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CLOUDING RESIDENTIAL ARCHITECTURES REORGANIZING URBAN FABRIC AND THE REVOLUTION OF DWELLING Our understanding of residential living with regard to architecture has recently become antiquated. As it exists, our daily lives are organized within the paradigm of separate destinations with roads between them. If more people live in an area, we need roads between our homes and everything else we do for everyone to utilize. If we continue within this paradigm, increased DENSITY WILL NOT HELP US improve our quality of life. So much of our infrastructure exists to bring us to our destinations. If the number of people and the number of destinations increase, the infrastructure needed will also necessarily increase. What we need to do is to decrease the need for separate destinations and bring everything into immediate proximity to our residential environment. Our technology has already undergone a revolution in bringing digital content into the palm of our hand. Our digital lives are rapidly gaining prominence in our daily routines. Our phones and even our cars have adapted to our digital needs while our architecture and urban organization remains in a predigital paradigm. Nanotechnology and broadband internet have the ability to take whole department stores and shrink them down to the size of jump drives, delivered straight into our pockets. The rules of having to travel to a destination other than your home for simple functions and wares such as work, social interaction, research, entertainment and exercise no longer stand. Our digital world has transcended traditional infrastructure and become a highly accessible cloud not reliant on any specific central location. When our residential architecture undergoes the next revolution it will be in the same spirit. To cloud our urban and suburban structure is to provide the same functions we are so accustomed to without the strain on centralized locations and urban infrastructure. Bring the malls, offices, and libraries to us rather than packing us into crowded offices, clogged freeways, and full parking decks. The leap toward a clouded architecture is drastic reorganization and redensification affecting every paradigm we have used to structure our cities since the invention of automobiles. As our lives change, so do our priorities. We can build where we had previously overlooked- in the spaces between our suburban homes. The new model for residential architecture is not necessarily about the living structure; it is about how we use it, where we put it, and how it interacts with the rest of our lives.
Farming: The thought of growing your own produce is intimidating for many, but it is one of the fastest growing do-it-yourself trends in our culture today. Urban, suburban and periurban agriculture have counted for sometimes as much as 70% of non-staple foods in certain cultures, namely ones with higher instances of food-insecurity and rapidly increasing urban densities. In recent years it is a leading source of higher quality foods, such as foods produced without chemical fertilizers and unpopular growth hormones. Selling goods at local farmers markets in urban centers are also a growing form of entrepreneurship and local social interaction. Increased land and soil area in urban blocks strengthens the ability of urban farmers to grow their own crop. Additionally, increased green space near roof level can further absorb solar radiation thereby decreasing urban heat island effect and producing more effective solar panels.
Storage / Utilities: The utilitarian functions of larger suburban homes are responsible for many increases in average home volume. Storage space is an increasingly important asset in home value. What is more, utility equipment necessary to comfortably deliver our quality of life show great potential for combination with other homes. Utilities are burdened with the expensive task of running hundreds of thousands of small communication lines to individual houses. Channeling this energy and organization through blockhubs would increase the efficiency potential of such services as well as the efficiency and communal feel of our residential storage requirements.
Office: Our view of the office often remains tied to that of the industrial revolution. In such a paradigm, we leave home early, get to our job- usually downtown- and spend the next eight or nine hours there until it is time for us to head back home. This model was successful because in most cases we were doing work that by absolute necessity had to be done in a specific location or in the presence of specific people; “working from home” was unheard of and uncomprehensible to most people. Now we are in the throes of the digital revolution, where it is not only convenient to spend a significant portion of our week working from home, it is often more productive and even encouraged. Teleconferencing, online documents accessible anywhere, wireless internet, VOIP technology and almost universal cellphone coverage makes being on the grid and ready for action a breeze to almost anyone. Many productivity experts, such as Tim Ferriss and Jason Fried say that offices are almost obsolete and taking full advantage of our current technological situation is the way of the future. By removing some of the last few hurdles (the architectural ones), we can launch ourselves into a new revolution of commercial organization. By metaphorically taking our office empires and breaking them up into many tiny pieces and adding them to our new “cloud” we can decrease the need for infrastructure exponentially and increase productivity and quality of life by similar measures.
Shopping / Retail: The retail revolution is a relatively complicated one. Big retailers are being forced out of dense urban settings and into the outskirts of cities, making them out of sight and out of mind for most urban dwellers. For suburban dwellers, they are accessible only via vast and unsightly parking lots and through hordes of mall shoppers. The stores themselves are behemoths, often lacking in any sort of enriching or rewarding architecture. Big towers of brick and CMUs. Fluorescent lighting and vinyl flooring covered in stains and scuffs. They are often ranted about as being some of the worst things about our suburbs. The whole experience can be so unpleasant it drives many away and is ultimately an unsustainable model for our future. Small time retailers are also in a tight spot. Often existing in urban cores, they have historically relied much more heavily on easy accessibility and word of mouth. The ability to be seen in someones home via the internet has changed their strategy from here on out. Their increasing presence within the digital cloud is creating a frenzy of small transactions and do-it-yourself merchants. Sites like Etsy, Amazon, Ebay have changed our marketplace forever. Yet, despite all of these things, it is still difficult to be sure something will fit, look the same under your lights, and feel just like you think it will feel. Our digital revolution is thus hampered and we are forced to either return to a physical store or remain dissatisfied with our wares and our digital shopping experience. New retail innovations and urban reorganization can create new, eminently accessible nodes where we can eliminate such hindrances. Full size digital screens, comfortable digital shopping environments, online inventories and body-recognizing technology can eliminate many of the needs for a visit to a physical store and allow every retailer to move more merchandise to more homes and more customers.
mall
storage The paradigm of clouded functions manifests in the yardscapes and interstitial spaces of our urban blocks. Small structures organize themselves mathematically around simple digital and utilitarian functions.
social
woodshop
grocery
gym office
home
The tangled system of ever growing roads and infrastructural connections gives way to the new organizational paradigm of critical adjacencies and simultaneous occupancies.