The World House Project - "We Can 'Grow' Buildings"

Here's something I saw on Inhabitat today that looks extremely interesting - the World House Project:

"The Evolution of Home

The WHP is a multi-year, collaborative initiative led by the Institute without Boundaries (IwB) that will explore the evolution of shelter and plan for the next generation of holistic housing design. The project will build on the research concepts of IwB’s inaugural project, Massive Change, using the same method of interdisciplinary design innovation.

The home is the intersection between the individual and society. On one end of the spectrum, urban sprawl and monster houses consume huge amounts of energy and pollute the atmosphere. On the other, over a billion people live in urban slums or in the streets without shelter.

The ambition of the World House Project (WHP) is to generate a system that achieves a balance between these extremes, and operates on the principles of sustainability, universality, technological responsiveness and balance, so that we may create dwellings that promote the long-term health of nature and human cultures."

They're benchmarking homes from around the world, old and new, studying them to gain an understanding of important implications of "climate, culture and terrain." The team, international and interdisciplinary in nature, will examine housing in the framework of twelve core elements of housing design and work to "create dwellings that are grounded in the principles of ecological design and that promote the long-term health of natural and human economies." The twelve core elements are: identity, social, communication, spatial, constructional, air handling, energy, water, waste, food, mobility, and finance. That's a very compelling list, indeed.

Here are a few images from the World House Project scrapbook on Flickr that I really like:






I've always imagined that homes could (and should) be built in this way!

It will be very interesting to see what comes out of this project. I'll be looking forward to watching it.

Image credits - World House Project Flickr photo album

Soren Korsgaard's Woven House

I was looking at Soren Korsgaard's MySpace page. His mood is "happy," he thinks TV is "all crap!" (except for The Office), and his Zodiac sign is Aquarius. He's single. He's six feet tall. His architecture is brilliant.

Soren's MySpace page showcases his work, and has some things I hadn't seen on his website. In particular, I was immediately taken with his Woven House concept.





I asked him about it. He said:

Concept

A house designed as a showcase to promote bamboo as sustainable building material, must be unusual and eye-catching.

Bamboo has been used for making everything from kitchenware to buildings for thousands of years in most Asian countries. Among the many beautiful methods of treating bamboo, highly sophisticated weaving techniques have been developed. Woven house is an attempt to take this tradition and use it in modern architecture and in a much larger scale than anyone have ever seen before. Birds are using weaving for making their nest from materials in their habitats.

Using the unique flexibility and strength of bamboo for weaving a vacation house, that appears futuristic and dynamic and gives a unique architectural experience, where walls, floors and ceiling is one continuously surface, that also can be shaped into sitting areas and shelves.

The woven bamboo surface can be a closed surface or open to let in light.

Location:

Can be anywhere in south – and Southeast Asia. Vietnam, China, India, Indonesia. Most importantly in an area where there is a tradition of weaving bamboo, and on a site where Bamboo is growing, so less transport is needed, meaning less impact on nature.

Construction:

Heat shaped construction bamboo is used for making the framework of the building.

Roof is covered with bamboo shingles. Internal walls, floor and ceiling is woven bamboo. And in between there is lots of space for insulation.

It's a nest. For people. Soren, dude, you're blowing me away. That's totally cool.

I only hope a Panda Bear won't eat it. The big, bad wolf has nothing on a hungry Panda.

Another Example of the technOrganic Future - C2C Home Winner

Speaking of the technOrganic future in my post yesterday, I'm reminded of another brilliant example - the C2C Home Winner, which I blogged about before. That was six months ago (have I been doing this that long???) so I don't think there's any harm in showing it again. Anyway, it's that awesome. Anyone who hasn't seen it should. For those of you who have, tell me is this not the coolest of cool. Personally, I can never get enough of it.

The most exciting element of the house is the organic skin used to generate electricity:

"Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It is collected and returned. This design utilizes timeless passive solar strategies by shielding unwanted summer sun and absorbing heat from low winter sun through its thermal mass. Active solar collection provides the main source of necessary electrical energy. The core extends vertically, clad with a super-conductive photosynthetic plasma cell skin that is able to generate 200% more electrical voltage per area than contemporary photovoltaics. Building on current research involving extracted spinach protein, this living skin is photosynthetic and phototropic it grows and follows the path of the sun, generating electricity in excess of single family needs. excess power is distributed to neighboring homes and street lighting infrastructure."

Incredible. But why? Plants generate energy from sunlight. Surely we can understand and apply photosynthesis in human structures. Check out the house's other systems, and how they harmonize with nature, here.

Some pics:







Without question, this is one of my favorite homes, ever, period. Amazing.

Image credits C2C Home Winner site

ARCHiNODE Studio, and the Fab Tree Hab - the technOrganic Future

I've seen this concept so many times before, in so many places, that I just didn't want to show it. But it's soooo cool, and today when I saw Shedworking post a YouTube video on it I just couldn't help myself. So here it is, the amazing Fab Tree Hab.




I must say, I blog about modernist houses, and yeah, I'm one of those people who love the "white box." But I really do believe that the future, the distant future that is, will be highly organic and deeply integrated with technology. We're already learning how living systems are vastly superior, how nature has solved problems that we can't yet touch, how adaptable and elegant it all is. To achieve sustainability, in the end, we'll inevitably arrive here.






Fab Tree Hab is the work of Mitchell Joachim and MIT colleagues Lara Greden and Javier Arbona. Joachim's practice, ARCHiNOD STUDIO, is firmly rooted in a brilliant vision of "architectural + urban + ecological design." I want to live in the future his work is pointing to:








Incredible. Want more? Check out the ARCHiNODE blog. Or check out Terreform, the nonprofit Joachim started with fellow architect Michael Sorkin (equally brilliant vision of an organic future) to "ascertain the consequences of fitting a project within our natural world setting."

These guys are doing radical stuff. They present a very exciting vision of the future. I wonder what it will take for us to get there, how long, how much pain before (will the world get worse before it gets better?), what will we lose, what will we give, what will we discover? I don't know, and even though I'm only in my mid-thirties I can't imagine I'll see it in my lifetime. But I know what I'm teaching my children.

From now on, I'll be on the lookout for more examples of this highly organic, technologically intertwined, vision, which I'll file in the category technOrganic Future.

Via Shedworking

Image credits - ARCHiNODE and Terreform sites