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"Houses of the future" sold tickets at world's fairs, but they
didn't affect home building. Can MIT's prefab smart house change the way
we build and live?
By Peter Hall
December 2002
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The home-building industry could be transformed, MIT researchers argue,
if it adopted the mass-customization methods being introduced in other industries.
Dell Computer, for example, allows PC customers to pick their preferred
hard-drive size, monitor type, and memory configuration from a Web-site
menu. The elements are then pieced together from existing parts and delivered
a few days later. Applied to home building, the customer-design process
would be considerably more advanced. A Web-based "preference engine"
would take home buyers through a series of questions, design games, and
diagrams in a dialogue that would ideally approximate a conversation between
a client and an architect. Having established the basic facts (budget, number
of inhabitants and their ages, working habits, cooking habits, etc.), the
preference engine would then attempt to determine more subjective preferences.
For example, it might show different interior spaces, then ask the customer
to pick a favorite and answer questions on what makes it preferable (lighting,
color, detailing, sense of comfort or security).
For much of the last century architects and designers have wondered why
the home-building industry couldn't be more like the automotive or aircraft
manufacturing industries. Cars and airplanes were the apogee of the machine
age, precision-engineered in factories with the latest materials and technologies,
their aerodynamic forms molded by functional requirements. Houses were the
opposite: dumb boxes laboriously hammered together on-site. Designers, architects,
and even governments spent untold hours and dollars trying to force construction
to go prefab. "We have only to apply to building the same techniques
of design, manufacture, and selling that have given us a motor car for every
four people in the land," wrote Walter Dorwin Teague in 1942. "In
this way the American genius of mass production that is winning the war
can win the peace as well."
Peace is an elusive target, and so is automated home building. Even the
most ingenious of schemes for mass-produced prefabricated homes--Buckminster
Fuller's Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, and Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann's
Packaged House--became treasured failures of architectural history. Fuller
pulled out of the Dymaxion project in the late 1940s, ditching a few thousand
orders, and Gropius and Wachsmann saw only 200 houses built before their
company closed down. The "house of the future" has consequently
remained a curious artifact of the exposition showground.
But in the last three years Kent Larson, an architect at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, has been laboring to revive the Modernist dream and produce
a housing system of the future that will have a real and lasting impact
on home building. The twentieth-century smart home was doomed by its prescriptiveness,
according to Larson. "It became a timeline of buildings that essentially
had no effect on the industry because they were single-purpose structures
with a single form driven by one ideology," he says. The MIT project,
on the other hand, is infinitely adaptable. "It's about creating
a methodology that can be scaled to different climates and people,"
Larson says. "What we're proposing is that houses should move toward
a mass-customization process."
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. During the next 30 years or so, our elderly population will double,
increasing the burden on the creaking health-care infrastructure. The answer,
according to the MIT team, is to upgrade the home so that it can support
the needs of an aging population. Their prototype housing will test a monitoring
system that can keep track of its occupants' activity levels, issue early
warnings of congestive heart failure, and offer reminders to take medication.
MIT's future living environment will even monitor its own air quality for
hazards like smoke, carbon monoxide, mold spores, and--since we're living
in the specter of terrorism--anthrax.
At first MIT chose to call the project House-n, the "n" being
scientific shorthand for "variable." In much the same way
that Lands' End, Nike, Ford, and BMW are investigating computer-based manufacturing
to offer customers swappable or "mass-customized" components for
their jeans, sneakers, and cars, so could thousands of unique house parts
be customized to buyers' demands. The auto-industry analogy even extends
to fabrication: 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. The network will be self-configuring;
to add new devices, the occupant won't have to go through complicated rituals
comparable to programming the VCR. Like the Internet, it is decentralized,
so that if one part breaks down, the house network won't crash. "You
can cut the wires and it won't stop working," says Larson, who asserts
that all of the above is possible with existing technology.
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The back end of the process, the "design engine,"
is a computational system that turns customer preferences into buildable
form using strategies and shapes predefined by an architect. The design
is developed in iterations, with high-end visualizations giving the home
buyer the opportunity to evaluate and respond to the engine's proposal.
The required components would then be manufactured to order (using computer
numerically controlled fabrication techniques) and delivered to the construction
site. The MIT team envisions thousands of design engines: some might be
licensed by star architects or developed by multinational brands. Customers
could find themselves choosing between the Frank Gehry or BMW design engines. |
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The tech-heavy networked home also reveals that Larson has identified
where to find his best allies. Rather than try to persuade the recalcitrant
home-building industry to pony up for a vision of change it may not welcome,
MIT has been working with information technology and communications companies.
"High-tech companies are looking to the home as the next big market,"
Larson says. "They're realizing that they'll never successfully sell
all the gadgets they envision unless there's a more sophisticated infrastructure
in the home to plug them into--which means new ways of building." This
fall the House-n team and technology consultancy TIAX (formerly Arthur D.
Little Inc.) announced the formation of the Open Source Building Alliance,
adopting the modish programmer terminology to depict a modular, component-based,
everyone's-invited approach to building. "Mass customization,"
argues an MIT white paper published in September, "creates a pathway
for new players to enter the $852 billion a year construction market."
Unsurprisingly, 44 companies, from Alcoa to Whirlpool, have expressed interest.
One clear reason why homes of the future rarely get beyond the fairgrounds
is that they have tended to be driven by corporations' ambitions rather
than peoples' needs. When the MIT-designed Monsanto House of the Future
opened in Disneyland in 1957, visitors were treated to a glimpse of carefree
futuristic living inside a plastic-walled floating cruciform structure
with picture phones, height-adjustable sinks, dishes washed by ultrasonic
waves, and atomic food preservation. "It was the permanence, the durability
of plastic that made the Monsanto house a marvel," writes Bernard Cooper
in his book Maps to Anywhere. "The wings, it was said, would
never sag. The plastic floor would never buckle, chip, or crack."
At the time, 30 percent of Monsanto's business was in plastics, synthetic
resins, and surface coatings.
MIT's House-n, with its lineup of corporate sponsors, hardly breaks the
mold. A prospectus from last year offers an almost nostalgic-sounding collection
of utopian scenarios: you arrive home to hear your kids playing with an
interactive game embedded in the walls. 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. Future living is now brought
to us by the health-care and telecommunications industries, yet Cooper's
characterization of the 1950s dream is equally applicable to the noughties:
"Time was a road that led to utopia...and life, prolonged, would be
nearly perfect."
Larson and his colleagues insist that their project is not a 1950s-style
prescription for better living but a research lab where technologies will
be tested. As a facility shared by several corporations, it will be the
first "holistic" effort to examine how our homes--and the
process of building them--might change to accommodate our evolving lifestyles.
"The popular vision of the house of the future is where you hardly
have to get up from your easy chair," says Stephen Intille, a computer-science
researcher working on the project. "That's not ours at all. We want
the house to enable you to lead a more active and richer life--and encourage
you to do things, not to have them done for you."
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"Responsive" environments provide information and advice to
occupants on when to exercise, eat, or take medication. The talking
house was much parodied in twentieth-century culture, so House-n
proposes more subtle reminders: timed projections on a table or messages
on a PDA. A responsive house might also adjust lighting and temperature
according to what occupants are doing at the time. |
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One of the MIT team's biggest challenges will be to avoid turning their
smart home into what looks like a virtual panopticon. One group is looking
into information delivery. Their charge is the growing problem that patients
at home frequently forget to take their medications. Using devices like
a PDA or the IBM-developed "anywhere projector" (which can display
information on any surface in the home), the team will test ways the house
can remind occupants to down the pills. "Every day we're compromising
our privacy so that people can tell where we are," Larson says. "We
want to give people control and choice. If you want to turn off the system,
you can. But for an 80-year-old woman living in the city, there may be a
clear benefit to monitoring systems that tell family members where
she is."
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