Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Saturday, January 22, 2005Update - Yet Another T-Slot House
Nw that it's too late to help me, even more T-slot houses appear. Looks like an emerging design trend. The iT House (Flash site) is, again, so similar to the things I've devised it's scary. In fact, this house is based on the same Bosch brand industrial automation T-slot framing products I note in my Gallery section article on the Urban Nomads and their modular building technology. But for some reason these architects were able to get access to a larger scale and cheaper set of T-slot components than the Bosch company is willing to offer to you or me. This is either custom fabricated -which seems unlikely- or they have been hiding this stuff for some specialized purposes. I guess it's another case of who you know, not what you know.
All in all, the iT House is an ideal non-toxic housing platform, but it's a costly one. It's probably come far too late to help me, but I think others EIs with an need for this kind of housing should take a look at this. It would be quite easy to integrate a great diversity of alternative non-toxic materials to this structure as well as to enhance it using the off-the-shelf T-slot framing components. They've even managed to integrate the kind of easy T-slot connection into a ceiling system making it easy to adapt this house on demand with snap-in partitions and appliances. It comes very close to the ideal of plug-in architecture. It's only downsides are a likely limitation to warmer climates and the architects' fascination with the use of vinyl based window transfers as a means to decorate the otherwise very minimalistic structures. One would have to order the home without this for a non-toxic home -and I'm rather doubtful of the long-term resilience of such transfers to UV even for the non-EI home.
In other news, I have learned that availability of the Tony's T-Houses Bali-T kit homes has been unaffected by the recent tsunami disaster. Good news as this is one of the cheapest prefab non-toxic housing options available -although it's still just out of my reach and only usable in Hawaii due to the unusual type of design.
Also, readers may find interesting an idea I have been trying to interest the executives of eBay in. I have found that virtually everything I would need for relocation and a home can potentially be found on eBay -if I could get the professional help to make it work. There are prefab steel buildings which could be adapted into a non-toxic home, land offerings in areas I have considered going to for low pollution, equipment for off-grid living, no end to the supply of used furnishings which -because it's old- is sufficiently outgassed to be safe for me, and even some kinds of food I could eat. In theory, my entire relocation and everything I need could be obtained on eBay and possibly at a cost I could afford. But it would only be possible with the help of a team of eBay experts able to stretch my resources to their maximum and a team of assistants to aid in the logistics of pulling this all together -since I could not myself perform due diligence on things like land by myself.
This idea seemed to me to be a great potential promotional gimmick for the eBay company. They have gotten a lot of negative publicity lately from people using the service to sell ridiculous things. It's created the impression that eBay is not usable for anything practical. My project would offer them the opportunity to demonstrate that one can, in fact, do very practical things with the service. Even provide adaptive housing to the disabled and relocate one's whole life. Unfortunately, I found it very difficult to reach the eBay executive offices. This icon of Internet business has no means to send an email letter to anyone other than customer support. Customer support actually told me they were completely incapable of communicating with anyone outside their department. I literally had to write the marketing department a letter and send it by snail mail. So much for the Information Age...
Alas, this is just another long-shot. I suspect I'm just grasping at straws with such notions. Cleverness just isn't enough to escape this kind of slow-death-spiral. Not in this country, not in this era, not in this society.
