99 Stellavista, The Robot House ARCH 8866 - Lars Spuybroek || Georgia Institute of Technology
At what point does the house itself become an inhabitant?
The studio used the notion of a robot house to investigate a broad range of questions about inhabitation. For example, do we by definition inhabit a house with previous or even imagined inhabitants? Are all houses haunted, in a way? Or, what is the nature of service? When a house “serves” the inhabitant, does that involve the famous master-slave relationship so deeply studied by Hegel – after all, the word “domination” stems from the Latin domus, “house.” What, then, does comfort mean? Does that mean a house can fully take over our lives, close its own curtains and, via the so-called “internet of things,” replenish the groceries and order our pizza? How does the automation of robotics relate to our own automated behavior such as habits? Or, when we design a fully robotized house, how far can that go in its interaction with the inhabitant, and is the robot-house then still a house or is it simply a second inhabitant, like Gloria Tremayne?
The Poché House
Zachary Brown & Richard Dempsey
The Poche House was conceived in an effort to simultaneously liberate poche in the traditionally understood sense, and to create new potentials of poche which we have referred to as Anti-Poche. Anti-Poche is created through the development of an organizational machine used to reorganize the existing plan of the now demolished Carlton House, former London residence of the Prince Regent.This is achieved through a systematic rearrangement of spaces. Overlaps begin to occur, and resulting extending the overlapping of already overlapping elements. Through this, Anti-Poche changes in degree creating multiple spatial types and configurations. The new liberated poche is known as the Patrolled space that expands what were servant’s passages within the walls of the original mansion establishing a new power dynamic by surrounding the other spaces of the house. The next degree into Anti-Poche are the Domestic spaces, these spaces contain the expected contents of a house.The Lounge is the next degree of Anti-Poche, which is spatially undefined by design allowing for the freedom of happenings of any kind to occur beyond any programmatic assignment. Moving another degree into the Anti-Poche leads to the Confessional, this quasi-religious association of space juxtaposes against the anarchic quality of the Lounge. The final and smallest layer of Anti-Poche are Cages. Cages are for the confinement of residents of the house who’s sexual proclivities require such confinement. The nature of Anti-Poche’s spatial assignments of space is to cause a harsh threshold or juxtaposition between degrees. Dress code, patterning, and vertical changes are used to make movement between degrees of Anti Poche understood.
The Mirror House
Anna Kiningham & Maria Pastorelli
Echo invents a new etiquette of inhabitation such that spaces to sleep, prepare meals, and take shelter are discovered and identified as need arises, changing with each visitor to the home.Where one cooks, another may find play or rest. Gardens and reflecting pools entice a rambling wanderer to continue through the space, always looking ahead toward the next space to go. Geometries that originally prescribed spaces for one particular occupation, the bay window for staying, the turret for circulating, now, at new scales, become a room, filled with smaller rooms for discovery, some protected for sheltered inhabitation, most open to the sky and the unending fields and forest around the home.
The Electronic House
Sara Laudeman & Yuhang Li & Marta McClelland
The Electronic House focuses on the responsiveness of a house to its inhabitants, as well as the reverse. The Electronic House suggests that the relationship between the inhabitants and the architecture is a game which then creates spaces of interplay and internal tension. In order to frame this discussion, the project uses the idea of a work/play artists commune.The residency length is selected by inhabitants and ranges between 4 weeks and one year. Clusters are created from a cellular grid (architecture) based on agent (inhabitant) actions as well as the occupancy level. These clusters are then transformed across the playing field according to a set of rules. There are rules for the effect that agents have, rules for the effect that clusters have, and rules for the way the house itself interacts within the field. This creates spaces of constructive awkwardness and direct tension, causing the inhabitants and the architecture to work with and against one another in turn. Practically, this means that the house is constantly shifting as it responds to the habits, patterns, and uses of its inhabitants. This means that there might be fewer issues of lost space, and that the issues of habit and play (or memory and fantasy) are balanced against one another.
The Deformable House
Hyung Kim & Conner Smith
Deformation House is an aggregation of eccentric housing morphologies and a restless exploration of interactions in a siteless, pre-existing, rigid, empty structure. There are constant conversations between private, shared, and void spaces to negotiate a peaceful order in the structure, which stipulates varied levels of permission in shared spaces networks that can potentially extend to another structure. The dwelling sequences are developed through an iterative process that abides by random orthogonal expansions and limited collisions that force upwards migration. Each move speculating a space in the main structural apparatus determines the shift in one's overall movements and paths within the house after each vertical migration. Restless disputes and accords in co-inhabiting shared spaces and adaptions to realities of access and prohibited forges obscure deformations in one's behavior and life patterns. This house interrogates behavioral adaptations to erratic spatial conditions that undergo cyclical changes.
Transformable House
Michael Koliner & Carly Todd
Unheimlich is a transformable dwelling that houses 10 residents for an unparalleled living experience. Partnered with The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, this home responds to the users interactions with the space and constructs new spatial conditions on a continual basis. Unheimlich records and interprets all of the inhabitants’ use of the building and rearranges the walls to alter their habitual behavior. The people of Unheimlich have the luxury of living in a building that constantly provides new conditions that introduce each of them with an exciting adjustment to their everyday life.