Tomorrow’s Dynamic House

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Tomorrow’s Dynamic HouseMelbourne architect Michael Trudgeon has spent much of this decade designing a futuristic ‘Hyper House’—a project which won him a finalist’s slot in the Seppelt Contemporary Art Award, soon to be announced by Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Here’s his concept and rationale.

Aspirations and Realities
In 1923, Le Corbusier claimed in Vers une Architecture that “industry on the grand scale must occupy itself with building and establish the elements of the house on a mass-production basis”. Since that call to action, there have been many attempts to design houses to support modern domestic living; structures to be assembled from components which would be rapidly manufactured in large quantities. Notable visions include George Frederick Keck’s 1934 Crystal House, Charles and Ray Eames’ 1949 Case Study House 9, the cartoonesque Autorama-style dream homes of 1950s America, and Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion houses—which transferred aeroplane construction techniques to residential building.

However, none of these much-publicised gestures has transformed the industry of building houses. Across the world, the business of residential construction remains dominated by thousands of small-to-medium businesses: it is far too fragmented to support the sophisticated research and development which sustains the transport and product manufacturing sectors.

In the United States, for example, government authorities spend $200 million (0.1% of the country’s annual utility bill) on building research—while the US steel and auto industries spend 10 times as much as that on their R&D. When faced with a serious economic threat like the oil embargo crisis of 1973, both industries have shown that they can react promptly to introduce new technologies to ease or solve the problem. For example, from 1973 to 1987, the auto industry halved the average fuel consumption of new American cars, while the manufacturing sector reduced by 28% the amount of energy required to produce a US dollar of gross national product. Despite a worldwide sense of urgency about energy efficiency, there has been little improvement in the energy consumption of the building industry during the last 25 years.


Smart Houses? Nonsense.
It’s inevitable that demands for increased efficiency and performance require investment in research and development. Certain industries, notably car manufacturing, are structured to fund these pursuits. In The Machine that Changed the World, James P. Womack and his research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology detail how the vast research budgets necessary to develop the efficiency of new cars are amortised across large production runs of many interchangeable components to keep consumer costs competitively low. Consider this design audit. From the first clean sheet of paper to the first customer delivery of a new car, 1.7 million hours of research and development time is required: the equivalent of 8000 person-years or 2000 people working for four years at 40 hours a week. At $50 per hour, the cost is $850 million. But with the industry average production run of one million cars, that design cost is amortised to only $850 per car. So the consumer cost for the full benefit of 1.7 million hours of research amounts to only four percent of the average new car price of $20,000. (At $20,000 and weighing 1700 kilos, a car costs $11.70 dollars a kilo. That’s cheaper than steak and it comes with a three-year guarantee.)

As an Australian example, a Sydney industrial design firm, called Design Resource, redesigned the Eveready Dolphin flashlight for $80,000 in 1996. Eveready has since sold 10.5 million Dolphin flashlights valued at $189 million. The design fee accounts for 0.04% of the final purchase price.

Here’s an architectural comparison. For a 40 storey prestige office building costing $110 million, architectural fees are likely to amount to 2.1 percent and the full fee schedule (including quantity surveying) would be about 5.2 percent. At $50 per hour, that bill covers only 117,400 hours of thought or 57.2 person-years (less than .1 percent of the time spent designing your car).

As a residential example, an architect-designed, three-bedroom home costing $400,000 would have a full service fee of about 11 percent, theoretically representing a design input of 880 hours (at $50 per hour) or 22 weeks. In these circumstances it’s ridiculous to talk about Smart Houses.

Cloned Homes
Despite a generally low standard of technological sophistication, houses are increasingly mass-produced. In 1996, The Economist reported that almost one in three new single houses sold in the US was factory-built (approximately 340,000 homes). By that year, seven percent of the American population lived in nine million factory-built homes. At factories like that of Schult Homes in Middlebury, Indiana, workers fabricate up to 17 houses a day.

The idea of using standard components to produce houses in factories emerged with the late 19th century work-efficiency theories of Frederick Taylor, who influenced Henry Ford’s conveyer belt system of mass-producing automobiles. Those examples have often been quoted by modernist architects. However, any architectural consideration of mass production inevitably raises the aesthetic spectre of a soulless uniformity and anonymity.

In 1938, Alvar Aalto observed that architecture’s relationship to location inevitably required flexibility of design and construction. For him, mass-production had to arise from an organically flexible system, one dependant on natural forces. His standardisation was elastic.

Now the computer’s ability to orchestrate flexible mass production lines has brought Aalto’s vision within grasp.

Dynamics and Diversity
The way to avoid fabricating numbingly uniform houses is to set up a system of parts with potential to create an infinite variety of unique combinations. An excellent traditional example of such modular building technology is the brick. For a contemporary system, careful scrutiny of newly available mechanical and electronic systems is needed to design an integrated and dynamic house which can answer diverse and complex living and environmental requirements. In future, buildings will be seen as flexible systems that enable change—not as rigid containers which inhibit choice. That idea has formed the basis for our studio’s conception of a ‘Hyper House’ for the future.

Hyper House
Over the past decade, we have been designing a future house wrapped with a dynamic skin of computerised glass which could respond to the weather and demands from occupants via an array of sensors connected to a network of small computers. The building could store energy (heat) in hollow structural columns fitted with thermal batteries. Like a mammal, it would be able to conserve its ‘body’ temperature by controlling the permeability of its skin.

Our computer renders on these pages show a multi-purpose pavilion measuring 7 metres wide, 14 metres long and 3.5 metres high. Its rectangular (rounded corners) floor plan morphs into an elliptical roof. Two 3.5 metre-high columns (hollow cruciform sections of polished aluminium; basically oversized yacht masts) support the composite roof (recycled plastic) and contain thermal batteries. Suspended around the edge of the roof are aluminium window mullions incorporating downpipes. These frame the glass skin, which has versatile, adjustable, optical and thermal capabilities.

At the south end of the Hyper House, part of the glass skin performs like a television screen. In another area, the glazing broadcasts a computer-produced message to the neighbours: it’s programmed into an electrochromic layer of the glazing. An array of small computers (blue biscuits mounted on the glass), operate in concert, via infrared instructions, to control the appearance of the glass.

Sensitive Skin
The Hyper House’s dynamic skin is an outcome of a current revolution in electronically controllable chemical coatings for glass—technologies which allow subtle control of privacy, views, lighting, temperature and the opacity of the membrane.

Glazing now may be seen as a high-performance composite material incorporating electronic, holographic and mechanical ventilation systems. Options include low-profile sandwich sheets filled with aerogel (a highly transparent, micro-porous material with insulating properties), double-glazed and gas-filled sandwich panels, active chromogenic glazing including electrochromic coatings (a low voltage makes the coating opaque), thermochromic coatings (opacity controlled by temperature), passive chromogenic glazing such as photochromic coatings (opacity controlled by incident light), spectrally selective coatings (allowing the optical properties to vary with wavelength), angular dependence coatings, and holographic films (allowing the optical properties to vary according to different angles of incidence).

These treatments are being developed to allow the glazed facades of buildings to act as dynamic mediators between climate and occupants. Combinations of the coatings, applied to different areas of glazing, will establish an interactive membrane which could allow sophisticated exchanges of energy and information. The building facade could be both a high-tech cloak to react to the elements and a chameleon-like, wrap-around television screen.

Structure
The house is constructed as a discontinuous compression-tension structure. Hollow columns take all the compression loads. The roof structure is a modular composite beam, with a core of recycled plastic acting as insulation, with the internal upper edge scalloped to duct heated air from the roof so it can act as a thermal solar collector. This heat is sent to the thermal batteries in the columns. The upper surface of the roof is curved to shed water and matches the cross-section required for the beam’s span.

The floor is constructed with sandwich panels comprising an upper skin of wood composite (the floor surface), a light core of expanded foam and a lower skin (to form the ceiling surface for the floor below where required). These stressed skin beams are supported by channelled edge beams spanning the columns. The floor beams are manufactured and cut to size in the factory.

Service Pod
An external energy and service module, powered by liquid petroleum gas, boosts the integral heat pump and acts as a cheap primary or back-up

generator for electricity. External placement of the main heating, cooling and power-assist unit keeps the internal floor space clear. Attachment, servicing and upgrading is simplified. This module could also charge the battery for an electric car. An aerodynamic, weatherproof body would protect the mechanism. The equipment might be rented in the same way as a TV or VCR. If it malfunctions, it can be replaced. The service pod would arrive on the back of a small truck equipped with a jack to lift it into position. It would be mounted on a shock-absorbing base and located directly over self-sealing, quick-couple, connection points similar to those used in dialysis machines and the LPG outlets at any service station. These supply natural gas into the pod, electricity out of the pod and hot or cold air to and from the thermal storage system.

An accessible, easy-to-detach, mobile maintenance module (like those used for repairing aircraft) is proposed as the most effective way of packaging high technology for quick and unobtrusive repairs.

A noise suppression unit could be used to radiate quiet throughout the house.

Heat
A heat pump would drive a thermal cycle in the building to collect, dissipate, store and redistribute heat for year-round temperature control. The floors and roof would become a ducted circulation system (like a ‘printed circuit’) for heating and cooling. Air ducts would be cut into the composite floor and roof materials.

The air duct circuit could be specifically designed for the demands of a particular building. The circuit plan and cutting is a computerised operation, done just prior to the glue-lamination of the upper surface.

The heat pump system would be integral to the building structure in the way that blood is to the body. It would only be visible through secondary manifestations such as intake ports on the building facade, the fine computer-sensing arrays inside and outside and the forced-flow fan mountings. The real organisation of the heat pump—its visceral network of ducts and tubes—would be ubiquitous but also invisible.

Exothermic Paint
Internal walls could be coated with exothermic paint to create large and very efficient space heaters. When a current passes through exothermic paint, it radiates heat and can produce temperatures from 1 to 1000° Celsius (depending on paint thickness, chemical composition and electrode placement and voltages). Electrical connections are made with silver paste or copper mesh tape. Like conventional paint, exothermic paint can be brushed or sprayed onto a wide range of surfaces and shapes. It is soluble in organic solvents and dries in 20 minutes at room temperature. Rustol, a Japanese manufacturer, claims that the paint can generate equivalent amounts of heat with only one third of the power required by resistance heaters.

Integrated Service Loom
A key strategy of the Hyper House is to make space more equipotential—that is, to allow any range of functions in the space, or different ones at different times. The first step is to integrate all the services. These can be ducted along a floor channel or along the inside of the perimeter wall at chair rail height. All services would be contained within a single, flexible ‘loom’ (duct) that doesn’t require corners or joins like traditional plumbing. The loom takes sewage out, brings mains water, electricity, telephone and video in, and conducts data through. Appliances are plugged in. By such means, a space is essentially characterised by its facility for connection, for change, flexibility and a long life.

Bathroom
The bathroom is planned as a roll-in, roll-out module (extrapolated from aircraft toilet modules and designed around a mechanical vapour-recompression water recycling unit) with fold-out bath, toilet and hand basin. These fittings can be folded away to allow other uses of the bathroom space.

The mobile bathroom uses a flexible dry-break connection system for fast plumbing. All systems are intended to minimise water use. The profiles of the fittings would reduce water flow by up to 50 percent compared with traditional fittings. Without sacrificing comfort, these designs also do away with non-functional water holding space.

The toilet uses a dry flush system requiring only 10 percent of the water required by a traditional unit. It incorporates a non-mechanical system to liquify solid waste for efficient disposal. Sewage plumbing cross-sections can thus be greatly reduced. The toilet pan and shower head retract into the bathroom module and the bath folds up into the shower recess.

Grey water from the shower and hand basin would be distilled and purified in a mechanical vapour recompression unit. MVR technology works by creating a partial vacuum to boil water using less energy than usual. This water—which becomes drinkable—would be stored in a 44 gallon tank for reuse in the shower and basin and for flushing the toilet.

Architecture as Media
Japanese architect Toyo Ito has said that architecture must become understood as a ‘media suit’ to interact with and moderate the information environment—just as clothing is an extension of our skin and the automobile is a mechanical kind of suit or extension.

We must come to terms with an extraordinary interchangeability of form and function and the loss of traditional cause-and-effect relationships as sanctified by modernism. Constantly shifting functions can’t generate fixed physical forms.The appropriate response to diverse functions is to express multiple, fragmented and dislocated terrains and to separate the structure and facade (or interface).

There has been some history to the evolving schism between the appearance of a building and its structure. “The triumph of the superficial”—as Stuart Ewen calls it in All Consuming Images, is not a new phenomenon—but architects have yet to understand the consequences of this separation of skin (surface) and structure. Until the 19th century, architecture used load-bearing walls to hold up buildings. Although it was common to apply decoration to their surfaces, walls performed a key support function. Often there was a connection between the type of image used and the structure of the wall. By the 1830s, that connection between image, structure and construction method had gone. New methods employed an inner structural frame to support a building.

Whether they were ‘balloon frame’ structures covered by a skin or ‘structural frames’ covered by curtain walls, these new support systems meant that walls no longer played a structural role: they became increasingly ornamental. A multiplicity of styles became possible with the development of prefabricated panels, ready to be shaped, painted, or printed to reflect any image, any period.

With the skin disembodied, the roles of the engineer and the architect became increasingly separated: the engineer took care of the frame, the architect the skin. As a result, architecture has become a matter of appearances. Yet if most architecture is about surfaces, about applying decoration, about decorated sheds, what distinguishes this discipline from billboard design—or from any branch of graphics?

In an attempt to deal with today’s culture of the ‘dis-appearance’ of unstable images, architecture can reveal the transience of these unstable images by the use of such devices as the digital facade—where there is no cause-and-effect relationship between the building and its use.

Electronic facades can be both enclosure and spectacle. As Bernard Tschumi has argued, there can be no new Bauhaus. We are no longer dealing with coherent, well-defined disciplines but with the diversities of performance art, cinema, video and film production. A facade might be a media strip, a flow of projections and people, a city event.


Towards a Dynamic Interface
Buckminster Fuller described a process of technological evolution as ‘ephemeralisation’, where doing more for less could lead to an implosion of functions, one into another, until only a single, fine, multi-functional envelope would take the place of the separate cultures of structure, aesthetics and service systems. This notion was also the basis of Reyner Banham’s 1965 Un-house, a “standard of living package” containing all the necessities of modern life (shelter, food, energy, television) in an environment bubble of transparent plastic, inflated by the air conditioning output.

Rem Koolhaas sees architecture again splitting (as with the Gothic separation of painting and sculpture from building) into two streams; a seductive, aesthetically adventurous, virtual reality contrasted by physical, sensible, cost-effective, minimal and still desirable buildings.

Paul Virilio has observed that the essence of design today lies in information. Designing material form is now less significant than broadcasting images of forms via telecommunications. Immediacy and impact are more important than an object’s capacity to last.

Certainly architecture, in terms of information technology, is a control system for our experiences of the world. It can filter out the unwelcome and celebrate the desired. It can create an artificial reality.

Computer-defined virtual reality achieves instant environmental transformation, substituting mass and structure for electronic simulation. Architecture thus can be seen as a subset of a wider field of artificial reality. The infiltration of electronics into the vocabulary of building brings with it the capacity for connecting all systems within the building, and the building itself, to the surrounding world. Such a connection might simply produce enhanced communication with people outside the building or it could set up an interaction with, or a response to, the emission of data from any source or algorithm … the building becomes a dynamic topological process; a seismic boundary.

Buildings have potential to be dynamic interfaces.

Michael Trudgeon is a principal of Crowd Productions (industrial and graphic design) in Melbourne and a double architecture graduate from RMIT. Earlier concepts for the Hyper House have been widely exhibited and reported.

Computer visualisations by Glynis Teo

 

© 1996-8 Architecture Media Pty. Ltd. All rights reserved.
Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
Last modified: 30-Jan-98.
 

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Published online: 1 Nov 1998

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Architecture Australia, November 1998

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