Rendering of the “House of Clicks” (all images © Tham & Videgård Arkitekter)
Putting all of a country’s dream home ideas into one design could easily result in abomination, an architectural version of the bubble-domed, smooth-driving “Homer” carfrom The Simpsons. A house designed from 200 million clicks on the Swedish real estate site Hemnet, however, turned the online interactions of 20% of the country’s population into an austere exercise in melding traditional craft and modern minimalism.
The Hemnet House, or “House of Clicks,” was designed by Tham & Videgård based on 2 million visitor clicks on 86,000 properties between January and October of 2014. The datashowed a majority in favor of fireplaces, an open plan kitchen, a tiled bathroom, a balcony, and an average of four rooms. According to the architects, they combined this data with two types of Swedish home: “the red wooden cottage that represents history, local resources, crafts, and national building traditions, and the white functionalist box which stands for modernity, optimism, industrial development, the welfare state, and international ideals.”
Layout of the “House of Clicks”
The exterior might appear industrial, but it’s actually wood painted the “Falu” red found on Swedish barns and traditional homes. Inside the walls of the four rooms are white and the sofas gray, with other rendered furniture resembling items you might find at IKEA. It’s not the most thrilling of house designs and is basically a red box with some frills like a roof deck and huge windows, a middle-of-the-road abode that averages Swedish preferences into a ready-made consumer object. Quartz reported that the house “is being primed for mass production and projected to be on the market by 2016,” with an estimated price of $345,000.
But what would a statistically popular house look like for a country that favors a more, shall we say, bloated style of home? TreeHugger imagined what an American version might look like based on data from Houseplans.com and, as you might guess, the craftsman design looks like a beehive of rooms with a barrage of closets.
Others have done similar tests with design, such as Jan Habraken with studio FormNationwho tried “breeding” an ideal chair based on the elements of popular designer chairs. The results of his Chairgenics were displayed at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2013. These were often malformed distortions. The “House of Clicks” is an interesting experiment where Big Data statistics demand consumer preferences, yet it’s still that guiding human hand of the architect that keeps things from morphing into monstrosities.
Kitchen in the “House of Clicks”
Bedroom in the “House of Clicks”
Living room in the “House of Clicks”
Fonte: Hiperallergic
