Human Habitation Systems

A house is more than just a place for a family to live and sleep. It is more than just a home. It is also a focal node of interest and connection with the larger world. Human habitation is more than just about building houses for families. Human habitation concerns the problem centrally of human ecology, and of human systems, particularly eco-systems, both upon an individual and a social level.

We can therefore take the concept of home and of habitation systems and apply it cross-culturally to discover the range of variation of pattern we encounter--the Lakota shared in a bison-hunting horse-culture and lived in teepees made of hides and lodge-poles easily obtained from their environment and easily transportable from location to location on the trail of the buffalo.  In the west, hide-covered teepees gave way to wigwams of stick and mud, and in the east to earth-lodges constructed from the large timbers readily available from the surrounding forests. If we go back in time we find that Neanderthals of 100,000 years ago lived in complexes of cave shelters and evolved a style of life that was focused upon the hunting of large game that crisscrossed the complex of cave dwellings in convenient ways. Perhaps the most important point of such cave dwelling is one that is often over-looked, as they were in general easily defensible, not just from large predatory animals, but from other humans as well, and it seems, the entrances to such complexes could often be disguised and hidden from view.

In the wide range of housing types and associated life-styles, we can find no standards or norms by which we can compare and contrast the living arrangements of different cultures and peoples in the world. With the advent of industrialization, we find increasing streamlining toward Amer-European style constructions--availability of milled lumber, forged hardware and molded masonry has led to variations of a carpentered box style of habitation. We of the west tend to construe this as the natural and normal style of habitation even if most of humanity in the past did not actually live this way.

Thus the problem of human habitation becomes one of critical focus in the promotion and design of alternative development, and when we recognize the relationship between style of life, adaptive processes of the large society, and the kind of habitation we adopt in our lives, we must recognize that there are social, economic and political ramifications to mode of habitation that has strategic importance.

We have adopted an experimental approach to the design development and conception of alternative human habitation systems. We see few boundaries or necessary limitations upon design beyond the maintenance of basic standards of hygiene and ecological non-destructiveness. Buckminster Fuller even imagined large floating Geodesic Domes in which people lived in a permanently airborne community. Others have conceived of huge floating structures that can accommodate tens of thousands of permanent inhabitants. Living under water or in space remain far-off but fascinating subjects of science fiction.

It has been a fact that one solution to rising local population densities has been the development of large complexes of flats or stacked apartments, and thus an increasing percentage of humanity is living in "vertical" dwellings arranged one on top of another. I would be inclined to turn the other direction and start digging large and deep holes with the prospect of underground living structures.

At the same time, whatever the manner or style of habitational modality and design we may adopt, we must be aware of the impact of such habitation systems on the environment and the local and regional ecology in which they are situated--hence development of marine based habitational systems is only as good as long as such development does not further contribute to the deterioration of life in the ocean that has so far been the negative consequence of human transculturative contact with the seas. The problem of waste disposal upon a floating ship that permanently housed tens of thousands of people would have to be directly resolved by some other means than merely dumping human excrement into the ocean. Systems that permit recycling of human wastes would have to be effectively engineered.