Living with Life

Living with your life, open source design

-exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2010.

Premise: OPEN SOURCE ARCHITECTURE

The boundaries between public and private, between family and individual, between working and living, between night and day get cloudy. Daily routines are defined by personality, each one different. Our apartment can reflect this blurring; this is multiplicity both for the sake of efficiency and also for new pleasures. We need a design that can fit to different concepts of life. We do not want to put our life in a closet but rather live with it. Fundamentally, the closeness and awareness of ones own way of life will lead to more sustainable, at least more conscious, living.

Spaces become free from traditional programs. The pod doesn’t just fit in. Instead, it grows with your way of living, old structure or new. Clients, users, anyone can say where, how much and when. One might want a sink and a TV to brush teeth and watch cartoons at the same time.

In developing an idea for a flexible system (and a desire to bring daily life into the foreground) we use flexible hoses that connect different devices (the sink, a toilet, a dishwasher and so on) like a necklace such that each item can be positioned freely in the house and be moved around like furniture.

The chain of the necklace consists of two hoses in parallel, one for fresh water and one for wastewater / used water. The different items would be linked such that grey water can be used for devices further down the line. The toilet, for example, is at the end while the dishwasher and some selected plants are in the middle. All of the devices have the ability to heat their own water and create their own water pressure.

Those devices that can use grey water have water storage as well. Between each item there are two tanks. The user keeps the water on the ground without using energy but to get the water to the next device we need to pump. The second tank, overhead, allows users to pump when it is efficient to do so and it allows users to pump very slowly. In effect, by putting the water up for storage we are storing the energy that the pump consumes.

The larger concept of having control of the water is about both adding freedom for different uses but also about making the consumption of water a conscious part of daily life. One does not have to use the grey-water from the shower to start the dishwasher if, for example, you were particularly dirty when you showered, but you do have to decide not to use it.