Re:Vivarium
Eric Hunting
things I wanted to explore with this experiment. We're very rapidly
moving toward the technical capability for robust plug-in
architecture. (we have the raw technology to pull it off. It's just
been delayed by the resistance to change in the housing industry) Look
at the Jeriko House (http://jerikohouse.com/), the iT House (http://www.tkithouse.com/
), the Kit Haus (http://www.kithaus.com/) and the Furniture House
series of designs by Shigeru Ban ( http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_HOUSES/SBA_HOUSES_14/SBA_Houses_14.html
http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_HOUSES/SBA_HOUSES_17/SBA_Houses_17.html
http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_HOUSES/SBA_HOUSES_20/SBA_Houses_20.html
http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_HOUSES/SBA_HOUSES_25/SBA_Houses_25.html
http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_HOUSES/SBA_HOUSES_34/SBA_Houses_34.html)
At first glance you think; OK, it's Modernist prefab again. House as
product. But underneath there are these open structural systems that
are doing for house construction what the standardized architecture of
the IBM PC did for personal computing, encoding a lot of engineering
and pre-assembly labor into small light modular components created in
an industrial ecology so that, at the high level of the end-user, it's
like Lego and things go together intuitively with a couple of hand
tools. In the case of the Jeriko and iT houses based on T-slot
profiles, this is just about a de-facto public domain technology,
which means a zillion companies around the globe could come in at any
time and start making compatible hardware. We're tantalizingly close
to factoring out the 'experts' in basic housing construction just like
we did with the PC where the engineers are all down in the sub-
components, companies don't actually manufacture computers they just
do design and assemble-on-demand, and now kids can build computers in
minutes with parts made all over the world. Within 20 years you'll be
going to places like IKEA and Home Depot and designing your own home
by picking parts out of catalogs or showrooms, having them delivered
by truck, and then assembling most of them yourself with about the
same ease you put in furniture and home appliances. Shigeru Ban's
designs hint at how this ends up in its simplest form; roof and floor
as a extensible intelligent backplane providing all your utilities and
everything else plugs into them like they were cards in a PC's
motherboard with that motherboard actually smart enough to tell you,
through a PC interface, where you can and can't safely put stuff for
the sake of structural integrity and building codes. And it will all
come apart as easily as it goes together. Obviously, not all housing
will be like this. The rich will still want their architect-designed,
contractor-built, hand-crafted, pro-decorator finished Mara Lago
Monstrosities. But the mainstream could be driven to this out of the
compulsion for cost-efficiency in a world of much tighter-fisted
bankers and unpredictable real estate markets. Mortgages just don't
make sense anymore. We can't keep trying to house ourselves with such
an anachronistic mechanism in a world where a few billion people are
going to be forced to move over the next two decades and property
values everywhere on the globe will be in flux. We have to maximize
the potential of industrialization in housing to eliminate this
nonsense of shelter through life-long debt, even though that never did
quite work with the Detroit model. The PC industry model is the next
best alternative. The bankers are lucky this recent real estate melt-
down didn't happen a few years later because if it did a lot of people
would be defaulting and disappearing
_taking_their_whole_homes_with_them! Remote BLM land would be
sprouting all these 'squatters camps' overnight that look like Palm
Springs!
But at the moment no one is really experimenting with social aspects
of this technology and so there's no communication of its potential
into the culture. It's still all architects in control of
implementation and demonstration of this technology -all experts, rich
foilks houses, and magazine architecture- because housing remains so
'high-stakes' and in our culture we tend to pawn off everything that
seems high-stakes to experts. So I thought to myself, lets open this
dialogue with something that's easy and low-stakes. So I came up with
this idea of architectural recreation; building as play. We all have a
latent affinity for this that just doesn't often get expressed as
adults. And I devised a casual venue for this play based on the notion
of a community club-house whose objective is simply comfort,
entertainment, and pleasure with the likely building technologies -
Grid Beam and such- cheap, simple, and easy.
The analogy to homeless-built structures is apt. The apparent
grandfather of the concept of freely adaptive community architecture
(who I've only recently become aware of thanks to articles Micheal has
been forwarding to me), 1960s Danish artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, was
originally inspired toward this idea by observing how gypsy camps had
been using open free-standing market pavilions during the winter. He
was charged with the project of designing a purpose-built alternative
for this because a community had become averse to the gypsy presence.
This parallels my own recent thoughts about the use of free-standing
pavilions as the basis of cohabitation using secondary free-standing
structures within them, which is also another of Shigeru Ban's
interests. (http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_HOUSES/SBA_HOUSES_24/SBA_Houses_24.html
) I've long been intending to use steel frame park pavilions (http://www.poligon.com/pages/shelters.htm
) as the basis of my own low-cost non-toxic housing. They're like
clear-span free-standing studio lofts you can enclose with any
combination of glass, screen, SIP, or insulated built-up walls and
then freely outfit with free-standing furnishings and partitions.
Nieuwenhuys took this notion to the scale of an entire city which he
dubbed New Babylon and trying to gather information about it I was
amazed at the parallels to many of the concepts I had studied in the
past with adaptive architecture. For instance, he arrived at the
notion of functionally generic architecture in a hierarchy of scale
based on frequency of adaptation so that on the macro-structure scale
you had this large very generic form of structure whose form was more
democratically devised and very slowly evolved with the needs of the
community while at the human scale it allowed for spontaneous adaption
on an individual level. This paralleled my own concepts of 'tectonic'
architecture for the Aquarian marine colonies of TMP where you had a
functional generic macrostructure intended to create a naturalistic
environment by mimicking (and when used on land merging with) natural
landscape through flowing concentric garden-covered terraces like the
lines on a topographic map. The result is artificial mountains,
valleys, calderas, archipelagos and atols looking rather like this;
http://www.tuvie.com/future-new-town-of-gwanggyo-with-plantations-around-the-terraces#more-943
http://www.emilioambaszandassociates.com/portfolio/portfolio.cfm?Pid=9
Within the terraces everything is generic space given purpose by
retrofit -just like those park shelter pavilions- and for this purpose
I suggested the use of UtiliHab -my name for the eventual open source
standard version of the Jeriko House/iT House building technology.
This is a freely evolvable macrostructure. Every terrace level can be
evolved in profile through large modular elements of surgical
demolition and reconstruction thus it can change shape freely with
time and community needs just like the natural landscape itself
evolves under the forces of the elements. But, because it has to be
made with geopolymer concrete and built to huge scales it can't evolve
very fast. So it's changes get dictated and implemented by the
collective society while at the human scale things evolve much freer
and faster based on personal preference and peer-negotiation.
Finding Nieuwenhuys' paper describing New Babylon (http://www.notbored.org/new-babylon.html
) I was particularly struck by this passage;
"Homo Ludens
Term used for the first time by Johann Huizinga in a book of that
title, subtitled: 'A Study of the Element of Play in Culture.' In his
foreword, Huizinga speaks of the man who plays in still-measured
terms: 'In the course of time we have come to realize that, after all,
we are not as reasonable as the eighteenth century, with its worship
of reason and its naive optimism, assumed; hence, modern fashion
inclines to designate our species as Homo Farber: Man the Maker. But
though faber may not be quite so dubious as sapiens, it is, as a name
specific to the human being, even less appropriate, seeing that many
animals, too, are makers. There is a third function, however,
applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as
reasoning and making -- namely, playing. It seems to me that next to
Homo Faber, and perhaps on the same level as Homo Sapiens, Homo
Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in our nomenclature.'
This discretion in the use of the term can perhaps be explained by the
slight importance utilitarian society gives to play. Homo Ludens has
only ever been a rarely manifested modality of Homo Sapiens, a
condition that, unlike [the condition of] Homo Faber, largely goes
unnoticed. Huizinga, for whom playing is a flight from 'real' life,
does not distance himself in his interpretation from the norms of
utilitarian society. And, in his historical analysis of the theme, he
quite rightly situates Homo Ludens in the upper echelons of society,
more precisely within the propertied leisure class, and not in the
laboring masses. However, by separating capacity for work and
production, automation has opened the way to a massive increase in the
number of Homo Ludens. Huizinga nevertheless had the merit of pointing
to the Homo Ludens dormant within each of us. The liberation of man's
ludic potential is directly linked to his liberation as a social being."
This was 1974, folks! Consider how this commentary relates to the
current Maker movement. Here he's offered us a look at the ultimate
outcome, back before there was any notion of personal fabrication
beyond the traditional DIY hobbies. And this idea brought me right
back to childhood in the suburbs and the struggle to make and build in
a culture that seemed very determined to suppress that activity and
push kids into the malls and then beat up on them for hanging out
there like vagrants. And then we have this;
"In order to grasp this, let us take the example of a local cafe, a
very quiet cafe whose atmosphere would suddenly become animated when
some new arrival puts money in the jukebox. In New Babylon, each
person can at any moment, in any place, alter the ambiance by
adjusting the sound volume, the brightness of the light, the olfactive
ambiance or the temperature. Should a small group enter a space, then
the ordering of that space can become something else. By articulating
many small spaces, one can create a space of more ample dimensions, or
vice versa. One can also change the form of a space with new
entrances, or by blocking the old ones; by adding or removing stairs,
bridges, ladders, ramps, etc. With a minimum of effort, one can arrive
at any desired modification. Moreover, one has at hand a varied range
of partitions of different materials, textures and colors; different
too in their thermo-acoustic qualities. The stairs, bridges and pipes
are themselves of varied construction and form. Through the
combination of irregular, barely practicable surfaces, of smooth
ramps, narrow passages, acute angles, etc., certain spaces become
selective. This would be the case with those one gets to by a rope
ladder or pole, and which will be the favorite places of children and
young people. The marginal sectors, which perch on the side of a
mountain or along the coastline and which are, given their situation,
less frequented, will be the preferred choice of retired or sick
people."
A local cafe... This made me ponder what might have happened if
Nieuwenhuys had ever teamed up with Ken Issacs because his Living
Structures could have easily suited a simple demonstration like this.
They were based on this similar premise of allowing 'regular folk' to
make and freely adapt their own simple structures. With enough clear-
span space they could have used a simple pre-made kit-of-parts set
using knob-bolt fasteners rather than regular bolts or hex-keys (so
you need no tools to connect things) and some basic furnishing designs
to create a cafe where people could change everything around as they
liked. And because the setting would be casual -a cafe-, the materials
cheap and disposable, and the scale such that people couldn't
seriously hurt themselves with anything you wouldn't have to be so
serious about things. You wouldn't worry about breakage or some master
design. You treat the free adaptation of the space as play and let
people go do what they feel. That's when I realized that, hey, we have
Grid Beam and T-slot right now. We can do this today! So we can use
this idea of a space for novice architectural play as a low-stakes low-
seriousness way to experiment with and explore the social aspects of
peer community development.
Yes, there is an implicit notion of scarcity in the Vivarium through
the limited volume of space and the need to deal with that through
negotiation. I don't think that goes away at sea or in space. In fact,
it may be more important because of the constraints on structural
design in those environments. Their potential space may be unlimited
but all functional space is built with key constraints on how it's
built and linked to the rest of civilization. You can make things of
any size, but, with the currently available technology, maybe not
entirely by yourself. Thus if you must build a structure communally,
you have an issue of a community negotiation over its design and
everyone's share and use of space. Seasteaders are of the opinion that
the sea can be 'homesteaded' like the 19th century western American
frontier. That might be possible with the advent of nanotechnology.
But right now that may be very difficult if not impossible because of
the logistics of the location; the large minimum economies of scale
marine and air transportation demand, the large minimum sizes of
structures that can withstand the marine environment's extremes, and
the limits in economy of scale and cost-efficiency of building at sea
and sourcing your raw materials. So life at sea may, of necessity, be
limited to an urban lifestyle.
Similar situation in space. The basic limitation of living in space is
that you live indoors all your life. To cope with that it helps to
have large volume spaces to live in, but these are complex to make and
difficult to maintain alone -even with the help of early non-AI
robots. The logistics of life support favors large contiguous habitat
environments rather than small ones as they are more inherently stable
and safe. Aquarium logistics -the bigger your 'tank' the more time it
takes for problems to become critical, giving you more time to deal
with them. You also have the same problem of large economies of scale
in transportation systems and a further amplified issue of reliance on
a local communal skill base for survival when the rest of civilization
can be months, even years, away. So the lifestyle in space is also
likely to be a predominately urban one, though perhaps quite generous
in potential personal space even if that space is physically linked
with others. Most of the ills associated with urban living relate in
some way to the urban habitat's resistance to the free evolution its
residents need. So in these new environments making an urban lifestyle
work has a lot to do with making the urban habitat freely evolvable.
My vision of the large orbital habitat -called EvoHab (http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/EvoHab)-
has some interesting parallels to this New Babylon environment
because I realized that real cities don't spring up fully formed, they
start small and they evolve into progressively larger structures. So,
realistically. if you think of a place in orbit as a destination and a
space habitat as a community and not just a machine/spacecraft with a
fixed duty life you need a building system that allows for free and
continuous maintenance and evolution of the habitat in all directions.
Looking at the many proposed space habitat designs of the past and
present, I realized none of them are practical because they are all
structures of fixed design and not 'ways of inhabiting' space. But
Marshal Savage's original Asgard habitat concept was interesting in
that it isolated the pressure containment hull system from the other
functional elements of the habitat, allowing them to be more modular
and more reconfigurable. It was an evolution of the concept of the
TransHab pneumatic hull system, expanded to a titanic scale.
Savage was very enamored of this concept of a vast transparent hull
bubble that really let people feel like they lived in the space
environment and not some simulated version of Earth. The problem was
that we don't know how to make large contiguous membrane structures -
we're talking kilometers here- on-orbit and his notion of using water
within that membrane structure as a radiation shield was dubious. It's
hard to stabilize and it's not all that transparent. (beyond 15
meters, light penetration drops sharply. That might seem very thick,
but bear in mind we're talking a low density medium and structures
kilometers wide) So I devised a composite hull system based on modular
components supported by a geodesic space frame which separates
shielding from pressure containment so they could be individually
supported by modular parts we probably could readily make on orbit. It
would be virtually transparent by being light-transmitting, the
exterior covered in image-corrected heliostats, the interior with
matching holographic membrane light emitters, and the two linked by a
thin optical fiber with an IR/UV band-pass filter linked to PV cells.
This hull may be many meters thick but, inside, it would look nearly
invisible.
The habitable structures are then based on a primary polar core truss -
like the core truss of a TransHab module- which is elaborated into an
'urban tree' extending into the open hull volume that sports
deployable systems and dwellings that attach to truss branches like
fruit on a tree and are freely demountable. The 'tree' analogy is
further reinforced by using a companion truss and trellis system (the
Skygarden system) of semi-permeable ceramic tubing which serves as
anchor and hydroponics nutrient supply for plants, this greenery
interspersing much of the structure. Personal dwellings would be light
volumetric structures made mostly of fabric covered semi-rigid foam
and light alloy, composite, perhaps even wood or bamboo framing.
Imagine a child's play house made of fabric covered foam with an
external frame for added rigidity. The smallest would derive from the
example of the Japanese Capsule Hotel unit. Larger ones would be
clusters of rooms with cage-like gazebos made of that hydroponic space
frame system open to the 'outside' (the open volume of the hull).
This whole structural system would be freely evolvable -hence the
name. It could scale from pressurized habitat modules for on-orbit-
built spacecraft -BeamShips, so called because the core truss of the
habitat extends along an external truss beam to which propulsion and
power systems can be retrofit- to space colonies many cubic hectares
in volume in spherical, cylindrical, or clustered forms, again with
the polar truss extending externally to host power systems,
stationkeeping propulsion, industrial, and docking facilities. People
could design BeamShips to settle different orbital locations, turning
them into modest stations upon arrival and then evolving their
structures in-place incrementally into a habitat of any size. So, yes,
this would likely be considered an urban environment whose residents
would constantly be negotiating over the space and location needs of
individuals, life support systems, and the overall habitat form.
Nanotechnology may ultimately change the logistics of living in these
remote places but it depends not so much on the capabilities of
nanotechnology itself as the amount of active artificial intelligence
it can encode, because total automation is not just based on
fabrication ability but the autonomous intelligence to direct it. This
may mean a convergence of information systems, industrial systems, and
structural systems such that things aren't made but rather self-
generated. Systems that intelligently transform themselves to suit a
purpose rather than systems that make things to suit a purpose. In
TMP2 I anticipate this as a technology called NanoFoam, which derives
from an idea of 60s futurist architect Rudolph Doernach. NanoFoam is a
diamondoid structural material that hosts its own colonies of
nanoassemblers and information systems within an internal vascular
system and 'organelles'. A result of the desire to increasingly make
nanofabrication systems transportable by letting them make 'chrysalis'
process containment vessels on-demand, NanoFoam transforms itself into
things instead of making them. And it contains enough active
intelligence to be completely autonomous in this process. So you could
pre-colonize the planet Mars by sending a soccer-ball sized mass of
this material there, it would take root and assimilate its strata like
a plant, and you just tell it what color you want on the walls,
drapes, and carpet when you get there. That would make 'homesteading'
the universe pretty easy but still wouldn't make the fact that you're
days to years away from other human contact more palatable -though
your habitat's AI might be a nice conversationalist and stalwart
companion and NanoFoam might make for very convincing fembots.
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
On Mar 15, 2009, at 4:53 AM, openmanufacturing group wrote:
> =
> =
> =
> =
> =
> =
> =
> =
> ======================================================================
> TOPIC: Vivarium
> http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/t/2217fe170db90ca0?hl=en
> =
> =
> =
> =
> =
> =
> =
> =
> ======================================================================
>
> == 1 of 1 ==
> Date: Sat, Mar 14 2009 9:19 am
> From: "Paul D. Fernhout"
>
>
> Interesting ideas.
>
> For some reason I was reminded of the homeless building shelters in
> tunnels;
> for example:
> http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE1DB1330F932A35752C0A96F948260&pagewanted=all
> "Transit officials have no firm figures on the number of homeless
> living in
> the tunnels, but say they have found several hundred furnished
> rooms, some
> complete with running water, electricity, furniture and such
> conveniences as
> televisions, within the labyrinthine New York City subway system. The
> transit police fear that the homeless are increasingly risking death
> to have
> such a space for their own. ''They all want their own little piece of
> turf,'' Sgt. John Greco, head of the Homeless Outreach Program,
> said. ''It
> is definitely getting much worse.''"
>
> Or this:
> http://gliving.com/dark-days-documentary-about-nyc-homeless-living-underground/
> "I have decided to start looking at what might happen to the
> millions of
> people living on the economic edge. Those people living meager pay
> check to
> pay check. What will happen to them as even the low paying jobs
> begin to
> evaporate? Here is a film which was made in the 2000, which features a
> community of homeless people living in the tunnel systems of New
> York City.
> A glimpse of life on the edge."
>
> And other similar things:
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=homeless+living+in+tunnel
>
> It's interesting how much of your proposal has to do with the social
> aspects
> of managing as shared space. Again, I think the issue of what it
> means to
> have "equity" in something comes up, as well as the distinction
> between
> being a "citizen" and being something else (employee, customer,
> consumer,
> attendee, guest, participant, whatever). Citizens may have some
> rights in a
> space, customers and participants rarely do.
>
> Also, by just assuming electricity, waste disposal, communications,
> shelter,
> production infrastructure, and presumably some materials, you've
> removed a
> lot of what is really interesting about envisioning alternative ways
> of life.
>
> Many months ago on Slashdot there was an article about a company
> (Google?)
> that let employees design their own office in creative ways linking
> to lots
> of pictures.
>
> This also reminds me some of what goes on in the backlots of movie
> studios
> or on big sound stages.
>
> By the way, I thought at first from the title you might be referring
> to this
> other famous "Vivarium" project by Alan Kay and others related to
> cutting-edge design and computing set in a "magnet" school:
> "Vivarium History: The Vivarium Program"
> http://www.beanblossom.in.us/larryy/VivHist.html
>
> Anyway, what I find most interesting about your idea is how, in a
> sense,
> after you have stripped away the interesting sustainability issues
> related
> to OM, you have shown how, even if people are just making cardboard
> castles
> in a shared space, the social issues are ones that most of us in the
> USA may
> be unprepared to deal with on a reflexive basis. So, it's an
> interesting
> thought experiment in that way. How do we deal with others who want
> to paint
> "our" cardboard castle, or tear it down to build one of their own?
>
> Still, if (sometimes mentally ill) homeless people living together in
> tunnels can work this out, you would think the rest of us could? Or
> maybe
> sometimes being mentally ill is an advantage (given our society's
> dominant
> paradigm of war and competition)? See:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Hearts_(1966_film)
> "King of Hearts (original French title: Le Roi de Cœur) is a 1966
> French
> film set in a small town in France near the end of World War I. As a
> German
> army retreats they booby-trap the whole town to explode. The locals
> flee
> and, left to their own devices, a gaggle of cheerful lunatics escape
> the
> asylum and take over the town — thoroughly confusing the lone Scottish
> soldier who has been dispatched to defuse the bomb. ... The film
> ends with
> the question of who is more insane, those in the asylum or the
> soldiers on
> the battlefield."
>
> Maybe implicit in your idea is also scarcity -- scarcity of space.
> If there
> were 10000 Vivariums in every city, maybe people would not be
> talking about
> thirty day leases on floor space and so on? So, in that sense, would
> the
> emerging culture of rare Vivariums really be applicable to, say,
> life on
> artificial island on the ocean or artificial habitats in outer space
> (where
> presumably, at least for many centuries, space would be plentiful
> again?)
>
> --Paul Fernhout
>
> Eric Hunting wrote:
>> Vivarium - A Proposal for a Modest Experiment in P2P Architecture
>>
>> [soundtrack: Constructors - Zatoichi OST]
>>
>> The Drive To Build: