One hundred years in the future houses will be, in almost all respects, semi-living, artificial organisms - closed systems with a metabolism, sensory apparatus, immune response and an approximation to a nervous system.
Interior living spaces will change as a cloud changes, easily reconfigured and rearranged to suit our fickle tastes, or accommodate different purposes.
Imagine walls and floors made of a malleable skin and embedded with tiny sensors and actuators so the shape and size of living spaces can quickly change, or even be divided into smaller rooms.
This barely scratches the surface. Imagine homes with a building material salted with dormant limestone-producing bacteria which awaken on contact with moisture and repair a crack or structural damage.
That is a futurist’s utopia of how most of the globe’s population will live, but Kiwis are still living in mainly old villas from the early 1900s, 1950-1960’s mid-century houses, more modern plasterclad homes and a growing number of townhouses and apartments.
There are no suggestions as radical as a Mexico architecture firm’s idea of subterranean earthscrapers extending 65 storeyshuge social housing waiting list. So, what is the future for housing here?
