MIT's $1000 House Project | Hacker News Reader

MIT's $1000 House Project

web.mit.edu

74 pointschaostheory25 comments

This is a project that has good intentions but at best ambiguous outcomes. Low-density housing without plumbing is an ecological disaster. Besides, the idea of single-family dwellings is becoming less relevant with the current trend of urbanization.

If you really want to provide housing for the poor, you need to revisit the ideas of Le Corbusier in light of the findings of Christopher Alexander.

Agreed. People need to give up the fetish with having their own little castles for us to move forward with substantive change in urban planning and housing construction.

Can you point to a webpage/book discussing "the ideas of Le Corbusier in light of the findings of Christopher Alexander"?

Google didn't really help, and it sounds like you have something specific in mind.

Owen Hatherley's _Militant Modernism_ is a good overview of what modernism (Le Corbusier's side) was supposed to be about, what went wrong, and some ideas for the future. I helped Owen translate some documents for the research behind the book, but I don't agree with him on many of the conclusions in the book.

Where I think Alexander's work comes in is where the Modernism movement started - rationalism in architecture. _A Pattern Language_ is essentially a set of inductive inferences about what works in urban planning and what doesn't. A lot of what went wrong with modernist projects stem from ignoring reality.

I think project cities like Germany's Vauban (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/earth/12suburb.htm...) embody this spirit. Soleri's Arcosanti is also built with very much the same intentions. I think Soleri's work can actually be a good example of "Corbusier meets Alexander," but most people seem to only remember him for the arcologies in Blade Runner...

Glad to see this project underway. On all fronts, technology has reached a point where seriously viable personal infrastructure can be had for very low costs. I've been mulling over how to have my kids buy/build real estate for no more than $10k before they graduate high school (that plus each starting a business is a priority).

For a reference point, consider the Tumbleweed houses: http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/ which are quality, albeit small, homes which have been built for as little as $10,000.

Also check out http://tinyhouseblog.com/ for other small & affordable housing styles.

In Northeast Minnesota (and in many other low population density states, I'd imagine) you can buy land for well under $10k/acre and many counties have no building codes in effect.

But if you're trying to do this for $10k near a major population center, best of luck to you!

Major population centers are expensive, and for a reason. If you can't afford it, don't live there (just like living in the opposite extremes: deserts/mountains are nice, but very hard to live in so don't). Lots of places _are_ affordable; there are even some towns that will _give_ you land, outright ownership for free, if only you'll live on it for a few years and build a decent home. There are also a lot of abandoned/tax-delinquent/foreclosed properties which are undesirable for most normal 6-digit homes but would work well for creative/eclectic dwellings.

The news on the link is old. They recently built the first prototype: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/1k-house-prototype-0915.h...

I don't know much about the MIT project, but a criticism of a related project is available in a nytimes op-ed at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01srivastava.html

I have strong doubts that mass-produced anything is the key to solving poverty. Having people rely on outsourced production rather than encouraging the local construction industry is no way to empower them.

EDIT: That said, having such housing available for rebuilding after a natural disaster doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

Where I live (Bucharest) building costs are already low compared to infrastructure costs. In order to develop a piece of land you could build a decent house for a reasonable price (not $1000, but maybe $10,000). The problem is that bringing water, sewage, electricity and optionally natural gas and internet makes a joke of this number.

I've been fantasizing about a startup which would buy cheap, agricultural land and build an infrastructure core into it, not necessarily connected to the grid. Probably more expensive over time, but might be cheaper in the beginning.

This would help in many situations including The Tent City of New Jersey:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2021173/Americas-cit...

Something similar is PFNC <http://www.pfnc.net/index.htm>, who aim to manufacture houses out of shipping containers, with an on-site cost of $15,000.

my favorite was the A-frame. looked the simplest, cheapest, most likely to achieve the $1k goal, and easy to put large numbers of them in a horizontal smaller land area. I only looked at about half the designs hough.

I wish I was an architect rather than a programmer...

The grass is always greener...

Nobody is stopping you from realizing your wish.

Get the right kind of experience as a programmer for a few years and you can be a software architect. :p

Or perhaps even a architecture software architect!

Hell, you could eventually be an architecture astronaut: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html

I often wish just the opposite ;)

So I'm working on "porting" my architecture knowledge and experience to something relevant in the world of software development. Looks like it's leading me on a path towards UX, UI, and interaction design :)

The main reasons for the pivot? In architecture you have huge project mortality rates, lots of overtime and stress, and low pay. There are of course wonderful things about the work in architecture and its potential & history, but it's generally extremely difficult to find an opportunity where you can get paid for doing innovative work.

No. Think bigger. 1M people at $150K each, living in the biggest and nicest castle ever devised. This is the kind of thing we need, if we are to move up the Kardashev Scale.

http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Why is it a desirable goal to move up the Kardashev scale?

If you believe the transhumanists, our brains will live in computers long before we'll spread out across the solar system. We'll be using energy and space more efficiently, not just using 'more.'

Why is it a desirable goal to move up the Kardashev scale?

Quite simply, moving up the Kardashev scale need not harm the desires of those who want to live in their own version of harmony with nature, while satisfying the desires of those who prefer continually advancing technology. Preserving the status quo, forcing urbanization, or reverting to a more agrarian society also will satisfy the naturists/locavores/etc., but at the expense of the technologists/futurists.

Thus, from a utilitarian perspective, technological advancement provides greater net satisfaction than technological stagnation.

Maybe it needn't, but if history is any indication it does.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02diamond.html?pag...

Preserving the status quo, forcing urbanization, or reverting to a more agrarian society also will satisfy the naturists/locavores/etc., but at the expense of the technologists/futurists. Thus, from a utilitarian perspective, technological advancement provides greater net satisfaction than technological stagnation.

Either the interests of the two groups are compatible, or they are not. You can't say that they are when one group gets what they want, but they aren't when the competing group does.

Of course in reality there's a vast spectrum of coexistence and compromise. Your argument boils down to a carefully selected excluded middle.

Not that it matters, since your conclusion begs the question anyway by equating technological progress (presumably as measured by the proxy of energy consumption) with utilitarian satisfaction. Certainly there's a correlation up to a point (vaccines, plumbing, healthcare, etc). But if you look at quantitative happiness metrics in the US they've been stagnant for the past 60 years, while per-capita energy consumption has doubled.

It's naïve linear thinking to say that additional energy/stuff consumption will increase our happiness. I call it the Drinking Undergrad Fallacy. The eponymous poor sap tells himself, "if three drinks makes me feel good, then 9 drinks will make me feel three times as good!"

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