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This line of argument is essentially MIT's trump card. The program counters
fear of surveillance, high-tech living, or futuristic forms with the twenty-first-century
idea of consumer choice: if you don't like it, choose something else. Larson
believes that the real lesson of smart homes of the past is to avoid allegiance
to inflexible ideologies. "Open source" building MIT-style,
on the other hand, is a variable system based on standardized guts--the
architecture's formal manifestations may be innovative-looking, or not,
depending on the environment for which it is intended.
If it begins to sound as though the House-n team counters arguments by morphing
into something else, that is a reflection of the project's evolution
and, to an extent, its dependence on sponsorship for survival. It began
as an architecture-department scheme to explore the aesthetics of combining
new materials and new sensing technologies in a "transgenerational"
family house. But despite attracting a fair amount of press attention and
sponsors--including Owens Corning, International Paper, and State Farm Insurance--the
project struggled to hit funding targets and tripped on the stringent zoning
regulations of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where MIT planned to build. Larson
responded by raising the stakes. Late last year MIT announced that the House-n
team would join a larger consortium with the Media Lab, a department with
an impressive track record in securing generous corporate sponsors. Now
recast as the Open Source Building Alliance, the project is divided into
nine special interest groups looking at everything from active shades on
building exteriors to the Web-based tools customers might use to design
their own houses.
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Dymaxion Dwelling Machine Developed by Richard Buckminster Fuller as a
kit home for mass production, this energy-efficient dome-shaped house
measured 36 feet across but managed to include two bedrooms, two
bathrooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room. The prototype--built with the
Beech Aircraft Corporation in 1946--attracted 3,500 orders, but Fuller
pulled out when he suspected profiteering among his partners. The
prototype was restored for the Henry Ford Museum in 2001.
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Aluminaire House The first all-steel-and-aluminum house to be built in
America, the Aluminaire was an experiment in using standardized hardware
to make mass-produced housing. Designed by Albert Frey, a disciple of Le
Corbusier, and MIT-trained architect A. Lawrence Kocher, the house
attracted streams of visitors at the Allied Arts and Building Products
exhibition and prompted one perturbed reviewer to worry that its severe
rectilinear forms might be too businesslike for husbands returning from
work, driving them to seek out "fluffier apartments." The
house is now preserved as a landmark in Central Islip, Long Island, New
York.
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Monsanto House of the Future The weird floating cruciform shape and
synthetic construction of the MIT-designed Monsanto House of the Future
attracted 20 million visitors during its ten-year residence at
Disneyland. "Hardly a natural material appears anywhere," the
publicity boasted. As if to prove the point, a wrecking ball turned out
to be ineffective when the house was closed in 1967. It bounced off the
plastic walls instead of demolishing them, and the house had to be
dismantled by hand.
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Spherhome French engineer Jean-Noël Pigout designed this
computer-controlled geodesic dome home to achieve energy efficiency by
opening and folding in like a flower. It closes up when the temperature
is too hot or cold, turning its back away from or toward the sun. A
2,600-square-foot prototype was unveiled in January 2001 at the Paris
Furniture Fair.
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Orange at Home The British telecommunications company Orange turned this
average Hertfordshire house into a remote-controlled show home to
research wireless technologies. Operating with Bluetooth and 802.11
protocols, the house is powered partly by solar panels on the roof and
is equipped with energy-saving innovations like a hot-air recovery
system that draws warm air from the kitchen and bathroom to heat the
cooler rooms. Security is automated, and the front door can be opened
with an Orange mobile phone. Room temperature can be set by yelling at
the walls.
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If MIT's ambitious new strategy pays off, within the next two years its
Cambridge campus will sprout a house of the future called the Place Laboratory
where researchers can study the effects of all this technology on volunteer
dwellers. Complementing the Place Lab will be a portable version that can
be installed in existing homes, workplaces, and urban environments. Further
down the line, MIT plans to retrofit a loft building and build a new
market-rate condominum using the same House-n system, featuring a single
integrated heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system. This alone
is anathema for home building, which currently depends on separate subcontractors
to install three distinct systems. "I propose that that's insane,"
Larson says. "Somebody needs to make a single appliance that allows
this all to happen."
Whether the project will succeed in persuading developers and builders to
take on its means and methods is a big question. MIT's would not be the
first project to be thwarted by industry recalcitrance. Even the government-backed,
multibillion-dollar initiative of the 1970s, Operation Breakthrough--which
set out to increase housing production and reduce costs with an engineered
approach to building--failed to infiltrate what is essentially a craft-based
industry. Bob Kuehn, a Massachusetts builder, welcomes MIT's initiative
but remains skeptical about its applicability. "Frankly I don't see
it," he says. "There are too many barriers from the way the craft
unions are organized. It's hard to come in and say, 'This used to be carpentry,
but now it's somebody else's work.' I can remember when we stopped using
lumber and went to metal studs, and what a big fight that was."
Larson pulls no punches when it comes to depicting the industry: "It's
fragmented, conservative, worried about lawsuits, resistant to change, and
involves labor-intensive processes that no industry in the world would use."
Industry representatives counter that their innovation comes not in sweeping
revolutions but in subtle increments tempered by cost constraints. "Factory-built
and site-built sectors have coexisted for a long time in the industry,"
says David Dacquisto, former vice president of technology at the National
Association of Home Builders Research Center in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.
He cites prehung doors, roof trusses, and even prefabricated foundations
as innovations that have reduced field labor costs. But he adds that
the technologies paraded in smart houses like MIT's are often too expensive
to be greeted with enthusiasm. "There are few products in this business
that are slam dunks, but I don't believe that's responsible for the slow
development of the smart-house concept. I think the reason these technologies
haven't come further is that they've been expensive and have delivered very
little as far as tangible benefits are concerned."
Larson argues that pioneering technology can be paid for by savings in labor
costs. He mentions a survey cited in the industry newsletter Construction
Labor Report, where 80 percent of contractors identified a lack of skilled
labor as the most significant challenge facing the industry during
the next five years. By automating fabrication, he says, we could reverse
the ratio of field labor to material costs, which can be 80-20, and
four times as much money could be devoted to materials, design, and technologies.
As for tangible benefits, MIT proposes revolutionizing not just home
building but the whole lumbering health-care business. "The existing
health-care system is really crisis care," Larson says. "Our position
is that there's plenty of money in the system; it's a matter of development."
If House-n does make the leap off the digital drawing board into the real
world, architecture could be confronted with an intriguing new model of
practice. When customers can "design" their own houses--customizing
their preferences online from a menu of choices as they might a computer--what
is left for architects to do? In their paper "A New Epoch," Larson
and two MIT colleagues suggest that mass customization finally allows
architects to play a significant role in the design of houses for the
mass market. Larson himself knows from experience that house commissions
currently come only from "adventurously wealthy" clients. But
with a Web-based design system, architects can become involved in the earlier
stage of creating design "engines" from which modest-income customers
could develop their own permutations. It has a faintly Modernist, and solidly
idealistic, ring to it: architects would no longer be designing forms as
the expression of technological function but algorithms that produce expressive
skins, each offering a variation from the next.
Ultimately this is a project for home buyers who are not enticed by the
new homes developers offer. It is about making sophisticated design and
technology environments for them. But if they can't be shaken out of their
current penchant for traditional materials, handcrafted on the spot, House-n
will join the ranks of history's demonstration smart homes, forever awaiting
their offspring. As Bob Kuehn puts it, "Fiberglass is fiberglass,
and shingles are another thing. I'm not suggesting that people have good
taste in their housing, but they do cleave to traditional forms." The
choice, in the end, may be ours.
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