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The House of the Future Has Arrived Researchers at MIT are revolutionizing house design and construction so that aging Baby Boomers can grow old at home.

Seventy-six million babies were born in North America from 1946 to the end of 1964. Aptly called the Baby Boom Generation, those surviving in 2030 will be between the ages of 66 and 84 years old, according to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). This will be the largest age-identified demographic since census takers started counting. Surrendering to the inevitable, economic and social prognosticators are predicting gloom for the time when senior baby boomers begin to place an enormous strain on the health-care system, the economy, and many commercial and industrial markets.

There is no doubt that this bad news is a looming crisis for both commodity providers and end users. The housing industry, which, according to industry analysts, has not kept pace with other markets, has been the slowest to acknowledge the challenges it will soon face. Whereas the automotive and electronics industries, pressured by competition from abroad, have reinvented their production processes and business models, residential builders have coasted on time-honored (i.e., unchallenged) practices. The housing industry both benefits from and is hampered by lack of competition from abroad—and home. Most of the industry is locally based and produced by small construction companies.

This is not to say that there have been no improvements. The industry has responded to the forthcoming shortage by adopting some methods of prefabrication in the controlled factory environment—most commonly, panelized construction (SIPS, etc.) and modular construction. Both systems reduce waste and speed the process, but many operations—HVAC and plumbing systems, window and door installations, and most finishes—still require conventional, on-site construction methods. The growing consensus is that these improvements reflect only incremental progress, not the radical innovations needed to transform the industry.

To the reader, this static situation might not seem like the province of architects. After all, 80 percent of so-called manufactured housing (to distinguish it from custom, architect-designed homes) does not enjoy the customized services of a design professional. However, there are growing pockets of institutional, public, and private researchers and analysts who are convinced that the problem is not the population, but rather the enormous gulf between new technologies and the home-building industry, and that indeed it is, or should be, the responsibility of the design professions and construction industry.

So convinced are researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), that they began a far-reaching investigation called “Changing Places.” Comprised of a multidisciplinary consortium of university departments and private-sector industries guided by the university’s Department of Architecture and the renowned MIT Media Lab, the research group is developing next-generation systems to close the gap between new technology and housing. “House_n: The MIT Home of the Future” is a research initiative within Changing Places that is currently developing methods to integrate digital and building technologies with architecture.

Larson’s contentions are supported by both the housing industry and related federal agencies to varying degrees. The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), a trade association with 200,000 members representing more than 50,000 companies who build greater than 80 percent of all U.S. homes, and the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH), an agency of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are involved in their own research.

A report issued two years ago by HUD acknowledges the crisis in the housing industry. Prepared by the Center for Housing Research at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, “Industrializing the Residential Construction Site” recommends that builders industrialize production by following the example of other manufacturing industries. Faced with global competition, many have adopted organizational strategies called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Such a system includes Just-in-Time (JIT) supply, a manufacturing strategy that eliminates waste by providing the right part at the right place at the right time. Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA), another strategy, reduces costs and improves quality by developing a design based on how all the parts will be assembled or manufactured. ERPs coordinate all these strategies with databases that can translate a broad range of formats.

Larson’s main criticism with these tepid improvements is that “all result in environments that are difficult and disruptive to change over time. They do not easily accommodate new and rapidly evolving technologies or customization demanded by the baby boomers. They also do not easily accommodate the many new products being developed by building companies that are trying to make the transition from commodity suppliers to providers of systems and services. Panelized and modular methods of construction are only suited for new construction, and not for the important renovation and interior fit-out market.”

New Building Systems Mimic Nature and Return to a Biocentric Approach to Design

We’ve come a long way from the sealed-window, fluorescent-lit, energy-guzzling buildings of the mid-20th century. With the help of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system and other green guidelines, more and more architects are meeting stringent environmental criteria. “Architects are getting good at the ‘technofix,’ ” says Bill Browning, Hon. AIA, a principal at Rocky Mountain Institute. They are becoming adept at applying technologies that deplete fewer precious resources, generate less toxicity, and threaten fewer habitats. In an industry that claims about 40 percent of the energy, 40 percent of the virgin minerals, and 25 percent of the virgin wood consumed worldwide per year, what else could we ask for?


To be built in Wisconsin's "tornado alley," the underground Kaufmann House by Eugene Tsui will have parabolic openingsto maximize light penetration.
Photo: © Eugene Tsui
Much more, it turns out. Up until now, sustainable design has been essentially an effort to minimize damage so that we can at least maintain what we still have. A worthy objective, considering the ever-mounting environmental degradation we are witnessing, but is this all we can aspire to? “It would be a pretty sorry state of affairs,” says architect Bill McDonough, FAIA, principal of William McDonough + Partners in Charlottesville, Virginia, “if, when asked how are things between you and your spouse, you answer ‘sustainable.’ ” Like a good marriage, good design should be uplifting and fertile.

Nature—whose designs are inherently efficient, effective, and beautiful—offers us models of abundant, healthy production. In their new book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (North Point Press, 2002), McDonough and his coauthor, chemist Michael Braungart, illustrate this with a cherry tree: Its fruit becomes food for animals and insects; its bounty of lovely leaves degrades naturally into the earth. Nothing is wasted; nothing is toxic. In terms of nature, growth is in fact good. So why can’t the same be said about the growth of human settlement?

It can, say those on the green frontier, if we can learn from nature. According to Gil Friend, president and C.E.O. of Natural Logic, “Nature’s ecosystems have spent 3.85 billion years building efficient, complex, adaptive, resilient systems. Why should we reinvent the wheel, when the R&D has already been done?” Increasingly, architects are collaborating with chemists, biologists, ecologists, and psychologists to learn Mother Nature’s secrets and apply them to our own mortal designs.

“Why does a 400-year-old structure still work and feel right?” muses Boston-based architect Bill Reed, AIA, vice president of Natural Logic. “Not because of its style—timeless buildings exist in any style—but because it grew out of its place.” The master builder, who was local, had all the local data he needed—including climate, available materials, and labor, culture, and economy—to influence his architectural solution. “Local conditions allow a building to be part of its place,” sums up Reed.

Consider another scenario: “Until 1860, Paris fed its entire population with food that came from no farther than 40 miles away,” says Reed. It was a closed-loop system: Vegetables were eaten, and the resulting human waste became fertilizer. Once the city sewage system was constructed, however, the nutrients flowed out and the loop was broken.

In our rational Cartesian framework—in which everything can be logically mapped out in quadrants or dissected into discrete units—we have, for the most part, lost sight of such underlying flows, cycles, and connections. Even worse, we have become indifferent to them, believing our technological wizardry can outdo Mother Nature’s organic schemes. But our technological hubris has come home to roost.

“We are a society that seeks to create manageable uniformity,” said landscape architect John Tillman Lyle, author of Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (John Wiley & Sons, 1996) and a professor at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona until his death in 1998. In creating such regularity, however, we destabilize life-giving processes. America’s ubiquitous turf grass, for example, yearns to evolve into a meadow and then a forest. Yet we beat it into submission by mowing and dumping chemicals on it. In the process, we inhibit groundwater recharge; poison air, land, and water; and waste not only precious fossil fuels but also our own precious time.

To heal the Earth, and ourselves, says Reed, “we have to fundamentally change our relationship with natural systems, from energy and water flows to nutrient cycles.” Instead of fighting against Mother Nature, we need to work with her to help stabilize nature’s life-giving processes. It is just not up to the Earth to heal herself, because we, too, are part of the Earth.

This kind of design goes beyond sustainable; it is regenerative. It revitalizes the underlying systems—both cultural and natural—so that all can work efficiently and in concert to achieve and maintain a healthy environment. Regenerative design grows out of various ecological movements, including permaculture. The word, originally intended as a hybrid of permanent and agriculture, was coined in 1978 by Australian ecologist Bill Mollison and one of his students. Reed boils the discipline down to its essence: “Permaculture basically says that gravity happens. Water flows down and takes nutrients with it.” By acknowledging such forces and working with them, permaculture designers strive for systems that reap the greatest benefits with the least amount of effort and resources.

There Is No North Arrow in Outer Space :lol:

Space architecture is already a bona fide specialty within THE PROFESSION. its lessons will infiltrate the mainstream, changing the way we DESIGN, build, AND … THINK

Take away gravity, atmosphere, orientation, natural light, sound, and context, then add dangerous radiation, abrasive planetary dust, and orbital debris, and design and construction of habitable environments of any kind becomes baffling and disorienting. To be fair, living on the third rock from the sun requires that we obey the laws of physics, which govern, without exception, all the possibilities of sustaining life on Earth. Granted, since the Industrial Revolution technological advances have given us the mixed blessing of defying some of these laws. But it was the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and the fierce international competition it sparked, that inspired us to imagine living beyond the “surly bonds” of Earth and to apply our considerable ingenuity and will to make it inevitable.

Progress has been astonishing in just a few decades, as evidenced this October at the World Space Congress 2002 (WSC) in Houston. The WSC convenes only once every 10 years, but it is vast, with 20,000 participants from scores of nations. Hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), one purpose of the nine-day Congress this year was to bring together scientists with engineers and architects to initiate collaboration for future Earth-based and interplanetary exploration.

The concept of an interdisciplinary approach to extraterrestrial design and construction prompted the AIAA Technical Subcommittee on Aerospace Architecture to organize the First Symposium on Space Architecture, a three-day event that preceded the WSC. Forty-seven architects, designers, and academics delivered dozens of papers covering a dizzying array of topics from the emerging aerospace curriculum for architecture students to the design of orbiting space hotels.

The symposium concluded with an all-day workshop in which participants, including students, conceived a philosophical foundation for the nascent field of space design and construction. Their product, dubbed “The Millennium Charter,” is a manifesto for space architecture. The workshop organizer, Constance Adams, space architect and human factors engineer at Lockheed Martin Space Operations, says that the group chose as its model the 1928 Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), at which an international group of architects gathered to deflect criticism by certifying a bond between modern architecture—specifically the International Style—and a world in transition.

MODULAR CONSTRUCTION

What is Modular Construction?

Modular construction is an advanced form of facility construction in which a building is built in three-dimensional sections (or modules) in an enclosed factory environment.

Every modular building starts with a precisely designed floor plan. This plan is divided into smaller sections or modules which are constructed separately in our state-of-the-art factory using conventional commercial wall, floor, roof and ceiling materials. All major systems including mechanical, electrical, plumbing and finishes are completed prior to shipping and installation on your site. From start to finish, it only takes us a few days to construct many modular buildings saving you months of time.

During the time that your modular building is bring constructed, site development teams are preparing your site and performing any needed on-site construction (a process called concurrent construction).

This ensures that time savings are maximized throughout the modular building process.

Why Modular Construction?

Clients choose portable facilities and modular-constructed buildings for a number of reasons. These include:

Speed: For customers who need building space fast, modular is one of the best construction techniques available. From start to finish, a new custom designed modular building is usually ready in a fraction of the time as a site built building. In fact, in many cases the building is built in a matter of days… it is the licensing, permitting and approval process that takes up the majority of time.

Value: Modular buildings and portable buildings offer more value for our customers’ purchasing dollars. As a large scale modular direct builder, we are able to gain cost efficiencies ranging from bulk purchase of materials to manufacturing efficiencies in our quality controlled plants. The result depend on your needs, our modular buildings usually have a lower square foot cost than old fashioned construction.

Portability: Modular builds are both temporary (portable buildings) and permanent modular buildings. Although an increasing number of our customers are choosing the strength and architectural upgrades of our permanent modular buildings, designed to last as long or longer than site built construction, many of our customers (especially in schools and businesses) prefer buildings that can be relocated as needed. Our temporary buildings are engineered to withstand the rigors of multiple relocations depending on your future space needs.