Self-Fab House

Beth Weinstein:

I recall the first time I discovered a brand-new book that appealed to my latter-day Metabolist sensibilities: with a title from Talking Heads, Houses in Motion was proposing lean, mean and mobile utopian aggregations. [1] This last decade has seen a groundswell of exhibitions, books and design competitions promoting innovation in small, efficient and readily fabricated or assembled dwellings. [2] It has seen an abundance of critically inclined and exuberantly designed deployable structures born of the chance encounter between between Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House and Krzysztof Wodiczko's Homeless Vehicle on a CNC milling bed. What a fruitful union that has been, with offspring of shockingly diverse genetic make-up distributed across the globe. Today, four U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlons later, and the first European equivalent in the works, it appears that throughout the global architectural community there is a concern and interest, if not obsession, with the development of compact, self-sustaining dwellings.

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, or IAAC, is making sure to cover all its bases in this department. It is one of 19 contestants in the European Solar Decathlon, scheduled to take place in Madrid this June, and it is also the sponsor of several ideas competitions on the topic of ecologically self-sufficient dwellings. And the IAAC has just published the results of the second of these competitions (a third is on the way), showcasing the work of over 100 submissions by students and young practitioners for the design of a Self-Fab House.