecture is sort of the poster child for this, where you get all these smooth continuous planes and very careful compositions that you see photographed empty, because as soon as you throw in some people or move some furniture around, it all ceases to work. Le Corbusier actually was very concerned about how people lived, but rather than just observing and reacting to them, he wanted to create a whole new way for people to organize their lives, and tried to invent architecture that would force certain patterns onto them. None of his ideas were really implemented at the scales that he proposed, so it's hard to say for sure that his ideas were all failures, but the sort of haphazard adoption of different things that he said has caused a lot of problems. And for better or for worse, his work has had an amazing amount of influence on architecture since his time.
    • Military Housing. Depressing, run down cookie cutter houses. Yeah, no.
    • Alexander is a great writer. There is no question about this in my mind, and in fact I am looking forward to his new book which should be out in a few months.

      His general idea is that the house should have some of YOU in it, it should reflect the personality of its owner. Not its designer, but the poor sap who has to live in the thing.

      He has a lot of ideas that don't seem practical today. For instance, he says that we should have small, independent businesses instead of huge, big-box style stores. There's no question that he has a point; you'll have a much warmer and more personal world that way. At the same time, you won't be able to choose between 12 different brands of PCMCIA Ethernet cards; you might even have to order one instead of grabbing it off the shelf at Fry's. It seems to me that the US has unquestionably gone down on the side of the Fry's and the Wal-Mart, because people may protest them, but they'll wind up being customers anyway.

      There's no question in my mind that the world has turned colder and more sterile than it used to be, and yet the warmer world of yesteryear had its own problems. I think his books are valuable as ideas for shaping a different type of future. The main problem is that they imply a confusing mix of freedom to design as you wish, and centralized control to make sure you don't design something that's out of scale, such as a business with more than 10 employees. Since large enterprises seem to be essential for our society, it seems that his views are backward-looking wistful thinking.

      But they have inspired some other interesting books, such as 'The Not So Big House' series. I think Alexander has been very influential in the micro way (individual houses), but certainly he has not had the opportunity to reshape society in his image.

      Whether that's a relief or a real shame I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

      D

  • This is already a reality in many large cities. The technology is known as 'refrigerator boxes and duct tape'.

  • "Hey, how do I use the stove?"

    "RTFM, fscking noob!"

    BOOM!

  • Aren't Off-The-Plan "Villages" enough? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by TooTrueTroubs ( 630665 ) on Monday December 02, 2002 @07:48PM (#4797537)

    Don't we have enough sameness with those everything-looks-the-same villages, where entire suburbs are built to one of a small number of very similar plans?

    I value the uniqueness of my home, I enjoy the quirky nature of it's surroundings and in knowing that my apartment is very different from those around me. These are things which can't just be achieve by lighting and furniture - it's architecture.

    We're living in a pre-fab world where everything from music to cars are all starting to look and sound the same - do we want to do this to our dwellings? I value difference and individuality, thanks very much!

  • In the US every locality has a series of local building codes. These are often (deliberately) incompatable with other locality's codes. The purpose is to protect the local building industry from statewide or even national competition.

    Until that nut is cracked, the rest of this stuff is just a pipe dream.

    • Bullshit. Non-standardized building codes are a pain in the ass, but they don't limit trade from one area to another, unless it's contractors from Stupidville trying to work somewhere else.

      I work in Chicago, where modern buildng codes were invented after the big fire. The idiosyncratic code here protects two things: First, it protects the jobs of the building permit reviewers and site inspectors. Second, there are elements of the code that make work for contractors/tradespeople. (e.g. PVC pipe is limited making more work for plumbers, and low-voltage cabling (telephone, CAT5) must be in conduit in commercial construction making for more work for electricians.)

      There may be some freaky hick town codes out there, but for the most part, competent contractors know about the differences between different towns' interpretations and 'tweaks'. It's a bit like dealing with a variety of Linux distros.

      That said, Chicago claims to be moving towards the "International Building Code" The IBC isn't international at all (I don't know if it has any metric equivalents?), but is the current update to the US-centric BOCA model code.

      While we're on the topic of codes, the BOCA model sucks. It's free to adopt as a town, but you have to pay to get a copy of the actual code. There was a /. article a while ago (can't find it) about a guy who dealt with this by putting the code on the web, arguing that it's now a law and can't be copyrighted. It's tough to fight the building inspector when you have to spend us$200 to get a copy of the code that he's referencing. But inspectors like being questioned as much as cops do.

    • Um, two points.

      First, most building codes are derived from a set of standard building codes, the Uniform Building Codes (or UBCs, for short), and so really do not vary much from location to location. The only differences between different codes in different regions have to do with local neighborhood variations: setbacks from the property line, maximum hight restrictions, lot coverage, and the like.

      Second, most building codes specify acceptable construction minimums, such as the minimum acceptable load-bearing beams to use to support a floor, and the like. It's impossible to create "incompatable" codes for things like load-bearing beams--one locality isn't going to rule out a 4x12 when it calls for a minimum 4x8, for example; at worse, the other locality may want you to use a 4x12 over the 4x8. But you will never fail plan check because you used too large a supporting member, too much insulation, or created an overly energy-efficient building.

      So while there are a number of things local municipalities do to protect the local building industry (such as a lack of standards for submitting plans to plan check, or the requirement that plans be locally submitted--which require that at least one guy be local to where the house is being built), screwing with the UBCs is not one of them.
  • Open-sourced software...
    Open-sourced Housing...

    What's next?:

    Open-sourced Government?...

    Well the russians used to have something a little like that, going back a bit, in the past and all, and we liked to call them communists. In fact we liked to call them "pinko bastards" but that's neither here nor there.

    Simply put a yen for open-sourcing is a yen for communism. Pinko bastards!

    (If you can't spot a joke.. then... well.. reply, it'll be funny to watch :)
    • What's next?:

      Open-sourced Government?...

      Yes. The closest you'll get to this is modern-day Slovenia [sigov.si], but many EU countries are on their way.
      Well the russians used to have something a little like that
      The Russians NEVER had anything like an Open-Sourced Government. Their "communism" was nothing of the sort and was fucked from the get-go.

  • Accurracy, Confusion, and Quality (Score:4, Interesting)

    by maggard ( 5579 ) <michael@michaelmaggard.com> on Monday December 02, 2002 @08:00PM (#4797622) Homepage Journal
    First off collaborative work does not make it "Open Source" however good a headline that makes (/. down on pageviews again?)

    Second the article confuses two separate issues - construction and fittings. Construction is probably the harder of the two as the trades are resistant to change as are also insurers, building codes, and other consumers. There are literally hundreds of proposals and dozens of demonstration buildings out there showing off some "revolutionary" construction technique or another out there. Few have any success as individuals and society are (not suprisingly) just plain conservative when it comes to these things.

    The flip side is the fittings. MS is on their umpteenth iteration of their "Smart Home", the electronic message-board 'fridge is a cliche, "wiring" one's home means something different to everybody and and all are likely to become obsolete in a decade anyway. Frankly the smartest investment is running conduit with room for more cables wherever possible and realizing one won't see much back on it in resale value. Most of the future services are only of interest to the tech-obsessed anyway or require complicated/expensive retrofit kluges to already pretty good systems.

    Lastly the article is just plain crappy. Aside from being badly written it is poorly researched. For example their home listings is grossly incomplete and even then wrong (Disney's Monsanto home was not torn down in '67, it lasted much longer then that.) A term paper from any architecture student would be better then what's been passed of there.

  • "If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization" - Gerald Weinberg

  • Fuck Modular (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Wyatt Earp ( 1029 )
    Yep, I say screw a modular/manufactured home.

    Why?

    Because the shit that goes into the construction of a modular mass-produced home is nasty.

    When they burn or catch fire the least bit, they produce toxic smokes and serious greenhouse gases.

    It's much simpler, cheaper and more environmental to use the by-products of farming as a building material or to use natural substances when you can.

    Like Strawbales or adobe.

    "Straw as a building material excels in the areas of
    cost-effectiveness and energy efficiency. If used to replace the more traditional wall-building system of brick and block, it can present savings of around £10,000 on a normal 3 bedroomed house. Of interest to the home owner is the huge reduction in heating costs once the house is occupied, due to the super insulation of the walls. Here the potential savings are up to 75%
    compared to a conventional modern house. Building
    regulations are changing next year (2002), bringing the allowable U-value of domestic external walls down to either 0.35 or 0.25 (the European Union would like to see 0.25) which is challenging the whole industry to meet these requirements. A typical bale of straw has a U-value of 0.13 - significantly better thermal performance than will be required."

    "Over 50% of all greenhouse gases are produced by the construction industry and the transportation associated with it. If the 4 million tonnes of surplus straw in the UK was baled and used for local building, we could build at least 450,000 houses of 150m2 per year.That's almost half a million super-insulated homes, made with a material that takes carbon dioxide and makes it into oxygen during its life cycle. Coupled with vastly reduced heating requirements, thereby further reducing carbon dioxide emission (greenhouse gas) from the burning of fossil fuels."

    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1 &q =strawbaleguide.pdf&btnG=Google+Search

    I'm building strawbale in 2003 or 2004.
    • When they burn or catch fire the least bit, they produce toxic smokes and serious greenhouse gases.

      As opposed to straw, which simply burns down! God forbid somebody knocks a candle over in your house.

      Adobe--maybe--but I'm not buying the strawbale idea. Your sales pitch sounds waaay too much like those hippies selling geodesic domes in the 70s.

      Faaaaar out!
      • Adobe--maybe--but I'm not buying the strawbale idea.

        I think the idea with straw bales is that you cover them inside and out with concrete stucco or adobe. Thus you have fireproof and vermin-free structures. :-)
  • I was a carpenter in a previous life. I helped build the house I'm living in now. I *like* the fact that my house was crafted not by the sharing of blueprints and computer-aided customization, but by real (as opposed to fake) people working on-site, making adjustments as construction progressed. A message to the OSBA: Don't take craftmanship out of building.
  • The housing industry is one of the world's largest, and the people who run it like that homes cost so much, the money is going to them.

    Normally competition would stop this but somehow it doesn't. It's too regionalized. It can cost $500K to build a house on a lot in silicon valley when you could get the whole house and land for $250K elsewhere. Makes no sense but it happens.

    Part of the reason is corruption, a strong and nasty resistence to something that would end the gravy train.
    • Simple. Demand for land is high in such places, and as a result, land is extremely expensive.
      • Duh. But what I said was that the cost of building a home for unknown reasons goes up in places where the land is valuable.

        It works like this. As a region heats up, the existing homes might double in price. A $200K home that was a $150K home on a $50K piece of land becomes a $400K home. But it is not, as it turns out, a $150K home on a $250K piece of land. It's not exact, but it's more like now a $250K home on a $150K piece of land. For unknown reasons the house itself is worth more, even though there has not been anything to cause a doubling in the cost of homebuilding.

        And if you go to a region with cheap land, lo, you can build that same house for $150K.

        Anyway, why are you replying to a day old /. thread? Nobody reads these after they vanish from the main page.
  • Check out http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Habitat_67 .html

    for some ideas of how integrated and modular construction can be at the same time.

    I lived in Montreal at the time and it was a great idea that showed great promise. The structures even looked good (still do on Montreal's rejuvenated harbor) as well as being easy to build, cheap in volume and the interlocking of units where part of the roof of one unit is the patio of some unit on the level above creates a surprisingly livable architecture.

  • The first page of their website says "The problem of our epoch is the problem of the electronically mediated house." Elsewhere they say "Low-cost sensing, PDAs, cell phones, GPS, computational story editing tools, and intelligent building components begin to provide the infra-structure required to present urban narratives that are tailored to the location, activity, and interests of individuals."



    Somehow I think this is going to end up as one of those interesting topics that nobody will remember in a year or two, coz most people just don't care about PDAs and cellphone presenting "urban narratives" of their life.


    And as far as "the problem of our epoch" I am sure we can all think of things of more concern than integrating our GPS with intelligent building components. :-/ But I'll be satisfied if they come up with something as interesting as lego mindstorms out of the project.

  • Houses in which I've lived (Score:4, Interesting)

    by renehollan ( 138013 ) <[rhollan] [at] [clearwire.net]> on Monday December 02, 2002 @11:46PM (#4798852) Homepage Journal
    I don't know if cookie-cutter components for houses is the way to go, at least not at the level of making major changes. For me, having owned three houses, and soon (due to unemployment) to move into a small rental place (until I can s/un//), the issue hasn't really been one of layout, or style, but basic space, and utility.

    Over the years we (myself, wife, two kids, a cat, and a ginuea pig) have accumulated the usual amount of "stuff". Facing a move, we're getting rid of stuff we don't really need: donating old books to the library and either discarding or giving away junk (and yes, that includes a lot of computer/electronic related junk, on my part). But that got me thinking: "Why have all this stuff in the first place?"

    Of course, as a geek, I've always wanted to serve music and movies from a central server to client machines around the house. Recently, I've been able to accomplish this, but the real motivating factor lately has not been the "neetness" coefficient in doing this, but the pleasure in not having to have "media" cabinets in entertainment areas, with increasing amounts of media (CDs, DVDs, and legacy audio and video cassettes, and vinyl albums) that threaten to overflow the capacity of the cabinet -- in my younger and perhaps more foolish days I had a solid-oak and granite cabinet designed, with a modern look, to accomodate 240 CDs, 90 cassettes, and my B&O Beosystem 5500. Looks great, even 15 years later, but what happens when I get CD #241? At least now, it makes sense to archive the actual media, possibly refreshing the content to more dense media over time, serve the content from hidden servers, who's capacity can grow with technology, and generally upset the ??AAs because of the unscrupulous applications of the means to do this.

    Homes appear to be designed to accomodate "stuff", more or less depending on how much material wealth one has. My take on this is that they should be designed to reduce the need for "stuff", in the first place. To be sure, proper networking to accomodate information and entertainment data is part of this (heck, even my bills arrive electronically, and I get an end-of-year CD from PayMyBills, instead of ever-increasing file storage), and a large part, and a lot can be achieved with a "data" headend and appropriate wiring in even a modest home, but it's just the start.

    Clothing, kitchen, and garage storage has got to be among the most inefficient use of space there is. Why do we need wardrobe cabinets and dressers? Why not simply provide enough closet space in bedrooms? Or "bench"-style storage, kind of like Captain's beds, but all around the room walls, modular, and the right height to put things on, much like a dresser. Wouldn't take more space than a dresser, and, most importantly, it would mean that you don't need to own a dresser for each bedroom. Modularity in such units (rather like kitchen cabinets) would be most welcome. If you want to go all out, eliminate the bed foundation: build it into the room, needing only a mattress and box spring, with sufficient modularity to accomodate single, double, queen, and king. Unless you really want your bedroom to be a second living room, with a certain "style", a bit of a "cookie cutter" look, if it saves on the need for furniture, would be great -- you sleep there, after all. Personalization can take the form of wall hangings (posters, paintings, photographs, LCD or plasma displays, etc). The place for style and traditional furnishings, IMHO, is in the more public areas of the home: living, dining, and family spaces. Personally, I'd be happier with smaller, more functional, bedrooms, with the reclaimed space added to the other areas of the home.

    On to kitchens.

    Cabinets... can't have enough kitchen cabinets. Why? Because there's no standardization when it comes to kitchen utensils and plastic storage containers. Take a cutlery drawer: one usually has a plastic insert that holds forks, knives, table spoons, teaspoons, forks (regular and desert). All the odd-sized "infant/todler" stuff, garlic presses, tea infusers, chopsticks, hand can/bottle openers, etc. get dumped into the "miscelaneous" part of such an organizer and invariably overflows into the reset of the drawer. What a mess. While the basics are taken organized, the rest piles up. There should be a "standard" kitchen set, designed to be stored in a modular insert for a standard kitched drawer that accomodates 95% of the most common kitchen items. Oh sure, you'll always have the rarely (or less-rarely if you like to cook) used implement, but there is something wrong when a kitchen drawer insert's largest part is for miscellaneous stuff, and it's too small.

    Plastic storage containers. The round ones really waste space, and the square/rectangular ones don't fill cabinets to a decent packing density. Cabinets, fridges, and plastic leftover storage containers should come in standard sizes (the first two probably do, but that doesn't help the latter). I'm thinking like 19" racks with 1-3/4" spacing per "U" -- except, call them "K"s, for kitchen: you'd have 10, 12, 16, 18 "K" cabinets in various widths (multiples of, say 4-1/4") to accomodate 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. "K" storage containers in multiples of the same standard width. Drawer inserts would conform to this standard too, so you can have the extra cutlery for 8 stashed in a cabinet, perhaps.

    Kitchen cabinet shelves: make them slide out, dammit! And fit in the dishwasher (being dishwasher safe, of course). This is probably most important for pantry shelves, which accumulate bread, cookie, sugar, salt, pet food, and other debris, but, as we all know, the pantry overflows to an extra cabinet (at least it does for cat food in our home). Naturally, they should be adjustable-height. Modern kitchen cabinets come close, but, while removable, and adjustable, they are not designed for this to be done on a regular basis. Oh, and while we're finishing up in the kitchen, standardise the sizes of canned goods to match the pantry/cabinets.

    Laundry Rooms. Every house needs one. My first two had just had the washer and dryer in a corner or closed off section of the basement, and the last one (built recently) actually had a separate small room. The latter works well, but gimme storage space for all the cleaners to keep there (not just detergents). Two storey homes really need a laundry chute -- bring it back. And, oh, a dumbweiter to take the folded laundry back up. As long as we're on the subject, why haven't we solved the problem of the bursting washing machine hose, huh? Yes, one should always turn off the main taps when not in use and not keep constant pressure on the hose (or rather the washers, which are what tend to give when you are 3000 miles from home), but who remembers to do that? (Well, I do, but my wife doesn't. /me ducks). Why the @#$%^$# don't washing machines have standard control signals for fail-safe water solenoid-controlled valves instead?

    Living/Dining/Family rooms: here's where the style of the home/occupant should show and really be the only place where "furniture", in the classic, non-modular sense, should be needed.

    Garage/storage: why ultrasonic bumper ranging devices aren't standard, with large LED distance readouts, or at least red/yellow/green "traffic" lights, I dunno. I guess people really do manage to park their monster vans with 1" to spare front and back, without difficulty.

    Interior walls: repeat after me: should be movable. Within the limits of structural integrity, most interior walls, separating sleeping areas from each other, and from other living areas, should be removable. Yeah, this is asking a lot, espescially if it is to look O.K. without any ugly attachment points on the walls/floor, ceiling. But it would be real nice to change a 2 master, 3 bedroom house, into a 1 master, 4 bedroom house, when the second kid comes along.

    Of course, these are just my thoughts, off the top of my head (or, depending on your opinion, pulled out of my a**), but I definately think there is room for improvement and some degree of modularization/standardization in the house building industry.

  • You could always buy a manufactured home. (The term "manufactured home" refers to homes that are designed using CAD, assembled in a factory, and then transported to the site. Oh, and they used to be called "mobile homes" before the term got associated with trailer park trash.) Manufactured homes *are* mass produced, and are relatively inexpensive--and, oddly enough, people only live in them if they cannot afford any better.

    Honestly, a lot of prefabrication and labor reducing technologies are slowly making their way into the building industry. From prefabricated trusses to standardized door frames and prefabricated window frames, quite a bit nowadays is being assembled at a factory and shipped on site, rather than being built on site. Even "custom" cabinets are being built in a factory and installed on-site, rather than being built on site. Further, technology is making its way into the toolbelt of most builders to reduce the amount of time needed in construction: air compressor-powered nailers, for example, reduce significantly the time to frame a house.

    That a bunch of eggheads want to somehow speed this up--and by changing how houses are designed, rather than how they are constructed for heaven's sake!--strikes me as a loser of a proposition.
    • Having done some rearch into this area recently, I have to disagree. First off, manafactured and/or mobile homes are trailers. Factory built or modular homes are the made in the factory then transported to site type, and they are built to the same codes as site built (aka stick built) homes...manafactured homes are not. They're basically a site built house that's built in a factory, borken apart into 2-4 modules, and transported on site and put back together. See here for more info.

      That being said, modular homes are a bit less expensive. Anywhere from $40-$70/sq ft on the plans I've seen. Of course, that doesn't include foundation and site improvements (water hookups, sewer/septic system, basement + walls, etc.) so figure in about $7,000-$10,0000 for that. Also, the homes are about 90% finished, and need trimming out (gutters, shutters, drywall seams, etc.). That adds about %7-$10/sq ft. Overall, it seems to be around $10-$20/sq ft cheaper than a comparable site built home (which is around $100/sq ft for a good sized house).

      Modular homes can easily surpass site built in quality. There's a few reasons for this. First, it's much easier to control quality in a factory than on a job site. Inspectors can easily check the entire progress of a home, not just on a few announced site visits. Factory machinery is more precise than a $15/hour day laborer framer with a circular saw (and if you've ever seen and talked to a typical framing crew, you'd probably not want to move into any house). Modular homes have to be built to withstand transportation and being lifted by a crane, as well as stand without the support of the other parts of the house.

      Of course, a good site built home is still that...a well built home. And some modular manafacturers cut corners in materials, and some don't. As with anything else, it pays to do your homework.

      Modular homes are taking more and more of the market every day. I think it's where a good chunk of the industry is headed in the near future. Modular homes can look like any other (yes, even that 6,000 sq ft log cabin), and can be customized to a good extent (floor plans, fixtures, cabinets, carpet, etc. normally exterior dimensions are fixed by model).

  • Overestimating architects (Score:3, Interesting)

    by w3woody ( 44457 ) on Tuesday December 03, 2002 @03:25AM (#4799647) Homepage
    When I used to work for a startup back in 1988, I met the Apple Architectual Design "Evangelist" who, over lunch with a bunch of other people, told me how she invisioned Apple taking over the architectual design industry. Amonst other things, she told me of a future where, due to efficiencies in design and communication, house construction could begin while plans were in plan check at the building departments because the plans needed for construction could be sent over to the job site before the required documentation for plan check could be finalized. What a wonderful world this would be that we could speed up the construction of a house by the two or three weeks a house spends in plan check, by using Macintosh computers to speed up the process so that construction and plan check could happen in parallel!

    I asked her what would happen if a set of plans failed plan check.

    "Excuse me?"

    What would happen if a set of plans failed plan check because a hallway was too narrow? Wouldn't the builders be up shit's creek if the cement foundation they just poured last week had to be jack-hammered up because the hallway nailers and forms were placed wrong, because the hallway was drawn too narrow?

    She assured me that architects never made that kind of mistake. I told her that architects made that kind of mistake all the time; my mother (who was a drafter for an architect) had made that very mistake at the start of her career--the architect she worked for didn't catch the mistake either. That's why plans sit in plan check for two to three weeks!

    Stupid woman. But it does explain why we see so few Macintosh computers in architectual drafting offices today...

    The article reminded me of her because the article cites some similar rather stupid blunders which I would consider "overestimating the architects." My favorite quote:

    n their paper "A New Epoch," Larson and two MIT colleagues suggest that mass customization finally allows architects to play a significant role in the design of houses for the mass market. Larson himself knows from experience that house commissions currently come only from "adventurously wealthy" clients. But with a Web-based design system, architects can become involved in the earlier stage of creating design "engines" from which modest-income customers could develop their own permutations. It has a faintly Modernist, and solidly idealistic, ring to it: architects would no longer be designing forms as the expression of technological function but algorithms that produce expressive skins, each offering a variation from the next.

    First, let me state that as the child of parents in the building industry (and who made spare money running plans to the city of Fresno for plan check while in High School), I have known quite a few people in the building industry and in the housing industry. So I think I'm speaking from a little bit of experience here.

    And let me state flatly that most of the architects I've met couldn't even pronounce the word "algorithm", much less be able to quantify their design skills into one.

    Second, let me state that the statement "Larson himself knows from experience that house commissions currently come only from "adventurously wealthy" clients." is misleading. What is expensive in a custom home is not the custom architectual design, which in my neck of the woods runs around $2/sqft (which, for a custom 2500 square foot house would be about $5,000), but the construction costs and the profits made by the building contractor who builds your house. (Most of the guys out there who run building contracts won't even look at your set of plans unless they figure on a $20,000 profit, minimum) The expensive part is not the design, but the construction. And even if altering the design of the house could somehow make the construction costs significantly less, the builder will just attempt to pocket the price difference anyways.

    Furthermore, the statement is misleading in that it suggests that architects are not involved in the design of tract housing. The truth is that what makes tract housing awful is that the architect who designs the tract housing generally has few incentives to design good tract homes. Generally a contract for tract housing goes like this: the developer knows he wants to knock off a few hundred homes, and so he approaches the architect and says "give me 8 house designs, around 1600 to 2000 square feet, and make them easy to build." And, like a soup that is prepared without someone tasting the concoction to make adjustments along the way, with most architects you get 8 rather soulless designs, because he's being paid regardless of the quality of the designs, so long as they meet the construction parameters that were set out.

    Tract housing is cheap, by the way, not because the construction techniques are any different from custom homes, but because the developer, in building a lot of homes, has more incentives to "turn and churn"--that is, he has more incentive to cut corners, both in the quality of the construction materials, cost of cabinets, appliences, etc., and in reducing his margins, so he can sell the houses as quickly as possible. That's because most developers who build houses and then sell them (as most builders who build "spec houses"--that is, houses built on speculation that it will sell) generally take out a "construction loan", and have to pay the bank interest in that loan for every month the builder holds onto the house. And when the entire profit margin for a spec house can be eaten in interest if the house remains unsold for 15 months, and for a tract house in something like 7 to 8 months, that means the developer is better off selling the house the first month rather than the 5th--and that means keeping costs (including profit margins) down.

    None of this has squat to do with architectual design, by the way.

    Hopefully the musings of these MIT eggheads will go the way of that Apple Evangelist. Or, at the very least, they'll figure out how the building industry *really* works, so they can at least devote their energy into making things more efficient for the builders--such as, for example, figuring out a faster and cheaper way to build roofs than prefabricated truss systems...
  • Has someone already made that joke?

    I had this idea that I called "podular" living. The idea is my house could be dismantled and re-assembled in new configurations as a family's needs changed. The modules would have "pod-like" ports that could be plugged together like Hamster-Habi-Trail tubes.

    Ofcourse I was going to make the pods more stuble than Hamster tubes. The interfaces would be large rectangular sections on the sides of octagonal modules. Floor and ceiling ports for stacking would be octagonal and house spiral staircases.

    A typical pod could be unsegmented, segmented in quarters, configured as classic living room/dining room/artic entry way with an optional balcony. Basically the starter pod would be an efficiency house/apartment in a geodisc. Additional geodiscs could be attached or a garage pod added. A basement pod could be buried... ect. The whole thing would be easily disconnected and mounted on earthquake resistant foundational pylons.

    The "landing gear" supporting the pod would fit into coaster like ports on the foundational pylons to provide more earthquake resistance. The exterior frame would be steel girders and wood paneling since they hold up to earthquake stresses better. The walls would be curved and very thick for heating efficiency. Think tomato shape with window steeples around the top.

    The pods would also be independantly heated so that when a pod was not in use you could seal it off and turn off the heat. Think blast doors. Squat sturdy construction would help them withstand hurricane force winds and storms. All metal versions could withstand wave forces and be constructed to be nearly water proof.

    *LOL* guess where I'm from. All that thought about earthquake and weather resistance... heh.

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