Theo: notes from 2011 / mildly edited
See also
Imagine building a real house with Logo-like bricks
Either there is a robot that can travel around and melt the filament anywhere. The robot has an arm that can be moved anywhereand put into any position in order to melt the ABS plastic or whenever material.
Alternatively there is a stationary 3-D printer that can print out moderately sized parts. Robots then take these parts and move them to the site where they are then put into place.
Specification for the "goop" - otherwise known as 3-D Ink or filament.
- It can be melted and reused many times.
- It is UV resistant
- the melting point is somewhat above the boiling point of water.
- It is water resistant and resistant to most other solvents and liquids occurring normally.
- It can be used to form insulated walls
Special goop can be used because it has special properties
- the ability to transport hot and cold water without deforming
- the ability to conduct electricity
- the ability to be an insulator around group that can conduct electricity
- the ability to be transparent
- the ability to be opaque and have a color
- the ability to be reinforced or to act as a floor span of some limited distance
- The ability to act as a wall and support a roof
Imagine a number of people are living together in the country. There are old people middle-aged people and children. Some are brothers and sisters. Others are just met each other. They lived together in a collection of buildings. There's a large communal kitchen and several smaller kitchens. It's all a rambling one-story structure with courtyards, a treehouse, and even a chicken coop. Everybody has at least one room that they can call their very own.
When guests come to stay, the bots get busy and a suite is added to the complex to suit just their needs depending on if it's just one person or a family. Perhaps it is a just a young cousin visiting and so two children's bedrooms are combined and more is added on to make a big room just for the weekend.
Every window in the complex has something nice to look at. But if there is a time when sunlight comes in that window and shines too hard on a painting than the window is moved to another position during this period.
If somebody has hurt their foot, then the floors are adjusted so that there are no steps. When there is a big football game and the young people want to make a big hullabaloo then the walls of the media room are enlarged and make thicker.
The colors of the house are adjusted according to the seasons and the traditional colors of upcoming holidays. There also adjusted if there is a birth, marriage or death and if there are any other significant events in the community. During the summer the walls are a little bit higher, the openings of little bit larger and the walls are more porous to allow breezes to pass through. In the winter when it's cold, the ceilings are a bit lower and there are fewer Windows.
When a lot of the children are studying China at school, a house becomes much more like one of the garden houses in Sujou. When the region is celebrating some historical event in the American West, then the complex has more of a feeling of a frontier town.
With each of these changes, things like shutters work like shutters. Screen door slam like screen door should slam because they are in fact screen doors.
Does something being made out of goop not make it the thing it is? Yes and no. Architecture is but a stage set. Architecture is but a stage where people act out their lives.
There is nothing stopping a house made out of timber with walls constructed of wattle and daub and Window pains made of spun glass. There is nothing stopping the whole complex being made out of tent material. After all, with free electricity and plenty of robots you can have anything you want. But those things take more planning and thinking and caring. It all depends on your particular priorities at the moment. If your particular focus is on parenting – that is to say looking after both your children and your father and mother at the same time then your priority may not be on historically authentic architecture. If on the other hand you are double income no kids then an exquisite dedication to historical accuracy may be of the essence.
It can as show itself as it was - either by what it displays on its wall publicly or what it provides as a view in your augmented reality.
- Like any work of art, you can view the architects statement and view the sketches.
- View its references and other similar buildings
- colors and shapes will change
You will go to a national park and choose an empty site. The next day your house or whatever house you want has been built - and will be there for the duration of your stay. Soon after you leave the site will return to the near primeval state it was in before your arrival.
Your house will be a Sol Lewitt. An instruction of what to build.
The street can look like 1856 or 1956 - it can look like whatever the residents want it to look like
Everybody get x thousands of kilos of goop they can do whatever they want with. Build a monk's retreat. Join together and build a skyscraper or they can go on the road.
You can only have one house at a time. Or two because you nee a second while the first is being built or torn down.
Some people will never move and others will move all the time.
The lots will be bigger the streets will be smaller.
It will be the end of architecture as we know it. Any building can be anything. any building can morph into anything else.So what is it? What is its essence?
It's a bit like thinking of heaven. If you were to go to heaven which person would you want to be? A 16-year-old, your 36-year-old self or the mature person? certainly there will be very skillful designers. People who know how to morph buildings better than others. But the transition will be as drastic as it was between designers with good paper and designers who are good in CAD/CAM systems.
All buildings will be tested before they are built. Users will be able to travel through the building and try everything out before it's actually built.
The architect, the engineers and the client will all visit the building many times before the first shovel full of earth is moved.
Currently most architects produce sheets of paper which are the instructions as to how to build the building. They are just a set of semantics. Yes, most clients can look at a floor plan and make a pretty good guess of what the instructions are saying. The building of the future will be something that you will look through your 3-D goggles and you will be able to see almost a perfect representation of the building as it will be built.
What will the aesthetics of the future be like? What will be the golden rules of architecture?
Will it all be merely state sets and representations of game assets? Or will new theories of architecture emerge? Of course it's the latter, the series that will emerge are likely to be strange and almost unrecognizable to us.
All of this is architecture that is:
- Firm commodious and delightful
- Architecture is frozen music (Goethe)
- Form follows function (Sullivan?)
- Less is More (Breuer)
- The house is a machine for living (Le Corbusier)
- Less is a bore (Venturi)
Architecture as:
- displays of quantitative information
- Timeless energy aware artifacts.
- Built by robots who assemble components created by 3D printers
- Updated frequently because the printers use a reusable 3D goop.
The building will breathe and undulate - filtering air, generate electricity, store power, clean water, nurture useful bacteria, store data, provide entertainment
It will be easier to live anywhere because the building will take care of the utilities