What we're doing right
A small step for a house, a giant step for mankind
8th November 2008
A self sufficient home decked out in solar panels, micro wind turbines, a compost toilet and rainwater harvesters, is taking it's first steps
Danish collective n55's walking house - an alternative to "accelerated living."
In the English countryside, a house is taking its first steps.
The Walking House, a 3.5-metre-high, 3.7-metre-long hexagonal chamber designed by Danish art collective N55, is slowly trundling around Cambridgeshire this month, crawling at a leisurely 60 metres an hour on six hydraulic legs designed by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its maiden movements are posted on YouTube, alongside comments that deride its slow pace.
“But it’s meant to move slowly,” says designer Ion Sorvin from his office in Copenhagen. He and N55 member Øivind Slaatto put the house on legs rather than wheels, he explains, as an antidote to accelerated lifestyles.
There are radical philosophical motivations behind the house. Inspired by the struggles of Europe’s Roma travellers, N55 promotes nomadic living. “The best way for governments to control people is to make sure they stay in one place,” says Mr. Sorvin, who lives on a houseboat in Copenhagen. N55 members also believe that the private ownership of land should be abolished.
The house, containing a living room, kitchen, bed and mainframe computer, is designed to be self-sufficient, with solar panels, micro wind turbines, a compost toilet and rainwater harvesters. Wood-burning stoves or small greenhouses could be added.
This is just one of many eccentric designs architects have conceived to create more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly dwellings that “do more with less space.” N55 has also created small submersible micro-dwellings modelled after Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.
An n55 "microdwelling," based on Buckminster Fuller's classic geodesic domes.
Mr. Sorvin doesn’t expect to see walking houses marching across the Earth or geodesic pods filling our harbours any time soon, though. “I just want to make people think about housing in a different way,” he says. “In Denmark, people will pay two-thirds of their income just to have a place to live – if you can live in micro-architecture, you can spend your time and energy on other things.”
With coastlines worldwide threatened by rising sea levels, mobile and cheap homes may not seem so radical for long.
Published in The Green Report in The Globe and Mail
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