Recycled and repurposed from five 40′ high-cube shipping containers the 540 Eco-Dwelling is a modular design using a composite highly insulated skin, solar panel array, and wind turbines to condition its inhabitants and produce energy.

Instead of consuming energy it is time to conserve and produce energy. By plugging in the 540 Eco-Dwelling into the suburban grid the energy hog McMansion will be forgotten architecture. By using this design vast areas of suburbia would be transformed into sustainable communities working towards a better and less energy dependent future.

The huge amount of vacant land in the abandoned american suburbs can be used to increase the ruralization of the city. We propose themed neighborhoods, specialized on a few plots of land: the sheep district, the chicken district, the pig district… This would allow neighbours to get in touch to keep or exchange their animals.

We propose developments which are sold as packs.
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House
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Land
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Stockbreeding

Each housing type is associated with a species or a culture. Housing standards are associated with agricultural standards.

Each pack is ready to use. It comes with a user guidebook, a training if needed, a one year guarantee and assistance service (an assistant farmer can be required).

This proposition requires an advertisement campaign. A persuasive propaganda promotes the idea of miniature farming and breeding, and the dreams associated with a rural environment (peasant idyll, family arch…), very far from a real farmer’s life.

I imagine a suburbia where other animals are given living spaces amongst the spaces humans live in, where people without access to garden spaces are still able to grow their own food, where vertical spaces are not just hostile spaces devoid of life instead they host mini-ecosystems with diverse flora and fauna. These are the concepts behind Brick Habitats. It is a modular system of bricks which allows us to create a wide range of features on the side of our buildings including habitats for plants and animals, water bowls/baths, perches, shelters, feeders.

The habitats for animals encourage non-human animals back into areas they previously inhabited before urban sprawl took over, whilst bringing life and positive energies into urban areas. The cavities provide nesting spaces for cavity-nesters like house sparrows, starlings, tits and possibly swifts. The extensions alone provide perches and overhangs and shelters for nest-building. The bowls collect rainwater and can also be used to direct water from the roof water pipes or windows into the plant pots. The cavities can also be filled with reed to provide homes for insects. The habitats for plants can be propagated with a variety of edible crops and native species for wildlife. Salad vegetables and herbs can be cultivated closest to the window. Seasonal perennials like tomatoes and artichokes can be grown further away. Native species grown for wildlife can be located in less accessible spots as they are almost self-sustaining.

The ecolinks project consolidates the landfill and cemetery with the amenity of the golf course. By utilizing the resources of each, ecolinks is an infrastructural center for a self-sufficient community. Cemeteries are once again a vibrant space for recreation with the added benefit of providing grazing land to herds of Shetland cows owned by residents. The golf course rough is now alive with produce in allotment gardens and the water hazards biofilter sewage and landfill seepage. Multiples of these small but dense communities will act in a distributed network to generate power and weather in the face of climactic imbalance. Landfills, now an inconspicuous part of the bucolic topography, produce methane that powers hygroscopic cloud seeding equipment. The storms from these plants not only provide rain to fight desertification in neighboring communities, but their lightning will be captured, stored used for co-generation and trickled back into a smart grid

In the face of current low density development and daunted by resource depletion and climactic change we must build a new infrastructural network that supports dense walkable mixed-use nodes connected by transit routes and surrounded by natural corridors.

The biggest obstacle to such redevelopment is not single family homes on large lots. Infill can bring residential areas to transit-ready density. The major problem is vast tracts of land given over to perpetual large-lot use such as golf courses, cemeteries and landfills.

Nevada has the highest foreclosure rate in the United States. 70,000 homes are affected- meaning 1 in 16 in homes is vacant. Not coincidentally, there are nearly 6,000 Clark County School District students who are now considered homeless. 1/3 of the homeless in Nevada are children under the age of 18, suggesting a much larger floating homeless population.

Re-inventing suburbia today is not a matter of making better houses or improving suburban planning. This project, although highly speculative, seeks to suggest a means of closing the gap between a near-absurd excess of new but vacant suburban homes across the nation, and our tragic, burgeoning homeless population.

We proceed from a Gordon Matta-Clark like vivisection of the typical subdivision. Each house within a standardized block is subdivided into four unequal units separated by a 3 meter wide gap that provides communal access and light. The interiors of each unit are reconfigured and capped with double glazed plates. The glass offers both a means of delivering acoustical and light control (via electrified privacy film.) Thermal control is delivered by employing the cavity space as a temperature buffer.

The ambition of re-envisioning the suburb must address what to do with the human as well as physical fall-out created by failed suburban development models and toxic financial speculation. Until we address the literal and metaphorical implications of these issues we are just gilding the suburban lily.

Superstudio’s Seventh City (”Continuous Conveyor Belt City”) moves with its 8 million inhabitants. In front of the city is a factory that builds the new districts, and behind it, another factory that destructs the older ones. It is an image of the american suburb: its main characteristic is not to sprawl, but to move. Continuously, new suburbs are built, and old suburbs are abandoned (see Detroit).
This movement is older than the suburb itself: the US have a long tradition of ghost cities, aimed at a semi-nomadic population and left in place after use.

These ghost towns sometimes become attractions for tourists, such as the cities of the Gold Rush. The crisis has accelerated the process.

For sure, all the vacant developments will not become touristic attractions.

We propose to use the other ones for great popular parties, during which the houses will be set to fire one by one. This new ritual is inspired by the Detroit “Devil’s Nights” and european tradtional festivals.

This destruction-consumation is to become a huge potlatch.

Let the suburbs die. There is nothing left to do with the territories consumed by residential sprawl.

This suburban retrofit turns a common element that is quickly becoming a liability for Florida communities, golf courses, into an amenity that contributes to sustainability and quality of life. Golf courses are expensive and resource intensive to maintain and decreasing in popularity. In their place, agricultural cultivation can provide fresh produce, local employment, community engagement and beautiful landscapes.

Golf greens are converted to agriculture and aquaculture with cyclical production repurposing waste from one product to fertilizer for the next. The cycle reaches into residential neighborhoods via street tree orchards, edible landscapes and a vertical hydroponic walls with produce collected by the homeowners association. The wall and new “granny flats” create a more urban streetscape suited to a sustainable multimodal lifestyle that includes walking short distances to the market and bicycling for transportation and recreation.

As suburbia meets major transportation corridors, defunct strip malls and big boxes are refurbished to provide places to prepare and sell wholesome meals made with local food. Cooperative commercial kitchens are essential to enable the safe, legal production of prepared foods by small local vendors. The big box store converted to a community market provides a place to store and sell goods for the community farm as well as other local farmers and craftspeople in the shade and sheltered from the frequent Florida rains and storms.

Taking inspiration in artist communities like Christiania in Denmark, or the squat houses of Berlin like the Tacheles, mobile_SUBURBIA aims at supporting the creation of such creative communities. Suburban cities provide the most important basis for this project, which is on one hand affordable living space and big distance to the creative centers of the cities on the other.

mobile_SUBURBIA makes use of abandoned structures of some suburban cities, by placing them on a mobile platform and re-greening them and installing wind generators.

Being lifted by zeppellins, the now floating suburb, becomes mobile and starts its journey. Comparable to a cruise on a ship it is possiblpe to land nearby big cities.
During the flight energy is generated by the wind generators on the ground and food is being planted on the roofs. Once parked the zeppelins turn into big floating wind generators by folding out the propeller in the back.

I imagine living on a mobile_SUBURBIA as a constant inspiration and adventure. It is my vision for a better future: small autonomous communities, ecological living and the possibilities of constant travel and personal exchange with a bigger variety of Cities, Comunities etc. The constant physical and intellectual travel mirrors our society´s technological development and hopefully becomes a better fitting living concept.