Innovative designers are trading in the basic box for fluid curves. Walls look like waves. If this trend continues, a blueprint won't necessarily suggest how the house should be inhabited or even, in some cases, which end is up. And a few architects, including Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald, a New York team who teach at Columbia University and who dreamed up those pod apartments and blob houses, are poised for the next step, taking their visions of shelter from concept to reality. One of their real-life laboratories is an apartment in Manhattan that has been converted into a seamless landscape of glossy orange fiberglass walls.
Surfaces merge from bed to bathtub, counter to closet.
In another project for the same clients, the architects are building an addition to a house in Connecticut, in which undefined spaces and spiraling steps will let people and activities flow, unconfined by conventional rooms. The exterior will resemble a fuselage of plywood, whose dynamic curves can be cut only by using advanced robotics. Radical visions like these are intriguing, and often beautiful. But whether they'll transform housing as we know it is a different matter. Trend forecaster Michael Dickens, a consultant for the consumer-products giant General Electric, is skeptical.