Rotative housing system

Do our houses really seem to belong to our contemporary times? Have them the same technological content of all other tools we use nowadays such as smartphones and latest car models? The answer is definitively not! We are almost resigned to consider houses as something structurally different in terms of modernity compared the other contemporary products. People probably think that what is necessary in a car or in a phone in terms of interface and flexibility of use can not be asked to a house. Therefore our general approach in perceiving the product “house” is to consider it as something structurally old, something that can not be at the same level of modernity of all other products we use today. But not always has been like that in the past. For instance, in the twenties and thirties of the last century, the modern house was the symbol of modernity and progress. At that time the most important architects in the world worked and designed outstanding new architectural figurations, and their house projects implemented the latest achievements of social, scientific and technological progress of the time. They actually tried to imagine the housing of the future. And they succeed on it, because we are nowadays living in the materialization of what they have thought and immagined almost 100 years ago. Another important moment of experimentation was during the sixties and the seventies of the last century. We think that is again the moment for architects to think forward and imagine a new way to conceive and live the house. This because houses have been left many steps back compared to the boosted progress of our contemporary life in the last ten years. Concept like “modularity, scalability, reconfigurability, flexibility, mobility” are composing a sort of “way to think” with which we are use to deal many of our daily activities. After a decade of Real Estate ruling the entire phenomenon of new urbanization, the room for innovation has been really small and limited to “ecology” and “energy saving” items. In other words, the main efforts to innovate in housing has been concentrated on materials and technologies connected with the production phase and the life cycle of a building. Very few has been done to revolutionize the “house” as a product seen by the consumer point of view. Is enough for a consumer just to live in a house that needs less resources to be heated and cooled? What about consumer’s needs and expectations concerning the way this house fits contemporary life conditions and social needs? For nowadays users things like “building site noise and troubles for refurbishing”, “wait for a year a new house”, “stress to choose and to arrange fornitures”, “rigidity of a house in case of extension need”, have become totally unecceptable! Today we search something on internet, we take our smartphone and we order it on Amazon, paying by credit card. The following day we have the thing at our place. Of course this will change everything. It has already revolutionized the music and travel industry, tourism and hotel industry are deeply changing because of this. All the other productive fields should face this genetic change of consumers. Including housing industry of course. In future if a family will need an extra room for their appartment, they expect to take their ipad, choose and configure their new room, order it and wait some weeks for the extra room to be installed in one day time without any noise or building site troubles. This is where tecnology will lead. Our approach has been focused exactly in this direction: try to imagine a product “house” that is able to do something that the actual houses can not do. New functions, new possibilities, a new level of involvement of the consumer into the personalization and configuration of his own house. In this post-crisis decade that we are about to live, consumers are waiting new products for spent their money. If houses will not change and if real estate developers will try to sell them the obsolete leftover stock, they will put their money somewhere else. If a new product will appear in this filed, the user will pay the extra cost for the extra functions that this new “advanced house” will provide. Therefore, the technological problem is not to find new processes to built cheeper houses. The point is conceive and put on the market housing systems that can do something new, that can provide new functions, in zero time delivery, and ready to use without any middle man. The market will pay extra to this new housing as a premium product. We have considered the house as an hybrid scalable system composed by two elements: the mother structure that is the permanent infrastructure of the house and a modular system that is inserted into the mother structure, that is configurable directly by the user, industrialized and prefabricated. The modular house can be ordered and configured directly by the user on internet. It can be installed, extended and reconfigured in one day time. The combination of this two elements and the possibility for the user to manage his modular house, is allowed by the new technologies: is the core of the innovation that the reseach group in the university has proposed. Scalability allows the users to extend their house according with the changes that occur in their life such us marriage, a new baby or a new activity. Even when grown kids leave the house, part of the space can be rearranged and separated to be rent, becoming a source of revenues. After all, the main target of this thesis work is to update the concept of our houses and to fill the huge gap existing between their nature and the new lifestyle in which we are living today. This has revolutionized our way to live and to perceive the world in the last ten years. Therefore also housing should be deeply reconceived to satisfy a totally changed client and users expectations and needs. Joseph di Pasquale