Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Modular Housing

Here is a link to the Sybarite Modular House I mentioned yesterday, posted over at Inhabit. Modular buildings such as this present a very effective economy of scale to work with, but what really appeals to me is the ability to add/subtract structure with relative ease.

If a basic landscape could be established (or re-established) for a particular Sup>urb, then modular apartments could be progressively added as the landscape gains resilience. Being modular, the whole conglomeration would not require monolithic rectangular buildings so sunlight to the natural landscape could be retained more effectively. This also works in with ideas I had about migrating cities. The challenge would be to avoid the homogenised appearance of many 'plug-in' apartments. Fundamentally what I am steering towards is a modular system, but taking advantage of central vertical farming practices.

And so the in-head design laboratory powers up. There will be an angle to take with this, where all the elements work out- I think again it is best to look for natural inspiration. An idea I had last night was to look at how spiders build nurseries in long grass, for example....

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