Machine-Grown Housing 111
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."
there's a reason for safety regs (Score:4, Insightful)
And when it collapses under the weight of that flock...
wtf... this dude is nuts.
Re:I like the idea of unplanned housing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
This is the key... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Roger Dean!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
problems with these. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't get over the way so many allegedly intelligent people cream themselves over these cute 3D animations of a huge behemoth lateral crane picking up building materials and laying them into place and voila, instant house. It must be the Lego lover's mindset, but it's not remotely as practical as it's proponents suggest. (And I still have no evidence that it is "already being done", all I see are drawings. But as Colin Powell proved, artistic drawings are proof of reality. But I digress.)
1. You have to lie these perfectly straight 200-foot rails down at either ends of the lot, perfectly parallel and at a perfect distance. And make sure they don't move.
2. You have to lug this huge behemoth crane on huge supports to the site and *onto the rails*.
3. You have to place all the building materials in perfectly lined up position. Who is going to do this? Construction workers? Another expensive piece of heavy machinery?
4. Who is going to climb up the damn thing when it gets jammed while carrying a 50-foot 10x10 support beam?
B: these wonderful, mod-hippie earthen building materials like cob and superadobe -- all of which are top secret and require you buying book X and going to seminar Q for a hundred here and a hundred there. Nope, that ain't the way to promote an off-the-grid natural building style, that's the way to be a beemer-driving neoliberal. Instead of these wonderfully "grassroots" building techniques going on to revolutionize building and make it accessible to the common man, cob et al become the trademark of upper-middle class SUV drivers who need a way to prove to everyone that they truly are earthy and granola.
(Let's not mention the inconvenient fact that the underprivileged and otherwise construction-disenfranchised that these cheap natural building techniques will supposedly help don't actually *own any land* to BUILD anything on!)
I'd be curious about cob... if it wasn't that every link about it I can find actually tells you *nothing* about how to do it, but instead urges you to attend a fucking paid training session. (And oh yeah, if I were in the landed class.)
I can process rich text, calculate spreadsheets, and read email for free, but I can't build with fucking mud and straw without going to some new age seminar. Funk dat.
Re:I like the idea of unplanned housing (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. The biggest cause of boredom I encounter are the speed limits on roads that could safely be driven at twice the artificially depressed rates at which traffic is often forced to flow.
Yes, for the math challenged among you, I am saying that you don't have to look far to find 55 mile per hour limits on roads that could safely be driven at 110. As a practical matter, I realize that a somewhat lower limit is needed to prevent idiots with unsafe cars from holding their accelerators to the floor for extended periods. But, sheesh, any stretch of controlled-access, multi-lane highway that stretches straight as an arrow from my windshield out to the horizon that has a speed limit under 85 miles per hour is just a maddening waste of time and a dangerous source of boredom.