
We were supposed to be living in pod houses - apophasis
https://theoutline.com/post/8005/futuro-house-the-home-of-the-future-that-never-was?zd=2&zi=lz5sv2cj
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peterwallhead
My late father, Malcolm Wallhead, designed an igloo-shaped hut in the 1970's,
ideal for setting up in remote places to escape the pressures of city life.
Even though it's rarely purchased for that purpose, they're still quite
popular for short-term accommodation.

[1] [https://icewall.com.au/](https://icewall.com.au/)

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claudeganon
I grew up in Michigan and we would have loved having these as a kid! We built
our own igloos from time to time, but this would’ve have been the ultimate
winter club house. Closest we had was old ice fishing shacks.

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rebuilder
Last winter my wife and I took our daughter sledding at a nearby hill. There
were a bunch of other kids and parents with, as usual, a variety of things
used to ride on.

One of the fastest "sleds" was a mildly curved fibreglass oval, just the right
size for an adult or a couple of kids to sit on. It was a Futuro window, from
the factory that made them! More precisely, I think it was part of a mold for
a window, since the inner surface was pretty rough, and as I said it was
fibreglass. So while the Futuro never took off as a ski lodge, or otherwise,
it's at least good for getting downhill in a hurry.

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GuiA
Is there a cool story around how the person came to own such a thing?

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rebuilder
The factory that manufactured the elements back in the day was apparently
somewhere nearby, and if you know people in manufacturing, some of them are
the type to never throw anything away...

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coconut_crab
Because land usage is maximized with rectangle shaped plots, not rounded ones
so pod or dome will never be popular. Same reason why they made cube shaped
watermelons in Japan I I guess, to stuff as many of them as possible in
containers.

~~~
souprock
Circular homes minimize the required material and the surface through which
heat is lost or gained.

In normal places, there is no need to think about maximizing the land usage.
People typically put a 2000 square foot house on a 10000 square foot lot. For
a circular home on a square lot, that is 51 feet in diameter on a 100x100 lot.
Each side has more than 24 feet to spare.

We really don't care too much about minimizing lot size. In most places, it
isn't even legal to have a tiny lot. The excess can be trees or whatever, and
most of us like it that way.

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Pinus
Trivia: The Swedish Air Force bought a couple of Futuro houses, placing them
on top of concrete towers to serve as observation posts on bombing ranges.
Here's a document (in Swedish) with several photos, including one of a Futuro
being transported by a Boeing Vertol 107 helicopter:
[https://docplayer.se/97545516-Futurohusen-pa-norans-fore-
det...](https://docplayer.se/97545516-Futurohusen-pa-norans-fore-detta-
skjutfalt-byggnadsnummer-k-k-kulturhistorisk-dokumentation.html)

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Tempest1981
A yurt seems cheaper to fabricate, and almost as cool:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt)

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twic
The hexayurt is the more HN-style version of the yurt:

[http://hexayurt.com/](http://hexayurt.com/)

~~~
lewisflude
I had the pleasure of meeting Vinay Gupta at a conference last year. Very
interesting man!

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buboard
There is a guy on youtube designing his own container-house in the california
desert. Turns out with all the regulations etc it cost more than a 'normal'
house.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA5fh29rhLs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA5fh29rhLs)

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Mikeb85
Pre-fab houses exist, even pretty affordable ones. But as long as land is
worth as much as it is, it makes no sense to have the house on said land cost
less than a certain percentage of the total value. Hence why homes still cost
what they do.

~~~
walrus01
In many urban and suburban parts of the USA there's specific ordinances
against manufactured housing, because of shoddily built singlewide and
doublewide "mobile homes" that people who already own property in the area
don't want put in place, for fear of driving down property values.

Unfortunately this also tends to encompass the definition of many higher end
manufactured homes, or even prefab/modular housing that might cost _more_ than
a stick built 1600 sq ft bungalow.

~~~
Mountain_Skies
An interesting twist on this is in rural areas or the exurban fringe, it's
common to see large multimillion dollar estates next to decaying mobile homes
and middle class 3+2 ranch style homes. There seems to be very little friction
between the different housing types.

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HeyLaughingBoy
This is actually the situation I'm living in. I live out in the country and
while my house isn't a mobile home, it is more than 3x smaller than my
neighbor's gigantic palace across the street.

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_iyig
Similar idea to Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house)

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m463
The reason we're not living in pod houses or geodesic domes or yurts is
probably zoning laws.

A friend of mine was able to build a geodesic dome (maybe in the 80's?) on
unincorporated land. Soon afterwards a nearby city swallowed the area he lived
in, and if he hadn't built it when he did, they wouldn't have allowed him to
put it up.

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HeckFeck
Could we also look into a roundhouse revival? Having the range in the middle
heat the whole house, while grilling steak and baking bread. Perhaps find time
for a cask of ale. That was the life...

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ianai
You know, I wonder if this had just been a little more modular if it could
have sparked something longer lasting?

Apartments are arguably this same line. You build a lot of units to maximize
the number of residencies in a parcel of land. In the process, you make the
units as uniform as possible. I could imagine the entire units being
manufactured off site being beneficial. (Granted, I seem to recall some modern
apartment complexes being built exactly this way.)

A case where something done slightly different would have leap frogged to
something modern.

~~~
pjc50
There's already a lot of work in "modular housing" and various sorts of "pre-
fabricated" construction. It has something of a bad reputation, dating from
the very early days. The UK had something of a plague of concrete panel houses
that turned out to be defective: [https://www.peterbarry.co.uk/blog/houses-of-
non-traditional-...](https://www.peterbarry.co.uk/blog/houses-of-non-
traditional-construction-common-property-defects-6/)

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peg_leg
One of these is used as a Champaign Room at a strip club in Tampa, FL

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microtherion
While I think domed houses like this one, or e.g. the "Flintstone House" in
Hillsborough, are very cool to look at, they strike me as rather impractical
to live in, because no straight-backed furniture can be placed flush against
any wall. No standard bookshelves, desks, closets, the TV needs to be curved
_just right_ , etc. No hanging paintings on the wall.

~~~
souprock
Look at the www.monolithic.com floor plans. Because the domes are large,
typical rooms will have 2 or 3 straight walls. It's only the exterior wall
that is curved.

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numlock86
Cool design (back the days I suppose) but the wasted space (well, volume)
introduced by that design is off limits.

~~~
nessunodoro
yeah the "pod house" was like the tv dinner of houses, a novelty product with
little intrinsic value.

others like fuller's dymaxion home were explicit about why the odd shape was
chosen: structural integrity in a natural disaster, maximize ratio of livable
space to raw materials, economize the physical footprint, mix/max it so you
can mass produce it cheaply and house the world.

The one major drawback I find in structures like these is that I miss right
angles. They help me orient myself in a space. A spheroid may provide maximal
volume for its surface area, but if your residents are going to be ill at ease
for any reason, they'll never choose it for their home.

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thombat
A popular app for pod dwellers would be "furniture tesselator": given a
selection of standard square furnishings it works out an arrangement in your
curvy-walled room that maximises free floor space / minimises dust-bunny farms
from the segments trapped behind the backs.

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CaptainZapp
Not quite the same concept, but I can't help being reminded of the Nakagin
Tower in Tokyo.

I, for one, hope it can be saved.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakagin_Capsule_Tower)

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timonoko
This Futuro adapts very well to the environment. I thought it was strange rock
formation or army bunker.
[https://youtu.be/GxwrKjhMe5o?t=92](https://youtu.be/GxwrKjhMe5o?t=92)

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cmdshiftf4
People are living in pod houses, only due to metropolitan convergence and the
consequent increase in the cost of land they've been stacked on top of one
another, called condos and are sold for multiples of the proposed Futuro.

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kijin
That thing looks like it will lift off and fly away in any kind of windy
weather. That's a huge red flag in any part of the world that has hurricanes
and tornadoes.

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GhostVII
I think it looks better in windy weather - it doesn't have a large flat wall
which will catch wind and potentially collapse.

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akrymski
Actually, we were supposed to be living in skyscrapers. Oh wait, we are.

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eecc
> The bank took their house and sold it at auction for very little money. So
> they lost everything.

Perhaps it's a bit of an off-topic tangent but this sentence caused my ire.
Why do banks always throw people under the bus when it comes to foreclosing on
someone?

I can imagine that it's often about reclaiming a residual fraction of a
mortgage so even a firesale auction can turn a profit but why can't they
bloody damn sell a property at market rates, cover the debt and leave the rest
to the debtor? Heck, even take commission for the sale!

Why the ruthlessness? It's abominable.

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WalterBright
> why can't they bloody damn sell a property at market rates, cover the debt
> and leave the rest to the debtor?

That's what my mortgage contracts have specified. I didn't add the clause, it
was a standard boilerplate contract.

BTW, buying a house at auction is selling it at market rate - the market rate
being what people are willing to pay for it.

~~~
setr
I would imagine that's a fairly small "market" and doesn't really reflect the
broader market. It's "a" market rate.

And it sounds like this isn't a case of what people are willing to pay for it,
but rather what I'm willing to sell it for: that is, the bank just wants to
get rid of the house for _something_ , even if it's highly innefficient and
people were willing to pay more.

