Useful + Agreeable Design Online

published in The National Post (Canada)

If a Porsche 911 Turbo were a house, what kind of house would it be? Or if a Wilson Triad titanium tennis racket were a house, what would it be? How would it use state of the art technology, advanced engineering, on-board computer components and premium materials to outperform the other houses? We tend not to think of houses in the same light as consumer goods, but at least one firm of forwarding thinking architects is pushing the product.

Oliver Lang and Cynthia Wilson, partners in Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture (LWPAC), an avant garde Vancouver firm, are currently in the final stages of research and development on a concept they call PAC Hous(e)ing. If they have their way, house buyers will soon be asking these same questions - beginning to think of houses as products and purchasing components of the architects' system which they can then customize.

The digital age, Lang and Wilson suggest, allows us both the ability to customize as did craftsmen in the agrarian age and the low unit cost associated with mass production of the industrial age. Previously, choice and mass production were seemingly at odds with each other. But, using computer technology and robotic production, we can now have the best of both worlds. The term for this is mass customization - and it has already proven popular in other sectors. Levi's custom fit jeans and Swatch watches are among the many popular and profitable examples of mass customization in contemporary design goods - the way of the future according to LWPAC.

LWPAC's answer to the malaise in the housing market, PAC Hous(e)ing, represents not a fanciful vision of a future house, but the logical next step for an industry catching up with the other smaller products such as computers, cell phones and running shoes.

The inevitable first question "what will they look like?" is somewhat beside the point. A central feature of PAC Hous(e)ing and mass customization in general, is that the appearance will evolve out of the process of determining an individual's needs. The computer generated images which LWPAC has produced suggest an appearance influenced by the smooth colourful curves and sleek hard edges more typical of the electronics industry than house construction.

The connection to electronics is more than skin deep. Traditional house designs do not adequately respond to the growing need for many computers and electronics devices within the home. PAC Hous(e)ing is being designed to encase the wiring of our growing list of gadgets much like a stereo or computer casing does on a small scale. Individual users' needs can be met by plugging everything from fridges to televisions, computers to lighting into the wall and connecting and communicating with the rest of the house and to mobile communication devices as well. Continuing the theme, the walls themselves are plugged into one another to add or subtract spaces and to reconfigure the homes at will.

More significant than the particular aesthetics are the materials being proposed. The materials of the future - thermal plastics, glass, steel and recyclable plastics - all begin in a liquid state and can be poured to fit a wide variety of customizable molds.

PAC Hous(e)ing is not a house style, but rather a system by which owners will be allowed to essentially design their own homes. Individual components can be chosen by the customer to be assembled and configured as they choose. Rather than purchasing a completed house with a set layout and size, the PAC Hous(e)ing concept is infinately adaptable. If a family's or individual's space needs change, additional components can be purchased to dock onto the existing structure to add more space, windows or doors. Groups of PAC houses can be attached to each other in a multi-unit cluster to fit more units onto a given property in dense urban areas.

The name "PAC", is also a play on the word pack. The system which can be assembled and re-configured easily can also be packed up and transported when we move. Lang and Wilson have lived in Barcelona, Berlin, New York and Vancouver in the past ten years - a degree of mobility not uncommon in our global era. In theory they could have taken their home with them.

Other industries are already allowing a degree of mass customization. The automotive and computer indistries are among the most obvious cases which rely heavily on technological innovation, large variety of consumer choice and up to the minute styling to compete. Computer companies in Silicon Valley, for example, have, for more than a decade, been out-sourcing production to companies in Asia who have heavily invested in robotics. Macintosh computers have taken advantage of both low design costs and production costs to frequently change designs to meet a fickle and fashion conscious market demand.

Lang believes that architecture and construction industries have much to learn from these models. "Architecture is still trapped in either the agrarian or industrial age with regards to product quality, cost and actual choice," Lang suggests, "while many industries have long ago launched themselves into the information age." Hiring an architect and contractor to custom design and build a house is a very expensive proposition, while less expensive pre-fabricated homes require large investment in factories and machinery and allow little flexibility for individualization or unique styling.

The construction industry, Lang argues, is also not up to the standards we have come to expect of other industries. "People would never get into a car of a quality that a house has today, in terms of production quality and gaps and they leak and get moldy and so forth, you would never accept that with a product," Lang explains. "You would immediately file a consumer report issue." We should be able to expect high-end industrial design quality and consistency, but too often we are left to depend on 19th century building methods and craftsmanship.

Housing has traditionally not been thought of as simply another consumable good, but has been, perhaps excessively, tied to the notion of craftsmanship. Understandably there is greater cultural significance invested in our homes, which provide the basic human need for shelter, than a tennis racket or car. Housing is also often representative of local materials, building methods, traditions and culture.

However, these key components of housing's significance in our lives are also the things which seem to keep them from evolving and benefitting from significant new technologies currently available. Traditional house plans are no longer sufficient to address the evolving notion of what a house is and what it needs to do.

The firm will be continuing discussions with electronics companies and other potential collaborators and investors over the next year and hopes to see the first prototype PAC Hous(e)ing built in 2003. Lang expects to be able to produce an intelligently organized 140 square metre house for approximately $150,000. A home which can then be docked to any site, moved to another city if need be and changed easily as the owners' needs change.

"The idea of incompleteness is actually very important here. How would something evolve with you if its complete? Its a paradox," Lang says. "But how would somebody ever buy a house that's incomplete? That's part of the package, to accept that idea of incompleteness, because it also furthers people's creativity. You can make something out of your house - you're not just placing planters out front or painting every so often. You are actually buying into a larger logic and system where you can customize it."

Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture - www.lwpac.com