THINKING OUT LOUD. UP HOUSE

continued

The roofing and wall panels come with integrated guttering profiles, which also serve to stiffen the panels. Most are slightly curved for the same reason. The panels are made of glass, polyurethane, ETFE foil cushions, stainless steel mesh and perforated sheet, aerogel insulating cores and plastic-metal composites. Most come with eletrochromic, photovoltaic and thermochromic coatings, computer control and feedback information and power connectors to make up a dynamic polyvalent building skin. Each panel produces power from incident solar radiation which is then used to power its own computer and the surplus power is fed back to the houseŐs central fuel cell, and back into the civic power grid. The panelŐs computer controls it's performance as a filter, also responding to the surrounding panels and the demands of the occupants. Daily, weekly and seasonal patterns of use are recorded and retained as a set of precedents or 'beliefs', to be refined and followed until changes in usage are detected. Some panels have OLED or liquid crystal screens printed on them so that they can act as complex graphic transmitters. The panels are all numbered and secured in sequence to the space frame and associated tensegrity structure with water proofed proprietary fixings. Automotive style weatherproof strips join panels to each other and to the deck.

It is of course no accident that the house looks aerodynamic. It is. Square block buildings are wasteful of energy, like big square trucks. Wind broadsiding these buildings creates pressure differences that suck out the internal carefully heated or cooled air making them big inefficient thermal bridges. Increased weather from climate change has made stream lining a safety issue for architecture. The final selected house envelope design was tested in a virtual climate-modelling wind tunnel, for this exact site, to ensure its performance in very bad weather.



By 7.30pm the house shell and service core is completed. From the second truck are wheeled the completed kitchen and bathroom modules. They are transported down the narrow track on big-wheeled furniture trolleys and delivered to the deck where they are rolled into the house to the first available service ports and locked down. Vanda will roll them into the locations she wants when the installers leave. They are easy to unplug and move. They use flexible dry break connection valves for coupling to water supply and sewage and sullage systems. For the house warming party, she is already planning, she will roll the kitchen out onto the deck for a barbecue and the bathroom close to the 'back door'.

As her furniture and intelligent partitions [with active sound damping and built in LED and fibre optic ambient lighting systems] are moved in she starts to scroll through the programming procedures for the house's temperature, humidity, solar, air movement and security settings. Like installing the system for a Macintosh computer, common sense options are assumed while infinite variations are possible if the user requests them. The computer controller's first task is to run a diagnostic check on the entire house to find out what systems are present and that they are all talking to each other. There is only one computer to program but the house's computer network is a semi autonomous distributed array of small computers in contact with each other [cellular automata], many self-powered from neighbouring photovoltaic membrane panels. Should there be a power cut or computer malfunction the consequences will be localised to a small area of the building and key functions like security and fire protection are reassigned or reconfigured to a temporary mode and the occupants notified. The computer program investigates the service network and the kitchen and bathroom modules and begins their operation by filling the bathroom hotwater storage tank from the mains water supply. This will be a rare occasion as the bathroom module, a 2 metre high, 2 metre long, 600mm wide stainless steel container, with foldout hydro massage bath, hand-basin and toilet, is based around a water recycling, filtration and a UV sterilisation unit. It uses mechanical vapour recompression technology, developed in the fruit juice concentrate and dairy industries, to operate rapidly and with minimum power. It will be mainly fed by roof rainwater run-off and will recycle up to 90 percent of water used in the bathroom. The toilet uses a non-mechanical pulverisation unit to break up solid waste requiring only a 50mm diameter exit pipe.



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Industrial Design Projects

FLEXI-FRAME:
A PROJECT EXPLORING NEW STRATEGIES FOR DESIGNING THE HOME


VICTORIAN CULTURAL NETWORK:
PUBLIC ACCESS NODE


PLANLESS HOUSE

THINKING OUT LOUD.
UP HOUSE


HYPERHOUSE ARCHITECTURE RESEARCH PROJECT AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SYDNEY

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