The idea of "future proofing" a house--building a home whose structure and systems are resilient, able to morph, and capable of providing a place for a household to thrive and prosper in real-time and over time--is not new.
And as Hurricane Florence bears down and menaces a million homes on the Southeastern coast, and the phenomenon of a climate disturbance and its destructive path across a widening geography of people's lives becomes part of a now-serialized national pastime involving storms, fire, earthquakes, and drought, future-proofing homes and communities takes on profound new meaning.
At its essence, a future proof home serves its purpose as a place for the well-being and sense of sanctuary of people living there no matter what happens across a span of time--maybe two to three generations. To do so, it must be durable, adaptable, and, without fail, capable of access to vital resources.
Inventor Benjamin Franklin, who'd been collaborating on ideas about the relationship electricity and lightning with a fellow scientist and friend in London, Peter Collinson, struck upon one of the first "future-proofing" building technologies.
By 1750, in addition to wanting to prove that lightning was electricity, Franklin began to think about protecting people, buildings, and other structures from lightning. This grew into his idea for the lightning rod. Franklin described an iron rod about 8 or 10 feet long that was sharpened to a point at the end. He wrote, "the electrical fire would, I think, be drawn out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike..." Two years later, Franklin decided to try his own lightning experiment. Surprisingly, he never wrote letters about the legendary kite experiment; someone else wrote the only account 15 years after it took place.
In so doing, Franklin--who gave the world the idea of public lending libraries--gave home building one of its first deliberately "future-proof" technologies, the lightning rod.
And this evolved, too, into a term in common usage--lightning rod--to describe a person, place, or issue that typically attracts negative attention, and takes the blame for something he, she, or it isn't responsible for.
Franklin's prescience and his applied brilliance as a building technologist--for example, what is the Franklin stove other than a double-duty technology for room air comfort and a cooking appliance?--are, at times eclipsed by his enormous role as a Founding Father in Philadelphia's Continental Congress.
Too, it seems that Franklin was on to something in 1750 we're only getting around to understanding more fully about houses, and looking at the lightning rod and its role in potentially future-proofing a home in the event of severe lightning storm activity helps us get what Franklin grasped.
That a home's structure and its systems--i.e. building envelope vs. HVAC, electric, plumbling--are inter-operable, inter-dependent, and when it comes to effectively designing, engineering, and construction workflows, one and the same.
Now, this represents a change. Received wisdom, prior to today's rapid convergence of the digital and the physical worlds, has been that a home's enclosure and its respective operating systems lived proximately and in a coordinated way with one another, but that they were separate, discrete parts of a home.
A lightning rod speaks to both the enclosure--a structural extension at the home's highest point--and its systems, the conduction of electricity in such a way as to avoid damage through the members of the house.
Building Information Modeling--which enables architects, engineers, and builders to share both received wisdom and new ideas, marrying how people want to live in their homes with how homes themselves, with their own version of bodies and brains, live--has created a no-going-back moment that requires stakeholders ranging from the capital investment arena, to community and neighborhood development, to manufacturing and distribution, to architecture, to engineering, to construction to break through two critical impasses to progress.
One, is to discern who owns what in the process. And two, is having solved for the first challenge, unite. That is, to merge building technology, construction technology, and home technology--tying together the streams of digital data that underlie the three areas--into future-proof homes, which ultimately means disaster-proof homes and communities.
Recently, as part of the research and development process we're undertaking to explore these issues of where that merger of building tech, construction tech, and home technology is leading us, we wound up with 30 or more manufacturer, systems suppliers, construction experts, architects, and web development whizzes in the same room on the Google Campus in Mountain View, Calif., near San Jose.
The focus, on the surface of it, was how to get room air comfort, indoor air quality, water quality, energy performance, waste-reduction, lighting, security, floor-plan adaptability, structural durability, aesthetic experience, healthful-living user experiences, and well-being to play nice together in the sand box of a home and community. And to do it, mind you, in a way that harmonizes, to the greatest degree possible in a financially attainable house. The home is KB Home ProjeKt, #wheretomorrowlives, and the community is Inspirada, near Las Vegas in Henderson, Nev.
It's helpful, maybe, to look at some of the ways Google is strategically approaching its "conscious home" initiatives--with Nest, Google Home hubs, and Google Assistant--and where they lead, eventually, back to how homes are designed, engineered, and built with both physical and digital raw materials.
Central to the Google approach is the notion of a "routine," an easily understandable concept by which one can heat-map repeated behaviors and patterns of people in their homes, and begin to work across devices, structural and systemic nodes to either make those repeated behaviors easier, more delightful, safer, or more efficient.
At the same time, the notion of "routines" applies to the house as well. Across time and across climatic shifts and events, homes behave in certain ways that become iterative, patterned, receptive to capture as data points.
For Google, the endgame is to triangulate and match human routines with a home and community's routines, to allow people a "more for less" sense of value that can live and change over time.
At some point, just as today's ovens can cook food at different temperatures in different parts of the oven, room air comfort--thanks to a closer match between human and home routines--may allow for two people in the same room to be comfortable, each with a different "thermostat setting" for the space he or she occupies.
Collaboration, at a level we're only now beginning to grasp, is one of today's non-negotiables. As a home's enclosure, its systems, and the neighborhood it's part of become increasingly a singular value, that is either future-proof or not, each stakeholder is going to have to understand more about where ownership in the process lies, and where a unified effort is not an option.
