The future home might be more than a greener garden and a larger plasma screen television set. The future home could be the answer to such emerging challenges as growing energy demands and environmental concerns. The Vitra Design Museum, in collaboration with the Art Center College of Design, proposes new ideas for our home in their traveling exhibition Open House: Intelligent Living by Design.
The exhibition focuses on 15 forward thinking projects that re-imagine our way of life with big ideas in both small projects, such as sustainable single family homes, and massive ones, such as dense green urban communes.
The event runs from April 14 until July 1, 2007, at the Art Center College of Design Wind Tunnel on 950 S. Raymond Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91105. It is free to the public.
Here is a quick introduction to a pair of homes that will showcased at the exhibit:
IwamotoScott’s “Jellyfish House” is designed, like the sea creature, to co-exist with its environment. Its skin is designed to interact with its site – in this case, a decommissioned military base in the San Francisco Bay. The most geographically desirable parts of the site have toxic soil that requires remediation.
One of the most exciting features about the Jellyfish House is that it has detoxification technologies directly built into it. The Jellyfish House captures, stores, and filters rain water for use in the home. Cavities in the building’s skin filter the rain water and redirect it to an underground storage unit. The windows are coated to absorb harmful UV rays, allowing only blue, visible light to emerge. The building skin also contains “water jackets” of hydrated salt that fluctuate between solid and liquid states heating or cooling the surrounding air.
SU11’s dunehouse was developed as a single-family prototype house intended for the desert regions of Nevada. Despite the inhospitable conditions of the area, with its extreme temperatures and lack of water, the area now houses the fastest growing population in the US.
The dunehouse, which is inspired by cactuses and desert animals that adjust to the dynamic conditions of the desert, harvests and distributes solar energy evenly throughout its building. Its form, essentially a shell, doesn’t seek to dominate the landscape and instead seamlessly blends into its natural surroundings.
