The other day I noticed an article on autoblog.com suggesting that Apple should buy Tesla, the highly popular EV manufacturer. This could be a marriage made in heaven for all those tech geeks who can’t be parted from their iPhones and lust after the latest in sustainable urban transportation. However, the idea of Apple designing an Electric Vehicle is not new; it has been kicking around for more than a year or so in the press. But could you imagine a sleek white car with a gorilla glass windshield gliding noiselessly down the street with you inside being totally connected to the internet and all your friends … autonomous drive anyone?
But, as usual, that got me thinking: why stop at cars? Housing is getting more automated, you can pull up your thermostat on your smart phone and fewer people have land lines. The housing system could tell you how much energy you used this week and have your refrigerator send you an e-mail saying “feed me.” How about your house security system, door and window locks, not to mention the nanny cam. How fast is your Wi-Fi system? Then there is your entertainment system, internet based information networks, who needs the Peacock anymore? You get the picture, literally.
Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 was another great idea from the not so distant past – preassembled housing units stacked on top of each other to create and vibrant and interesting housing community. Presumably inexpensive, but again, an idea ahead of its time, each unit ended up being highly customized to stack up in interesting ways, driving costs above affordability. Fast forward 45 years with new technology these units could now be designed by information technology companies, a new opportunity for all those underemployed young architects instead of designing video games. These homes could be designed and then built in factories by robots and shipped to the site, ready to stack up and plug-in … an answer to affordable housing for young urban professionals? You move in and you are now connected in more ways than one. Google glasses and a smart watch … a brave new world … who needs an iPhone in your pocket when you could live in one?
As we celebrate the launch of our updated Fabrication webpage, we wanted to highlight one of our featured models—The Hengqin Innovation Center in Zhuhai, China.
The two distinct program elements of the Hengqin Innovation Center, the Conference Center and the Innovation Research Center, are expressed as two complementary architectural forms: the Jewel and the Mountain.
Visit our new Fabrication Page to get the behind the scenes of building this model (link in bio)!
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