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Housing
This section is dedicated to discussing the basic architectural program for the Open House project and the potential building systems and design concepts to accommodate it. The home construction is the core project tying together all other featured building projects. It represents our 'core narrative', its stages of development establishing the basic structure for the documentary.
The basic program of the home is a modest sized two bedroom, one bath dwelling for a couple or small family with optional office or bedroom flex room. However, many special features are included to provide an example of a contemporary home of the near future that functions as an 'engine for unplugging'. These include a potential off-grid energy system, alternative utilities, workshop spaces for both heavy and light fabrication work and a home microfarm based on hydroponics/aquaponics to provide supplemental food as well as Living Machine waste processing. The home will also take a novel approach to environmental sustainability through the use of recycled building materials and a physically low-impact design that relies on pier foundations and a relatively light adaptive overall structure. (as opposed to the more conventional approach of sustainability as based on a choice of heavy 'green' materials like earth)
The overarching feature of the program is that the house must be buildable and demountable by one to a few people with no great skills, relying extensively on digital fabrication as a means to reduce labor using production tools that will later be permanent fixtures of the home workshop. At present our most likely choice of building technology for this is the open source homebuilding system developed by WikiHouse built using EcoBoard or similar wheatboard sheet material combined with the use of a drainage plane and rain screen cladding system and helical or pin pier foundation system.
Alternatively, there is an option to employ adaptive reuse of an existing industrial/commercial space or an open source high-performance structure using the Pavilion design approach noted in the sub-section. This has a great advantage in allowing the use of an urban location and for demonstrating the lifestyle concept of Mobilism with the use of furnitecture designs. However, at present there do not seem to be many open source high performance structure systems and finding a suitable industrial/commercial building may be providential.
The are several basic design approaches currently considered to meet the existing program.
Integrated Home design - This is a single-unit home integrating all its significant features. This offers the most direct application of existing WikiHouse designs. However, it is a large structure that would be more expensive and more challenging for one person to construct while having more complications in meeting regional building codes.
Tiny House design - This is a home based on a design deriving from typical Tiny House designs and featuring a typical approach employing sleeping lofts and possible use of a wheeled foundation chassis. Space constraints would preclude integration of workshop and microfarm, and so these would need to be created as separate stand-alone pods and located nearby. Space constraints make this less suitable for families and would preclude the use of some kinds of home automation and domestic robotics. However, it is a very economical approach that readily skirts many build code requirements in many locations.
Compound Home design - The compound concept is similar to the Tiny House concept in that it relies on the use of very small self-contained structures. However, it assigns the role of a single or pair of more specialized rooms to each unit structure, the collection of structures grouped together in a 'compound' linked by walkways or a 'court' to form the overall home. Since this so greatly reduces the scale of structures (down to shed or friggebod scale), it is the most accessible to the lone builder, greatly minimizes the obstruction of building codes, and is also the most convenient for prefabrication and team development. It also offers a good analog for Hackbase development based on more remote locations. But the most powerful advantage is the great flexibility of the concept as the home can be freely adapted with a change of its largely self-contained units. This, however, is all balanced against one critical limitation; it is not well suited to locations with broad seasonal climate shifts as one must go outside to move between the parts of the compound. Nonetheless, this has been a popular approach for many Modernist home designs.
Pavilion design - This concept takes the compound concept and puts it under a common large-span shelter, replacing the use of unit structures with furnitecture elements that define the role of space in a common open-plan interior environment. The common shelter may be a repurposed commercial/industrial building or a new high-performance 'skybreak' structure based on a minimalist pavilion form. This is the most futurist approach likely for this project and is this author's personal favorite as it represents a way to demonstrate the likely Mobilist lifestyles of the future based on frequent mobility among functionally generic urban landscapes. It is also the most user-accessible based on the ease of furnitecture fabrication and, aesthetically, it also best suits the open living theme of the project. But it is severely limited by a lack of open source high performance structure designs at present and the providential nature of adaptive reuse opportunities. Thus this is probably a less-likely approach than the others.
Floating Home design - Employing any of the previous concepts for its basic structure, this approach puts the home on some type of floating platform which may incorporate outdoor features such as gardening containers and man-made landscape features as integral elements. The point to this approach is to take advantage of possible waterfront location opportunities or possible adaptive reuse of old marine structures while also drawing attention to the imminent impacts of Global Warming and sea level rise on coastal communities. The chief challenge of this concept is that, while open source building systems for floating structures do indeed exist at present, ones suitable to carry the weight of full scale buildings may not. Typical contemporary floating homes rely on foam core concrete platforms or modular pontoons of proprietary design. However, there exist roto-molded cubic pontoon systems of modest scale that can be assembled like lego bricks and could be redeveloped in open source forms.