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RICHARD BENDER
a clear purpose, a clear direction and a clear point of view. The Coca–
Cola Company made soda, U.S. Steel made steel. The structure of the
corporation, its leadership, goals and techniques were clear, clocklike.
But corporations have been restmcturing. We have seen the develop–
ment of the conglomerate, and if we compare it to the corporation,
we can see the shift from a clocklike to a cloudlike apparatus. What
after all does Litton Industries do? What business are they in? What
tools do they use? What do they make? What are their goals? Who
is
their leader? Not only the leadership, tools and goals, but the control
system as well, have become cloudlike, and more difficult to perceive.
Cloudlike mechanisms are developing all around us - in education,
medicine, government, transportation, recreation, even housing. What
would a cloudlike building industry look like? We see housing factories,
tools and pieces rather than finished houses, tools and pieces which will
be designed to make people less dependent on decisions made at the
factory. We will invent a kind of automated cottage industry where
homemaking is meant to be part of daily life and where the home is
expected to grow, change and perhaps even to move with each family.
Our factories - and the kind of factory we are building now for future
use - are designed to produce ready-to-wear houses in a world that is
ready for custom tailoring. The utilities, services and institutions which
we provide to support these houses are equally out of step. What we
should do is tum technology around to the point where we give people
tools and the mechanism and design framework to support them. Then
houses will be the creations of their users, rather than responses to the
needs created by technology.
'
Power lines, for instance, can be eliminated by the substitution of
total energy systems. Single fuel supplies (gas, for example) are used
directly for heating, cooling and generation of electricity. In rural areas,
the savings on pole and line costs make this generating equipment as at–
tractive as aesthetic considerations do. In the future, more and more dis–
persed settlements will build on this idea. Nuclear energy is another
possibility for independent power supply. Containers of radioactive waste
with a half-life of more than twenty years have already been used as a
line-free source of energy, and nuclear cells, solar energy and cosmic
radiation as energy sources may not be far in the future.
If
this seems
"futuristic," think how impossible radio or television seemed a century
ago. New technologies always look like magic.
There are still other energy sources available to groups of buildings
and communities. Solid waste incineration, reuse of waste heat and
energy from household processes are two important possibilities. We
