Andrew Maynard's Corb 2.0: Archigram Reborn
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02.17.07
It is everything Archigram was forty years ago; an exciting, original revisit of how we treat where we live, how we define real estate. Imagine moving our houses around according to our activities, our whims, our friends, our crying babies. Imagine everyone being the penthouse and the next day being on the ground floor. It is most definitely not a container project (Andrew agrees with this treehugger that their porportions suck) but he says: Ever wanted to live in the penthouse every now and then? Want to get away from your annoying neighbour with the big stereo and bad music taste? Want to have a party without disturbing others? You want a different view every now and then? Corb V2.0 gives you the opportunity. A wind powered travel crane will move your unit either randomly or according to request, giving everyone in the building equal rights to a piece of the best view, the best garden access. Real estate as we know it is turned on its head.
Even the graphics are pure archigram, comic strip presentation of talking containers saying "why do architects keep trying to squash houses into containers? Container dimensions are terrible. Why not design a kickass apartment and use all of the other fun toys that we find on docks to help deal with the many troubling issues that the modern visions of dense housing have difficulty addressing?
The housing can be rearranged according to circumstance or even appearance; It all moves around a big courtyard lined with service links and corridors for circulation. If you get really tired of your neighbours (or get a new job somewhere else) you just ship your house to it and plug into another ring.
They have taken Archigram's Plug-in City and made it reality by using common container handling equipment and adapting it to humans instead of adapting humans to containers. It is beyond brilliant. Best. Idea. of the Year. ::Andrew Maynard via ::Arkinetia
I don't think I'd like the idea of coming home one day to find my house had been moved so the guy under could get a better view. Indeed, location is a large part of the value of property so regularly moving the unit would be disruptive to the market. I also see a flaw with stepping outside of normal container dimensions. It would in fact not be possible to ship you housing module to another location because it would not be compatible with the existing transportation infrastructure. I feel that this concept ditches the useful parts of container architecture and keeps the one thing that is not that useful for an existing structure (configurability). Still, the concept of moving or reconfiguring an existing building rather than having to tear it down and build a new one when the property becomes repurposed is the more interesting part of this proposal.
They had better be bigger than the average container, because thats maybe two small rooms (bedroom, kitchen/dining/living) for one or two people.
Also, its hard to read the words in the comic, could you post it larger?
Apart from the stnadardised size of the container being important for shipping, the container as housing has another key advantage - the reuse of the massive surplus of (very cheap) shipping containers.
How about a rip off of Lot-ek's MDU design? http://www.lot-ek.com/
more needs to be said about lowercaseH's comment.
It is wonderfully accurate, not so much in the content that indeed AMA have ripped off yet another idea and claimed it as their own -but more that it speaks to the validity of a firm whose PR engine far outstrips any available talent, and seems to thrive on the fact.
So many have so said much about so little in regard to AMA that they need to be embarrassed into higher quality journalism, research and peer review before jumping on the easy band-wagon.