Living Tomorrow
As we all know, visions are boundless – even though creative ideas for living may be limited in our own living space. But we are mistaken if we think our living spaces might look like Truffault’s science fiction movie ”Fahrenheit 451” one day in the future. They already do.One of the first "Smart Living" model houses is said to have been built in 1989 by Professor Ken Sakamura in Japan’s Nishi Azuba, at a cost of 1 billion Japanese yen. With its 380 integrated computers, "TRON Intelligent House" no doubt became a noteworthy milestone in the history of architecture.
In the meantime, smart houses are booming. The US and Great Britain have been particularly ambitious in developing them. And it’s Microsoft boss Bill Gates who has taken the lead again. His own multimillion-dollar house has become legendary over the past years – not surprisingly so. After all, who else would be closer to all that computer knowledge…
In the US and Canada, millions of houses are said to be already equipped with technologies like Active Home, HomeDirector or Smarthome. Their smart functions include, on the one hand, security systems, lighting and temperature control via motion detectors, remote control or timers. On the other, these benefits translate into more than just additional comfort. Thanks to flexible temperature control alone, which automatically turns down the heat when you leave a room or open a window, a smart house uses up to 30 percent less energy, to mention just an example – which can reduce carbon dioxide by up to 7.5 tonnes for a single occupancy house!
Uniform Standards
"From now on, the technology should be pushed to the background", says Tom Laemmel of Windows ehome Division in Microsoft’s headquarters at Redmond near Seattle at this year’s Cebit trade fair. And he agrees with his colleagues from Dell, Hewlett-Packard or Sony - especially in view of the booming Bluetooth technology. But that’s definitely still quite some time down the road.
For the time being, the challenge is centrally controlling individual equipment and systems to enable communication among them – which requires manufacturers to adhere to uniform standards. It is no coincidence that more than 100 businesses all over Europe have combined to form the European Bus Association, to guarantee uniform standards for future developments.
Technology in the background
Indeed, all this seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. "Instead of having typical wall surfaces, pieces of art will rotate on huge flat screens – and we will no longer even realise it is just a monitor", says Faith Popcorn, trend scout and originator of the term ‘cocooning’. This type of interactive wall will make everything possible – wall pictures, virtual journeys. All you need to say is: Show me this suit in 50 different colours - or pictures of the recent family gathering." This will add a new (more pleasant?) touch to her forecasted retreat into the private sphere.
A revolution in building materials
Already today, New York architectural firm Hariri & Hariri designs houses with 2.5 m high flat screens covering an entire wall of their sleeping module. Though for the time being, technology for these screens is available for the US space shuttle only, you never know what might happen in the next few years given the right amount of funding.
"Progress in materials research will trigger further key impulses, say many designers", according to a report in science magazine scinexx.de. "Materials changing their colour thanks to integrated glass fibres, building materials that are either warm or cold to the touch, depending on your needs, or biotechnologically produced synthetics which imitate natural materials without the drawbacks… You could even revolutionise divisions in spaces. Why not have a huge single room in which you work, sleep and eat - or choose the bathroom as your central point in the house? And by the time walls are made of materials which may instantly become either transparent or opaque, a public space can be converted into a private retreat by simply pressing a button".
Living Tomorrow
Should you have problems imagining all the above, you better make a trip to Vilvoorde near Brussels. There you will see "Living Tomorrow 2", a multimedia model house realised in joint cooperation among 96 companies, including Microsoft, Phillips, Xerox, 3Com and others.
In cooperation with many experts and leading manufacturers, each of whom contributing their particular knowledge and prevailing state of progress, the Living Tomorrow project, developed by Peter Bongers and Frank Belien in 1991, aims to display realistic visions of tomorrow’s living and working environments.
In the nineties, it was Bill Gates who personally inaugurated the first "House of Living Tomorrow" in Brussels. Last year, due to the enormous attention the project drew from the general public, a new location was inaugurated in Amsterdam worth 20 million euros. "80 percent of the solutions presented here are ready for market, 20 percent are a vision for the future", the operators say. "Imagine what would happen if you connect the bathroom mirror, the refrigerator or the washing machine to the Internet", the LivTom brochure says. Major changes in houses are already in the pipeline – in tandem with the businesses involved. Incidentally, Philips plans to launch a screen in 2005 which will look like a flexible plastic foil....
