Picture a long, warehouse like open space - with the exterior shell pierced continuously by large openings for doors and windows. Inside this shell walls and flooring would be 'lego'ed' together - with 4'x6' panels being an example standard dimensional size. Floors and walls could even be simple and inexpensive blank slates for the real do-it-yourselfer to paint or cover further.
Obvious benefits from this design that spur further thought and needed research include:
Factory construction of interior panels.
This provides a likely significant reduction of construction waste with opportunities for manufacturing line style efficiencies leveraging design standards and high quality material controls.
Easy upgrade-ability of the home's interior or even size.
If the place next to your condo becomes available for purchase - you can do so and add that space to your home with a relatively minor floor-plan re-design: replace a wall with a doorway. Of course - pulling out the other persons interior to replace with your own would be just as possible. Perhaps the other person opted for a modern interior - all blacks & whites with shiny metals... and you wanted a wood floor and paneling. Simply call the office and put in an order to have the walls & floors replaced. The order goes out to perhaps a special on-site factory where the panels are built to order, carried up and slotted into-place. No sawdust necessary. Old panels could be taken down, and if in good condition refurbished and re-used elsewhere - freecycle for the win.
You may have caught that this interior space allotment & ability to re-build is fairly similar to standard retail construction. A large space subdivided according to renter's needs. You're renting or buying square footage - not a plot of land or a building. You could see a 3,000 sq ft right next to a 1,000 or even a 500 sq ft space. Follow that with a 6,000 sq ft flat that just cannibalized three smaller spaces into one.
This mix is absolutely intentional! After starting to read Jane Jacob's Cities and the Wealth of Nations I realized that if I plan to truly re-create a dynamic & healthy hyper urban environment - I cannot segregate neighborhoods from their support-structures. By allowing dynamic subdivision based on the residents desires rather than some master-planner (with some initial % limits to prevent totally overwhelming sectors with retail or other uses.) we can encourage a dynamic and healthy 'street-life' - even inside.
A recent example of modular, factory based yet flexible construction are the LivingHomes designed by architects Ray Kappe and Keran Timberlake. Note that these are built in their entirety - rather than inside a pre-made shell. I like my pre-made shell simply because it provides structure beyond the cubical design usually mandated by this style of construction.
Check out the tour - very cool!
Love that fire-place too - Denatured Alcohol Fire in a box. http://www.ecosmartfire.com/
I wonder what else it could burn? Reminder - consumer & retail waste is being processed on-site and one normal output of that digestion is flammable gases like methane and syn-gas. I plan to use most of that for boiling water to make electricity - but if it's possible (Doesn't smell bad or render toxic fumes into homes), I'd want to route some to fire-places like this or even cook stoves.
back to boxes inside a shell... with utilities nestled between shell and interior walls. I'm still trying to figure out a sanitary drainage system that doesn't mandate restrooms and kitchens always in the same patterns or places. I want each home to be as flexible as possible - no rubber stamp layouts please. But other than the drains - the inputs could and would be routed in grids that either are part of each panel or are always in standard paths in order to be built around.
Hot fresh water will circulate continuously for space heating and hot water taps. Instant on hot water will dramatically reduce potable water waste from the tap as you won't have to run the water to empty out the pipes of cold water thats in the way. Also - warm water circulating would provide perfect feeds for on location on-demand *hot* water taps. The warm would be used in sinks, clothes washers and space heating.
Electricity especially will be routed everywhere - panels near the floor and along the ceiling will plug into the next.
It will be simplicity itself to place lighting and plugs. Note that inside this facility there will be Direct Current (DC )as well as Alternating (AC) current.
DC is more efficient and is generated by default with most alternate energy sources like Solar & Wind turbines. The average consumer already has a *ton* of DC powered devices. Every device you have that has a wall wart (black plastic bricks attached to the cable) is a DC device. Anything that can plug into the car's cigarette lighter is also potentially a viable user of this DC current. But the real draw on that power line will be the DC driven LED lighting. LEDs are typically less luminous individually than the usual incandescent bulb. So we solve that with clusters or strings of LED that together up to comparable lumen's.
Picture the interior of a science fiction star ship... panels that lock together - easily removed to view the underlying utilities. Light strips lighting up the floor and changing color depending on the situation. Think about how the light changes to red during emergencies if you're having a hard time picturing it. (Red is easier on your eyes and doesn't cause contraction of the pupils at night). However, I'm not necessarily thinking of 'mood-lighting' per say or even simply white lights, though that's definitely an option - but lighting that cycles over the course of the day though the solar spectra of early morning... afternoon and evening in conjunction with outside conditions.
Most lighting will likely be fiber-optic based with a central light-box lit by arrays of LED's. Plastic or glass cables running through each panel would route light to where it is desired and useful. An externally controlled color-wheel is simple to do in this situation, preventing the need for multiple color (and therefore more expensive) LEDs. If the light-boxes are powerful enough you could have panels without any LED's attached and instead just jump light across air filled junctions between panels.
This fiber-optic lighting fits right in with the solar light collectors that would be placed on the green-roof of the GaiaShip. These sunlight driven lighting systems use fiber-optics to route the light into a building's interior. Join the LED & Sunlight systems together and you cut the need to drive the LED systems to a bare-minimum - if at all during the day.
A requirement I set on the GaiaShip's design says that sunlight has to penetrate to *every* living space. And - I want to *maximize* the amount of actively usable living space on the ground (5-12 stories - most residential) . Now - how to do that without having shadowy and gloomy courtyards where nothing grows except really tall skinny trees or huge and horrible vertical wall concrete canyons.
The sloping walls dressed with elevated greenery and mini-gardens on most levels open up the spaces between buildings, but the interior of multi-story buildings need light too. Make them too thick and you have one-sided apartments and condos who only see daylight out one side. I wanted to avoid that if possible but still have interior public walkways in order to move between private and public spaces without going outside or 'underground' (+first floor) into the parking & utility sections.
So, Channeling sunlight where I want it in the interior becomes necessary.
I see a combination of multi-level hallways capped by skylights for the larger, higher end residential and retail spaces (think indoor mall); high ceiling hallways with 'solar-tubes' (flexible reflective tubes) spotlights for interior garden spaces; and courtyards with either open or covered roofs). These courtyards and interior hallways will be dictated by the shell of the building. Solar light tubes and fibers however will be routed between upper floor walls and down to lower levels in order to share the wealth of free light deep into the interior.
On a final note - the factory wouldn't have to be 'owned' by the developers- in fact it's a prime candidate for an entrepreneur or two or more to seize upon and provide a valued service to this mini-city. 10,000 people is a pretty sizable dedicated market - and that's only for the first one!
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