The story of why we aren’t all living in Dymaxion houses today is a convoluted epic of business failure (for one thing, starting up a production line for houses using cutting-edge aerospace technology was something that had never been done before; for another, Bucky’s business sense was not, sadly, as good as his design sense) that has been recounted in numerous biographies. What interests me about it is that it’s a far more humane approach to the problem of providing housing for the masses than his Brutalist contemporaries, whose designs tended to be fixed, immovable, made cheaply out of low-end materials, and built with high density mass housing in mind rather than low impact customizability. It was also way ahead of the field in terms of awareness of environmental constraints; while we could design better today, we’d be making incremental tweaks, whereas Bucky came up with the original idea of modular, lightweight, mobile low-impact housing ab initio.
Charlie Stross: “Why are your houses so heavy?”
From http://technoccult.net/archives/2011/05/25/charlie-stross-on-buckminster-fuller-why-are-your-houses-so-heavy/
PlanIT is building a city in Portugal as a test of its “Urban OS” concept, hoping to sell “instant cities” in China and Inida in the future.
“It’s a bit of a bloodbath really,” says Lewis, who began studying it while still at Microsoft. “They’re using techniques older than God. All of the technology is being used on the design end. No one can look into the future and ask ‘If I put better glass into this building, what does that do for energy efficiency down the road?’ You have developers building to do a quick flip, and eventually the building becomes so inefficient and so expensive to fix they have to knock it down. There’s no process and no lifecycle management. The industry is fragmented and the consolidation that’s happened everywhere else hasn’t happened here.”
A Harvard Business School case study (pdf) published earlier this year echoed this view. Despite being a $4.6 trillion global industry, construction firms have had little incentive to integrate, consolidate, or otherwise become more productive. While non-farming industries have made productivity gains averaging 80% since the 1960s, the construction industry has become 20% less productive over that span. “Studies suggested that up to 75% of construction activities typically added no value,” the authors noted.
A City in the Cloud: Living PlanIT Redefines Cities as Softwar
PlanIT plans to make constructing buildings, and cities, as efficient as manufacturing automobiles.
Buckminster Fuller, thou art avenged.
PlanIT will have competition from open_sailing‘s open source SwarmOS, which open_sailing co-founder Cesar Harrada considers a spiritual successor to The Walking City.
See also:
Cybersyn
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/onX4RxFf-10/
The Dymaxion car reconstruction project mentioned here previously has been completed. For better or worse, it was just rebuilt as a one-off art project. Until the end of the month, you’ll be able to see it at the Ivorypress Art+Books gallery in Madrid.
Guardian: Norman Foster’s back-to-front car
(Thanks Bill!)
From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/e88KKpC89f4/
