The bubble house, the computerized home, the floating cabin and more places we imagined you'd live in during the decades to come.
Posted 02.25.2011 at 11:23 am
4 Comments
Going by our archives, the only thing more hyped-up than flying cars and humanoid robot assistants were cool futuristic homes -- homes that could converge their walls to create new rooms, that could adapt to any environment, and that could play with your children while you took an afternoon nap. In terms of functionality, houses of today haven't changed much over the past fifty years. We still use good old brick, marble and cement as building materials. We still turn the microwave and TV on by our ourselves. For the most part, we still do our own chores. So what happened?
Click to launch the photo gallery.
In some cases, we dreamed too big, perhaps spiraling into ideas that were decades ahead of their time. In the early 1980s, a band of designers at the Illinois Institute of Technology predicted that by the mid-1990s, we'd be using computers to build fully computerized, shippable, energy-efficient modular housing units. Microprocessors would control the appliances and adjust the ambiance, while robots would hang the laundry. Humans, meanwhile, would lounge around the indoor spas (alas, still not a standard feature) in between watching programs on holographic television sets.
The future that never was makes our Roombas and plasma TVs sound a little quaint, doesn't it? We're happy to report, though, that we have plenty of reasons to feel content with our non-computerized houses. In April 1956, a group of researchers at MIT tested plastic houses, the draw being that plastic walls would be easy to hose down on cleaning days. A couple of decades later, Goodyear began testing air-bubble houses, which would situate your family within an unnervingly spacious translucent dome. These days, neither sound particularly appealing, given their vulnerability to natural disasters and local hooligans.
Dismally enough, we predicted in 1982 that in order to conserve natural resources, people living in the year 2000 would be forced to use low-flush toilets and "miserly" shower heads. As much as we love robots and computer-controlled appliances here at PopSci, we'll profess to choosing hot showers over talking microwaves any day of the week.
Click through our gallery to see more housing projects dreamed up between our pages.
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so if i built a house in which every interior wall space was a touchscreeen, and nearly every exterior wall space was solar cells, the roof had wind turbines... and all green technology stuff....
would popsci do an article on it?
@extremechiton
I would hope so. The materials to accomplish this are already on the market. One company that comes to mind is Konarka. Konarka manufactures a solar film that measures 1/3 the thickness of a human hair. The company has discussed laminating things such as vinyl siding and roofing shingles. Solar roofing shingles are already sold by a handfull of US manufacturers and even more European manufacturers.
A small start-up company in Great Britain is bring to market a similar film made up of LCDs and LEDs. The flat screen televisions that only recently found themselves on store shelves are quite obsolete. The future looks bright with inexpensive "wallpaper" like LED/LCD screens being installed on interior and exterior walls.
Imagine covering your interior walls with a film made up of LCDs/LEDs. using a remote control you now have the ability to not only change wall colors on the fly, but you can embed scenery, video, sticky notes, etc., all electronically and wirelessly. Imagine your ceiling is covered with a film made up of the same film. Now you have the ability to assign lighting to specifice areas of a room, different colors for room moods, view images, videos, - the uses are endless.
This technology already exists and will be rolling out in the the not too distant future; low power lighting; low power wall treatments; solar shingles and residential siding; highly efficient personal use wind turbines using superconductor tech?
So, yea. I think PopSci would be highly negligent if they did not discuss these emerging technologies through not one, but several articles.
Like Balki says, "Don't be ridiculous."
David Rollins
CTO - MyPowerMaker Co.
I like the floating home idea, but more inline with a floating Motel idea, but try getting funding for an idea like that is like trying to pull all your teeth without a numbing compound. In the United States we have a lot of lakes and man-made lakes that is going to waste. All that land and no one seem to know how to use it safely and still improve the ecosystem. Some of our lakes are large enough to build an Alantian type city on but no one has any idea in how to do it without destroying the ecosystem with pollution. With the incredible intelligent boost of the last century, a person would think America would had gained enough intelligence to know how to build an environmental city on the water.
"So what happened?"
We did not receive the energy resources required to make those dreams become true, that is what happened.
Many of those futuristic wet dreams hinge around humans doing less and machines doing more. Conveniently ignored is that the human population keeps on growing, that billions more would enjoy living the way Americans lived 30 years ago (and who can blame them?), and that despite our machines becoming more and more efficient we are using more energy every year. We do not need a technological revolution or more efficiency, we need a value revolution.
Our definition of a better life needs to change. As long as living better means consuming more energy, food, or resources than the generations before, we will not get far. A lot of what seemed possible just is not sustainable. It is time for the party to come to an end. With the help of the remaining fossil fuels we need to create a world that is independent of fossil fuels.
Karsten
--
www.polluteless.com
Practical Advice to Pollute Less