“A container village as temporary housing for a sustainable architecture lab seems well suited to the type of structure and the recycling aspect compliments the sustainability goal. For projects done in, let’s say, the span of just one season where you are working in the milder climate months, lighter structures like hexayurt, traditional yurts and other rigid tents, and such would probably be cheaper. But with a more protracted project -let’s say, a couple years altogether to get your permanent community development and a continuously rotating group of student/workers- the higher cost -and heavier handling- of the containers starts balancing against multiple replacements of light structures and a higher level of comfort. I recall that Arcosanti, which has been 30 years and counting under construction, used concrete tube dormitory housing based on this logic, with structures similar to those tube hotel cottages in Dasparkhotel (http://www.dasparkhotel.net/index.php), but customizable by the students. But, again, this is a heavy thing to move around.

Though they obviously have their limitations in terms of cost, weight, and bulkiness, I think the great virtue of the container is that it has no ceiling in the potential standard of living it can support with ingenuity -which is remarkable for something that’s so simple and not even purpose-built. So you have this remarkable situation where you see them being used by everyone from the dirt-poor to the ultra-wealthy. You could purpose-build this. Basically, a container is steel frame box unit which links together and to which everything else retrofits. You could deliberately make that with 12 pieces of structural steel profile and a clever corner connection scheme. This is what a lot of the Modernist prefabs are based on -which really goes back to stuff the likes of Pierre Koenig was doing mid-century. But, ironically, because this is purpose-built rather than based on an industrial cast-off they can’t get even close to the cost of a container mod.

I think that one of the greatest blunders of ‘low cost’ and social housing development is the well-intentioned but confused notion of dignity through apparent class parity that grew out of the colossal failures of mass social housing in the mid 20th century. What this means is that there’s a notion that the more consistent low-cost housing is in appearance with middle-class housing the less stigma there is associated with being poor and more incentive for the poor to aspire toward middle-class ‘values’. (whatever the hell those actually are…) Thus there is a compulsion to pursue public housing as a low-cost simulation of a middle-class standard of living, which invariably results in stylistically standard-looking housing made with sub-standard construction and materials. The problem is that most middle-class housing, particularly in the US, is already made out of crap to begin with. It’s already been reduced to nothing but a simulation of some long-past historic level of quality produced at the tightest cost-efficiency its very primitive building technology can support. So there’s little you can do here to cut corners in labor cost -which is most of the cost (up to 80% in some parts of the US). You have to whittle-away what little you can in materials overhead, so you end up with a crappier version of something that’s crap to begin with, costs only a little less, and the poor pay more -as they so often do- because it deteriorates much faster, utilities and such fail more frequently, the materials are more prone to make occupants sick from latent toxicity, and it has statistically higher odds of going up in flames or being ruined in storms and earthquakes. (the US has a higher statistical rate of housing fires than any other western nation, and it mostly relates to what suburban housing is made of) This is one of my chief pet-peeves with programs like Habitat for Humanity. As much good as they do, they are very dedicated to this notion of apparent class parity, and the reason is that they make houses to please bankers, not suit the needs of their occupants. Bankers want all houses in a given place to look the same to maintain consistency in property values. The banality of suburbia is deliberate. The architecture is optimized for market fungibility based on the lowest common denominator in middle-class aesthetics.

Now, he may have been an egotistical kook in person, but Frank Lloyd Wright had a very smart idea about the issue of low cost housing that has long been largely ignored. Through his ‘Usonian’ designs, he tried to demonstrate the concept that the key to effective low-cost housing lay in using careful design to maximize the performance -in terms of durability and comfort- from a minimum of high quality materials and space. The result may look inconsistent with the ‘standard’ forms of housing because it’s adapted to a higher standard of efficiency, but the performance matters more than appearance and with smart design it should still look beautiful even if different. In other words, you apply a higher standard for design the lower the cost -not the other way around- in order to achieve parity of _performance_, not appearance, through efficiency. Efficiency is where you realize economy, not relative quality of materials -which today don’t amount to much of the cost of housing anymore no matter how much you spend on them. With labor at sometimes 80% of cost, any significant savings in labor from use of a more expensive but higher performance material and construction method, like structural alloy profiles, is still a net savings.

The dignity one might think you can give people through a cosmetic simulation of a supposedly higher ‘class-standard’ of housing disappears quickly when the pipes burst, the glued-on styrofoam moulding starts falling off the walls, the carpet gives your kids asthma, and the whole thing goes up in flames one night. There is much more dignity in a simple, modest, quality structure that actually works. But we tend to overlook the obvious logic of that because of class hubris and a fear of actual class parity. (upper classes always fear being dragged-down by lower classes -Malthusian logic…_) We’re conditioned to think that society is a class ladder everyone is instinctually compelled to climb or die trying and that life is naturally supposed to have a sliding economic scale of standard of living, safety, and comfort in order to help drive people up that ladder. But really, what sane person today actually aspires to the gilded circus freak Lifestyles of the Rich And Famous? Most of them seem to have the same sense of aesthetics as the late Saddam Hussein. In a civilized society you base minimum standards of living on the highest base-line health and productivity you can realize, not the peculiar excesses of certain social classes.

I sum-up this concept with the assertion that simple structures of high performance matched to high adaptability produce a high standard of living with high cost-efficiency and a high aesthetic potential through a high potential for self-expression. Reduce structure to its elemental, in terms of structural performance rather than use/function, then let the inhabitant make of it what he will instead of imposing things on him. There’s a school of subtlety in design that says architecture is a theater stage for life and that the most beautiful/outstanding things on that stage should be its occupants. This premise is demonstrated by the better, more thoughtful, examples of Modernist architecture and the lofting movement of the late 70s and 80s. Loft apartments started as a simple strategy of adaptive reuse among urban artists exploiting the property bargains offered by urban decay for their much-needed workspace. (artists always face this conundrum of needing lots of space on the cheap when the market for their work tends to be located in upper-class urban areas) But then they discovered the virtues of having a simple but large volumetric space you could freely adapt to your needs -for comfort sake- a bit more than simply by what artwork you hung on the walls. You could do most of what used to be associated strictly with penthouse living, making these virtually abandoned urban spaces into private palaces hidden amongst the grunge. And, as artists, they could realize this with their own hands. The loft came to represent a new casual lifestyle within the urban environment. By the end of the 80s the association with artists combined with the potential for interior design freedom made lofts chic and real estate developers started building ready-made lofts as a mainstream upper-middle-class form of urban housing, realizing that the inherent adaptability made it more attractive to tenants while being as cost-efficient as commercial office buildings. Most abandoned urban industrial zones are now gone. The loft created a way for them all to be gentrified out of existence!

Ever since I’ve noticed this I’ve been wondering why all apartment buildings aren’t lofts, why most urban architecture isn’t ‘functionally generic’ at the human scale and concerned more with function at the level of society, habitat, and landscape, and, for that matter, why all suburban housing isn’t based on structures that are, essentially, free-standing loft units? After all, the first thing most Americans do when they move into a new house is gut it and renovate the interior -it’s their only option for expressing themselves when home exteriors are required to be uniformly banal for the sake of property values. And they keep on doing that at a steadily increasing pace -particularly with bathrooms and kitchens that now get renovated an average of every 3 years. (because houses STILL rot from the bathroom out…) So why aren’t houses -and everything else- deliberately designed to make doing this as easy and efficient as possible -particularly given how expensive it is and how much land-fill waste it produces?

This comes back to the issue of low-cost housing in that, if you concentrated the public investment in such housing on super-durable high-perfomance structure that is functionally generic and very simple in form -a ‘backplane’ for habitat- then left the rest to the inhabitants you might produce a very lively environment with no ceiling in potential comfort and and standard of living at a very low cost. if it was focused on creating ‘habitat space’ and not ‘apartment units’ in the way that office buildings make ‘office space’, it might enjoy that same sort of potential economy of scale. Then you could exploit the sweat-equity of inhabitants in making their dwellings in exactly the same way IKEA makes furniture cheap by getting the end-user to do the end-assembly.

As I mentioned earlier, in the 60s proponents of plug-in architecture explored the idea of open frame structures into which appliance-like dwelling modules could be plugged into. The overall super-structure provided a utilities/infrastructure backplane for these dwellings to plug into but otherwise imposed no limitations on the size and shape of the individual dwellings beyond the limits of their connection grid. It tried, relying on the lightness and openness of space frames, to become virtually invisible. So the design of the superstructure revolved around how volumetric space was organized into an overall habitat. In effect, it was landscape design. Architecture merged with civil engineering. Problem was, the nature of space-filling space frames is such that they don’t integrate well into any natural landscape. It was anti-gravity architecture -like the architecture people make in Virtual Reality. So it never got from SciFi ‘down to Earth’. Indeed, some of the crazier of these concepts proposed vast planar truss structures suspended over whole existing cities like a highway overpass flying over slum zones and relegating the lower urban landscape to something akin to the lower biomes of a rainforest. Like trees in a forest suppressing undergrowth by dominating the canopy and the energy of sunlight, these things seemed to be trying to kill-off the old cities by cutting off their access to the sky!

But if you understand the design objective as the creation of a landscape for people to inhabit, not the design of discrete housing, you can start thinking about the urban habitat within the context of the larger natural environment it resides in and seek integration through the borrowing of forms and rules from nature as well as human social and psychological needs.

So what am I getting at here? Well, suppose you designed ‘public housing’ not as housing but as a community environment comprised of the most absolutely adaptive and functionally generic loft space possible -a habitat backplane little more than a roofed skeleton with gridded integral utilities infrastructure- and then let its occupants retrofit it to their hearts content, with assistance from community groups that are focused on fabrication at that retrofit level. You don’t impose any particular use on this space other than to define spatial zones that preference more public or private modes of activity, facilitate certain flows of human traffic, or have certain bioclimatic characteristics. So all the activities of a whole community could be hosted in this backplane.

I’ve long had this fantasy of trying to repurpose a modest sized office building or parking tower into a village; a ‘proto-arcology’. These structures are designed for perpetual repurposing -even if that repurposing almost never is imagined outside of the context of commercial office space. Recently, I’ve been toying with this notion of an outquisition theme comic book called Tribe about a loose community of young contemporary ‘maker heroes’ (with a mysterious benefactor who only communicates by email and instant messaging) who solve environmental, economic, and social problems and provide disaster/emergency aid around the globe in MacGyver-style fashion through their home-brew technology. Sort of like Thunderbirds for the actual 21s century. It’s intended as a light entertainment vehicle for introducing people to Post-Industrial culture and the emerging technologies enabling that cultural evolution -and perhaps with cameos by some of today’s personalities in the movement. In order to facilitate its efforts, the Tribe has various temporary and permanent bases -made mostly through the adaptive reuse of found structures- in unusual places all over the globe between which they travel in their various home-brew EcoTech vehicles. I imagined one of these being in an abandoned post-global-recession suburban edge city where they appropriate a lone abandoned office building, strip it to its steel and concrete skeleton, and remake it through retrofit into a proto-arcology complete with vertical farming, renewable energy systems, workshops and labs, grid computing array, terraced gardens, vehicle depot, and large apartments that seem luxurious but with that luxury made by their own hands and ingenuity and often by recycling found industrial artifacts. (and, of course, cargotecture comes into this too for various deployable buildings and, in particular, for a marine base made of containers lost from ships and deployed to farm the South Pacific Gyre for recyclables with robotic wingsail skimmer craft) Alas, all far beyond my own artistic talents and collaboration is dead in the comics industry today.”