
Robert and Virginia Heinlein's Colorado Springs House - benbreen
http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/pm652-art-hi.html
======
seltzered_
I get really intrigued by these designs (went through a folding obsession
phase) then try to judge how usable/learnable the design choices are. FWIW, I
constantly find myself comparing the current wave of home automation / IoT to
the 1958 film Mon Oncle:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9t98Gox60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9t98Gox60)

This said the heinlein house sounds pretty usability-focused: “There are no
rugs or any need for them. All floors are surfaced with cork tile that
provides a warm, comfortable and clean footing. Nor are there any floor lamps
or table lamps. The illumination is built into the house. General lighting for
the living room comes from cold-cathode tubes concealed behind a box molding.
These illuminate the ceiling. Adjustable wall spotlights are located at all
work and relaxation areas in the house. All electric convenience outlets are
at comfortable hip height. I'm through stooping over to the baseboard."

------
mturmon
"A house is a machine for living in."

I hold largely to this view, and it is reflected in the design of this house,
and indeed the design of my own house.

But it's also important to introduce some elements of style, whimsy,
randomness, impracticality. Especially for an engineer, it's important to not
let practicality be the sole design value.

The Eames's house and Alvar Aalto's house are some guideposts I've found
valuable.

------
dsr_
This is a house so efficiently designed for its purpose that it could never
adapt to new needs.

That might be the right thing to do in certain circumstances: if you live near
a city, odds are pretty good that when your needs change, someone else will
want your house.

On the other hand, I bet every built-in appliance is a non-standard size that
is somewhere between painful and ridiculously expensive to repair or replace.

There's probably something deeply philosophical from this that would be
applicable to writing programs.

~~~
phyller
Similar to the black suit. I bought one 20 years ago, it still makes me look
sharp for any occasion that requires dressing professionally.

If this wasn't the Heinlein's house it would be unsellable today. The cost to
tear down the house would probably be subtracted from the value of the empty
lot to determine how much it was worth.

I need to buy a house soon in an area with a lot of old houses, some more than
100 years old. Here are my list of house attributes with staying power:

    
    
      - high ceilings
      - open floor plan
      - generous dimensions (particularly bathrooms and kitchens)
      - light (and air) from the outside
      - durable water-tight construction
      - no wood on exterior (it rots, maintenance nightmare)
      - a good view
      - land
    

These might seem obvious, but apparently not everyone has gotten the memo (I'm
looking at you England). It seems to me that commercial properties even from
hundreds of years ago are much more likely to have these attributes than
residences from 1960 and earlier. If you can't afford brick or stone
exteriors, stucco is cheap and seems to last for a long time. A tasteful metal
roof is great.

My grandfather was before his time and built his entire house in hot, humid
Florida out of steel many decades ago. Steel panels on the outside, steel
paneled roof, steel frame. It's been hit by quite a few hurricanes and looks
as good as new. The other wood frame houses around his are looking pretty
shabby now. Not sure why steel construction didn't catch on.

~~~
danans
> [air] from the outside

That's probably the only thing from your list that you are likely to find in a
100 yr old house that hasn't been recently renovated. And that is a result of
the far less precise building and sealing methods from that time, and not that
fresh air was a design goal of the old house.

Those old houses tended to leak water and air like sieves, resulting in very
high energy consumption and lower comfort.

On the plus side, the materials they were probably built with (solid wood)
were far more tolerant of moisture than today's synthetic building materials
(OSB, etc), and with all the air leakage that occurred, they dried out
quickly. That's why many of these old houses' structures have lasted, while
newer, tightly sealed houses with moisture penetration have failed. Also the
air leaks provided fresh air.

> ... water-tight construction

Not only is this not likely to be the case on an old house, without a modern
mechanical forced ventilation system installed, a water-tight house (with the
windows shut) incompatible with the requirement for "[air] from the outside".

~~~
phyller
Good points, perhaps why the 300 year old house in the woods in New England I
have stayed in occasionally has withstood the elements. Foot thick beams
helped. And maybe there is some type of preservative in all the bat and mouse
crap.

A recent stay in England has shown me you can have plenty of air circulation
with no water intrusion, they have these wonderful skylights that you can keep
cracked open even during a storm and no water gets in, I was pretty amazed.

I made the list not to condemn old houses, but to consider when building a new
house. However, if you go to the downtown areas in old towns, the old
commercial properties can tend to hit almost everything on the list.
Apparently these things were known, just not applied to residential
construction, probably because of cost.

------
khr
Mirrors in skylights seems like a very obvious improvement to increase the
amount of natural sunlight in a space. It seems adaptable to north-facing top-
floor suites. Mirrors could be installed such that the sun would reflect into
the suite throughout the day. It seems to be such an obvious improvement, but
I've not noticed such a system anywhere in my city. Maybe the regular cleaning
of the mirrors is enough of a deterrent for building owners to invest in
something like this?

~~~
Wistar
Not a sunlight but Mitsubishi's new synthetic-light "windows" appear to be
pretty spectacular. I want one.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45827812/mitsubishi-w...](https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45827812/mitsubishi-
windows-shine-alarmingly-realistic-fake-sunlight)

~~~
r00fus
Doesn't sound like full spectrum light. I'd live to see the CRI on those
things.

~~~
Wistar
I did a little digging and, it appears that Mitsubishi and CoeLux have
partnered on these artificial skylights and, although the CRI isn't listed,
the CoeLux site says this:

"CoeLux systems combine LED lighting that reproduces sunlight spectrum,
direction and brightness with optical systems and nano-structured materials
that reproduce the endless distance of the sky and sun."

If it actually does reproduce the sunlight spectrum it'd have to have a very
high CRI, no? Toshiba has their TRI-R LEDs claimed to be capable of 95% of the
sunlight spectrum and they are rated at a CRI of Ra97. Yuji has LEDs with
claimed CRI of 98, so it seems within the realm of possibility that these fake
windows are very convincing.

~~~
nine_k
I have a few LED lamps with CRI 95, and they produce very natural-looking
light, not noticeably different from sunlight. Not really expensive even.

------
otikik
"All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, clean and
comfortable footing"

I bought a second hand home, which had cork. It's warm, yes. And maybe
comfortable. But it is not clean. Cork is very porous and once a speck of dust
finds its way into the material, it's difficult to pull it out. Drop some one
on the floor and you might be able to clean most of it, but some of it will
stay there, forever.

Stick to wood. Maybe a bit less warm that cork, but much cleaner and equally
comfortable.

------
pseudolus
There's "everything to please a housewife in the kitchen including an 'office'
with phone and typewriter". There's nothing more amusing than reading print
periodicals from the early part of the 20th century to the mid-1980s. The ads
are also always a particular highlight.

~~~
parrellel
Did you like the bit about the soundproofing and the two shower heads in the
bathroom. Or the bit about the extra large beds.

Certainly, these things are for work and efficiency, nothing more.

~~~
MisterOctober
Well, it's a sort of work, isn't it

------
stevenwoo
The house they moved to after this in Santa Cruz is unique (from the outside
at least)
[http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html](http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html)

------
vvpan
Why is 1776 a special number in this case? The yeah of declaration of
independence?

~~~
throwanem
Yes. It's an extremely Heinlein choice; he's regarded by the sympathetic as
having been highly patriotic, by the unsympathetic as virulently
nationalistic.

~~~
natechols
I never thought of Heinlein as especially patriotic or nationalistic; he was,
on the other hand, a big fan of revolutions against oppressive regimes.

~~~
berbec
And he had some... interesting... ideas about who makes a good sexual
partners. [1]

1;
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441748600](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441748600)

~~~
natechols
Full disclosure: I never bothered to read anything of his written after "The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress", since the universal consensus seems to be that his
later books are very, very strange.

~~~
learc83
He had a blocked carotid artery for several years, and I some Heinlein fans
blame his crazier stuff on that.

I think his later books are just what happens to many successful creatives.
They get so famous that no one else has any editorial control over what they
produce, and the quality of their work decreases.

------
jotux
Looks like there are photos of the house in it's current form on zillow[1].
It's obviously been remodeled, a lot.

[1] [https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Colorado-Springs-
CO/13...](https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Colorado-Springs-
CO/13672320_zpid/4172_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/38.790487,-104.858758,38.78867,-104.861641_rect/18_zm/)

~~~
HarryHirsch
They finally gave in and got rid of the flat roof. People eventually find out
that they will develop leaks that are impossible to find.

~~~
ghaff
Which is pretty evident if you’ve ever spent time in typical commercial flat-
roofed buildings. Who hasn’t seen buckets catching drips at some point or
other?

~~~
erichurkman
Ah, I always have fond memories of office buckets. At eShares, we had one in
our first office. It dripped when it rained, but inexplicably so: we were on
the ground floor.

------
mrbill
The fancy bed was auctioned off in 2013.

[http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-
second-...](http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-second-best-
bed/)

It went for just over $2K.

[https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins-
Bed-/25131783994...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins-
Bed-/251317839942)

~~~
pkamb
One of the worst "you might also like" algorithms I've ever seen!

[https://i.imgur.com/Vy0dSUZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/Vy0dSUZ.png)

------
buserror
Oh well, here goes a few karma points ;-)

Does anyone else _dislike_ Heinlein? I mean, I read hundreds of SF books,
followed dozens of authors, and I'm pretty sure Heinlein is the one I ended up
giving up on and actively disliking.

I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up
some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin-
daughter clones and fucking them.

The thing is, it's just pretty much always the same, perhaps that example is
'extreme' (quite frankly I don't know -- nor do I care- if I read it all) but
it pretty much always gravitate toward something or other like that.

Now, if the world building was nice, and the other plot lines were great etc
etc I'd accept the wierd navel-gazing as part of the entertainment, but in the
case of Heinlein, I always felt it was the other way around!

~~~
sneak
I dislike a lot of things about him, despite loving most of his books. It was
him and Orson Scott Card who taught me to love and be enriched by an author’s
work separately from the person themself.

It always seems a shame to me when people can write at length about taking a
fundamentally skeptic view of _everything_ in the world and society, down to
its core values, and then be so blind as to their own biases and prejudices.
At the very least, Heinlein writes in a few places how he’ll never be truly
free of early childhood conditioning around sex and norms (contrast the author
of Ender’s extensive reflections on xenocide choosing to give money to anti-
gay-rights organizations), but stops there. The misogyny, the militarism, all
of it remains unexamined.

A deeply flawed person, who gave us deeply enriching works (IMO).

~~~
dragonwriter
> The misogyny, the militarism, all of it remains unexamined.

I think two things you absolutely _can 't_ defensibly say about Heinlein is
that his views about gender roles and relations, or about the relationship of
society to it's military in either an institutional or individual sense are
“unexamined”.

There may have been blind spots nonetheless—I don't think anyone can be free
of those—but “unexamined”, no.

~~~
parrellel
I think they were referring to Card there.

~~~
sneak
Nope, definitely Heinlein. He takes nationalism as a given, as if these
abstractions we call countries are something real. The idea of whether or not
this is a good thing is never once dragged out into the light.

Additionally, I can only take so many well-meaning Jillian Boardmans. Friday
is often held up as a counterexample, but the fact that she _willfully marries
her rapist_ seems to pass unnoticed.

Fuck that noise.

~~~
parrellel
Ok. I'm going to go with dragonwriter here then. Man wrote a (terrible) book
about dealing with becoming a woman, man wrote Stranger, man wrote plenty
about dealing with tyranny and assorted nastiness.

He wasn't LeGuin by any means, and he fails by modern standards, but for
someone born in 1907, he did a pretty good job.

------
ChuckMcM
Sort of an obituary for the house:
[https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=652](https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=652)

Which apparently was completely remodeled in 1995. Sad, but not entirely
unexpected.

------
ucaetano
> Heated air enters the bathroom through a duct beneath the tub, warming the
> bathtub and the floor

I can hear the collective yawn of a few million Romans from the afterlife not
impressed with this "modern" copy of their tepidaria and hypocausts.

------
dogfishbar
Robert Heinlein's nephew Terrance Heinlein (Terry) is a brilliant architect.
Bob Muller

------
informatimago
I’m surprised they seem to have actively rejected the hypercube architecture.
;-)

