As architects we design for our clients immediate needs, but as planners we also look at how our creations will grow and change over time to serve the needs of future generations. And as parents and stewards of the Earth, seeking to construct a more sustainable built environment, we need to look at what kind of environmental impacts come from the economies we create in manufacturing building materials and what energy consumption and waste footprint our buildings will have over their lifetime.
Sustainable design and construction is about to leap into the future with current advances in materials allowing us to build smart and lightly in a way we only dreamed about a decade ago. With LED lights, transparent solar cells, deep learning AI assisted agriculture, BIM (building information modeling, and bio-mimicry driven material manufacturing, we have the technology to bring together buildings that feed, house and generate net positive energy and clean water to residents at modern comfort and safety standards with a smaller ecological footprint since we first stepped foot down from the trees.
Key to this next era of design is lite buildings. A building at its essence needs to provide a dry temperature controlled envelope. Graduating from the layers of brick and mortar, roofs of metal and stone of the past century, we can now provide the same envelope at 100th the cost using light weight options; alloy frames, locally harvested bamboo strips, clear polymer sheeting, tempered glass, etc. Adjustable transparencies and smart thermal flow systems allow natural sunlight and ground insulating properties to heat and cool buildings at the fraction of the effort needed to heat and cool an isolated box of a traditional building interior.
Our modular ATOMHOUSE, ATOMFARM and ATOMFACTORY systems act as a platform for incorporating these emerging designs and technologies into affordable and scalable units to quickly and efficiently build resilient housing and food security into residential and community development projects globally. We are creating a new paradigm
