Directions for housing are reflective of the way our society will develop in the future In the future, homeowners may grow their houses instead of building them
The house is a machine for living in,“ wrote Corbusier in his 1923 manifesto `Towards a 1923 manifesto `Towards a New Architecture'. Since then, science fiction and popular science have so co-opted our imaginations that even in the realm of domestic architecture we are compelled to prophesise the house of the future as one that serves up a smorgasbord of technological innovation.
We've come to expect a future where the domestic drudgery of the hausfrau has become a robot's domain, where every human desire is satisfied with the touch of a button or the popping of a pill, and the future home is literally a place where dreams come true. This technocratic dream-vision calls to mind an accompanying aesthetic images of modular, repeatable, hard-edged, mechanised, customisable and highly dense but antiseptic dwelling units, rising unerringly into the sky on foundations of steel. Though images of pods, pads, blobs, bubbles, tin cans, domes and capsules in every manner of plastic, steel and glass extrusion have populated our minds in the last century, this exuberant future is slow in coming.
Climate change, population pressure and talk of egalitarian living have added a sobering `green' design mandate to Corbusier's `house is a machine...'. This marks a subtle shift towards a more planet-conscious mode of human habitation.
On one end, new calls to design the Zero Carbon house have brought about an uncomfortable handholding between architecture and ecology.
The Zero Carbon house has so far found its pragmatic expression in solar panels, heat exchangers, woodpellet burners, wind turbines, wellinsulated triple-glazed window sections, rain-water harvesting and high-tech waste recycling systems. A Zero Carbon house must ideally live off the grid, but in the very worst case, it must return to the grid at least the energy it borrows for its necessary functions. It seems that our palpable fear associated with scarcity of resources, land, water, and affordability, has robbed the early 21st-century home and our future imaginings of the glamour and pizzazz of the hyper-evocative house of the century just past.
On the other end, perhaps more ambitious in scale, but less ambitious in immediacy, the behemoth visions of Italian-American architect Paolo Soleri's gargantuan arcologies express this `green' intention. He coined the term `arcology' to denote the bringing together of architecture and ecology. As self-sufficient hyperstructures, these human colonies are meant to compact into three dimensions the otherwise sprawling suburban colonisation of the earth.
Arcologies are dense condensed cities that depend on efficient resource distribution, in contrast to the sloppy inefficiency of suburban land use. Happily, while Soleri has found a solution to the cancerous spread of suburbia, most gravityconscious human dwellers seek quite literally to lay claim to a piece of mother earth for themselves.
Arcologies may satisfy on the level of green-dwelling practices, but the question left unresolved is whether the scale and possibilities of these mega-city marvels floating islands, submerged cities, orbital colonies and other civil-engineering wonders proposed by Soleri are in keeping with natural human habitat.
Unhappily, the skyward ascent of his galactic towers may only satisfy the early fans of Star Trek.
Given these uneasy future partnerships and propositions between man and nature, architecture and ecology, and our 21st-century penchant for technological fixes, should we not step on the brakes to first answer the more weighty questions of human dwelling and habitation as a way to solve these conundrums?
After all, ecology can be understood thus: ecology a word brought to popular scientific use in 1836 by German biologist Ernst Haeckel, comes from the Greek `oikos' meaning `household' and logos meaning science in essence, the “study of the household of nature“. Perhaps it is time to invert `house as a machine for living in', with the notion of the house as a `living machine'.
The `living machine' paradigm of human habitation could substitute for the missing link between architecture and ecology. If self-sustaining, green, primordial shelter forms the primary driving force of architecture as nature, then, feebly playing God, a new kind of bio-engineering introduces the `growing' house.
The “living machine'', first written about by Van Der Ryn and Calthorpe, in 1986, offers a counter to `green design' with its dominant, anthropocentric world view that lacks ecological consciousness.
Quietly and in the margins, this inverse proposition `living machine' continues an alternative stream of futuristic rumination. Researchers like Rachel Armstrong have devised a way to bring architecture and biology together. She believes that it is possible to create chemically engineered building materials that can grow, self-repair, and respond to changes.
“In the future, homeowners may grow their houses instead of building them“. This vision emerges from MIT's media lab where Mitchell Joachim and his colleagues are hard at work to integrate houses quite literally grow into the ecosystem.
The Fab Hab Tree House, as this new house of the future is called, uses a gardening method known as pleaching to fold natural but trained growth of trees into other natural or recyclable materials such as clay and straw.
“Synthetic biologists“ (as they're now called) have engineered bacteria to perform simple tasks, like changing colour or illuminating under certain circumstances. This has marvellous `clean technology' interior-decorating possibilities for the homemaker of the future.
A three-part symbiosis must exist between man and nature, the house and the city, an individual and his society if we are not to offend the future perfect. So, if the house expresses the relationship between an individual and his society what will our `living machines' look like?
