Comment Many engineering hurdles (Score 5, Insightful) 35
"Think about how much space you need in a typical house today, and how much of it you use at a given time," Olds said. "If the house could dynamically reconfigure itself to match your daily routine, you could find yourself being much happier in less space and using less energy. For example, a room could be configured as an office during the day, with a media wall that is used as a business display. But at night, it could be a living room, and then it could transform into a bedroom."
But much of the rest of the world outside the US has much smaller houses already. People here have massive houses not because they need to but because they apparently want to. This is especially true in the suburbs where the rooms are often much larger than they need to accomplish their goals. Large houses are status symbols and the size of American houses has little connection to what is practically necessary. Maybe this might work better in Europe or if it were restricted in the US to urban centers? The article also acknowledges problems with other ideas, such as how they discuss modular bathrooms but then acknowledge that getting all the pipes and the like to fit would be difficult. And nothing here even begins to touch on the many issues there would be with building codes.