Please meet Home for Life, a bonkers architecture project designed by the British artist Roger Dean to serve as a prototype for a newly conceived idea of housing, one sustainable and womblike, innovative and somehow practical—"a house for the new millennium: artistically beautiful, environmentally kind, but cheap and quick to build," as he describes it. Though Dean's bread and butter is painting vibrant, fantasylike landscapes for album covers, he once imagined this structure could truly provide a revolutionary shift in how people construct houses.
From Dean's perspective, Home for Life, which was unveiled a few years ago in the UK, could set the stage for building with fiberglass molds, plaster, and sprayed concrete, in theory allowing a four-bedroom house, buttressed with steel rods and insulated with pumice beads, to be erected in just six hours. As the artist explains, this process would save 10 to 20 percent in materials and as much as 50 percent in labor costs. Of course, that's only if the molds actually exist, and considering Dean imagines their cost at "about a million pounds to produce," the project at large veers into "never going to happen" territory—which, to be fair, seems to now be a booming subset of the architecture industry.
This project also "enhance[s] rather than spoil the surroundings," according to Dean's official site. He writes: "All kinds of architectural groups are calling their buildings environmentally friendly, but there isn't such a thing. You've hurt the environment by building on it." Though the interiors are quite similar to those in the Malibu home of the late, great media personality Dick Clark, Home For Life has never actually been lived in out in the world; thus far, it's traveled to a couple of exhibition halls around the UK and once served as "the only habitable space free of mud" at England's annual Glastonbury Music Festival.
· Roger Dean's Organic-Shaped Mushroom House. [Inthralld via Design You Trust]
· Home For Life [Official]
· All Architectural Craziness posts [Curbed National]