Future Haus Think Modular
The house of the future may come in prefabricated pieces. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Wheeler: We really have to rethink how we build, rethink the construction process so that houses can be delivered more like our cars, our appliances, like our TVs, like our phones.
Joseph Wheeler is the co-director of the Center for Design Research at Virginia Tech. We’re with him in the Environmental Systems Laboratory. It’s a huge open space filled with the components of kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms like pieces of a puzzle, which put together would make up a house. The project is called Future Haus.
Wheeler: Future Haus is a modular concept. There’s something not practical about building buildings in a warehouse and shipping them to their final site. It’s kind of difficult to transport a big box on the roadways and deliver space from one place to the other.
Rather than shipping space, ship components. What this project is about is prefabricated building components: prefabricated kitchens, bathrooms, living room, audio visual walls, mechanical closets, and deliver them to the site, pre-built, pre-wired, with the integrated technology in them. All of the individual components are plug and play. They’re working off the same interface.
Take your kitchen faucet for example. We have the manual control, but you also have hands free on and off.
ambience: faucet
We’ve installed a leap motion here. Leap motion is a gaming technology that uses infrared and it’s gesture recognition. If you approach the sink from one side, it’ll give you cold water. If you approach the sink from the other side it’s going to give you hot water.
We’ll hear more about Future Haus in our next program. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.