And after the owners departed, these new-wave modular homes could be recycled. Where gables and front porches once defined style, the dream home could be as playful in shape and colorful as jelly beans. In this new age of free-form housing, circa 2025, the houses' interiors would be as flexible as Silly Putty. A new design aesthetic of amorphous computer-generated forms and new materials is liberating architecture from its traditional building blocks. 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.