GENOMICON

This is cool

Although there would be endless squabbling about who got the top bunk – and inevitably it would go to who ever had the most money, and lets face it people: we’re all getting a bit sick of that.

Still… really nice idea – assuming the prices matched the facilities rather than the view or the quirk-quotient.

I’ve always quite liked the idea of capsule hotels – been around in Japan for a while… and yes, even though The Fifth Element is possibly one of THE most annoying sci-fi movies ever made, they got their airplane design dead right:

This is what long-haul flights should be like. I do 20 hour flights a lot. Sitting next to someone is what makes them horrible. Separation… Please.

Capsule hotels have started to turn up (in a grudging, heel-dragging sort of way) in the West, with the advent of various trendy looking incarnations.

But I’ve tried some of these out (kindof) – the cheap ones in London were booked out, millions of years in advance and the other ones… are craftily priced so they look cheap, but when you come down to it they’re about the same price as staying at The Columbia, and at least you get to share the elevators with low-rent rock stars there.

Hotels aren’t there for your convenience. They’re there to squeeze every last penny they possibly can out of you – so in The West, anything new tends to be slight of hand for getting more money out of you… so you get all these hotels that look like they’re designed for and by web-designers, that web-designers can’t actually afford to stay in.

So anyway… here’s a Japanese version:

Which I find almost painful to look at – because I know what it is: It’s a special hell made for people with hangovers. I can feel the accumulated pain and suffocation of decades of mornings-after… and I’ve never ever been in one, but for me hotels and hangovers go hand in hand… and these look suicidally oppressive.

No. Give me a tent above the treetops, in the breeze. Please. Let me sleep.

Swedish Microhouses:

(from : English)

Or enchanting drawings thereof, each with a (de rigeur) million dollar view.

What I find interesting about these though, is that they’re designs by “some of Sweden’s best architectural firms” specifically commissioned to fit within a 15m by 15m 3m by 5m space… and if I’ve got this right (it was faithfully reported elsewhere) this is to escape the strict regulatory framework that large buildings need to comply with.

This reminded me straight away for the reasons that this was built with 3 wheels

If it has 3 wheels, then legally it’s a motorbike so you don’t have to be dealing with all the regulations that come with cars that would make innovation prohibitively expensive.

It seems that there’s this thing going on where innovation is happening in spite of rather than with the help of the legal frameworks that we have in place.

Which isn’t to say that all building regulations should be thrown out the window – when a force 6+ earthquake hits New Zealand (which they do periodically) cups fall of shelves. Everyone is a bit shaken. There’s talk of “the big one”. When the same sized quake hits Greece or Mexico, apartment blocks fall over and people are killed.

I’m fairly committed to the maxim “Rules for Corporations; Rights for People”, and I’ve very wary of the right-wing meme of “small government” which is basically slight of hand for weakening democratically mandated control over corporate power. (which is why corporations pour billions into the think-tank led propaganda machine to promulgate this idea).

But I think maybe there needs to be some sort of “fair use” angle on individual human innovation. Fair enough – we can’t be endangering other people, but we should be allowed to endanger ourselves.

No, they don’t exist.

I’m quite interested in camper vans – I’ve spent 1/2 my life living in one for some reason… but I don’t like the decor of what’s on offer. Everything is a bit bitty, and cluttered. I want an Ikea version – I want Zen etc. Something like this

But with wheels.

It also has to be unobtrusive… ie: look like a panel van on the outside, so you can park it anywhere without people thinking you’re camping. Mobile squatting etc. And of course the other problem with camper-vans is that they now cost more to hire than fucking hotels.

I was thinking of doing something along these lines this year – before I wound up broke, living on a boat and then winding up in hospital and having to move back in with my folks so I could be looked after etc. I was thinking of getting a panel van and building a modular kitset thing so the essentials were covered (ie: shower, toilet, bed, electricity)(no, cooking isn’t as essential as it looks)(yes, you can live on pizza forever)(mmm pizza) but everything went a bit wrong so I’ve been watching developments etc from the sidelines.

This turned up recently. Natty concept etc. Like living in a luridly coloured concertina, modeled loosely around A. E Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.

(more pics here). What could possibly go wrong? Apart from being endlessly moved on by the cops etc.

Ok – something a bit more Urban and invisible… A dump truck (almost)

which is pretty cool, but it’s starting to get back into itty-bitty-land interior-decor-wise

(from via), and the prices seem to average around 400,000 US dollars – holymotherofgod. I mean they’re nice, but not as nice as the two houses you could buy for the same price.

So I think an idea that’s a bit of a goer is this sort of design asthetic:

(which is a shipping container) but made out of lego like stuff that you can use to line the walls of a generic panel-van.

In my experience, the most difficult thing about living in a van is temperature control. Security is a big one as well – I lived in a panel van in London for a month, and had two attempted break-ins, while I was in the van. The 3rd time they got lucky, and nicked everything.

A shower is crucial (solar, gas-heated hybrid). Electricity (probably solar/gas-generator). A toilet… less so, but when you need one, you need one – so I’d say that was pretty crucial as well. I also think access to daylight is fairly critical if you’re going to be spending long periods of time in it. You need some way of having big (like metre sq) windows or a skylight. The more I think about this, the more I’m thinking that ideally you need to be able to cut big holes in the van. You could achieve a lot using big neo-magnets and t-slot beams… but to really sort out the temperature control and daylight, you’re going to need to cut holes in things.

And to be honest, I have this nagging suspicion that what this is really about is a Child-Of-The-70s reincarnating the shaggin-wagon with ’00s minimalist styling. Shaggin Wagons were all the rage at about the same time that Star Wars came out…

And they had something to do with pornography, though I’m not sure what. It’s like the interiors were kindof like 70s porn decor, but with all the lust-filled fetishisation transferred from the porn-stars to the plush-velvet-over-everything obsession.

It’s like there was this weird transferal where the woman was no longer good enough for the fantasy (or was simply unavailable) so all the lust went into the upholstery. So to speak.

I can’t find any decent photos of just how extreme this got… but did find this rather lovely bit of paleo-futurism which kindof gets the point across etc:

This hasn’t gone away of course. The Japanese have gotten hold of it, and have (characteristically) pushed all the sliders up to 11, and created something way beyond what is remotely practical or workable. They’ve got an interesting take on super-normal stimuli:

(from)

And there’s some tragic irony floating around out there somewhere, that the design aesthetic that I have in mind is actually Japanese… but the Japanese themselves have taken vans and gone so far in the opposite direction that it’s not longer measurable using normal scientific instruments.

One of my favorite concepts is that anything that turns up in a Science Fiction movie will eventually be made… probably by fans of the movie. It will probably be made repeatedly, with better and better fidelity as technology improves.

In a funny sort of way this extends to the Movies themselves. One day someone will make Dune… and pull it off – in the same way that there were a couple of goes at Lord of the Rings before someone got it right. Not to trivialise the efforts of others – the existing attempts at Dune are so much better than I could do, it’s embarrassing in some ways even to comment – but face it, every Dune fan is still waiting for the definitive version. Casting Paul Atreides is always going to be hard.

Still, never mind about that, check this out:

Somebody’s actually built the house from Mon Oncle – a Jacques Tati film from 1958 which I saw when I was about 14. While not Science Fiction exactly, it’s about the old world meeting a vision of the new world in which every possible aspect of plastic modernity is pushed to a ridiculous extreme

And danged if it don’t have pretty much the same level of starkly minimalist design-fetishism that the pre-crash 21st Century had. The kitchen looks like an ipod.

Via www.architectradure.com

This is also another interesting example of this trend where a piece of work is not presented as a fait accompli – but rather the whole production history (or edited highlights thereof) are also presented. It’s like art/craft has acquired a new dimension along the time axis.

Speaking of Hexapods, check this walking house:

(from N55 : via gizmag via Dvice )

Like a hexagonal winnebago that goes at about 1/1000th the speed. Cool though. In a funny sort of way.

Pepe: Art sure is ugly.
Neil: Shows how much you know about art. The uglier the art, the more it’s worth.
Pepe: This must be worth a fortune, man.
(After hours)

And this isn’t just art, it’s AN ENTIRE ART GALLERY, and I really like it because it pushes the envelope bigtime, and they’re actually making it… will be finished this year apparently. Here’s a vid of them CNCing the spines

Which is a bit boring, but never mind.

It does make me think of a thing I wrote during a previous incarnation about “Goody vs Baddy Design” which has a funny video in it, so it’s worth a look… but the point is, the design above is Baddy Design in every concievable way.

It also reminds me of this other gallery in Graz, Austria – the source for which I’ve long since lost,

If it has a larval stage, I expect the larvae look something like this: