Airbnb Will Start Designing Houses In 2019 (fastcompany.com) 30
Airbnb is reportedly planning to distribute prototype buildings next year. Yesterday, Samara, a futures division of Airbnb meant to develop new products and services for the company, announced a new initiative called Backyard. The initiative is described in a press release as "an endeavor to design and prototype new ways of building and sharing homes," with the first wave of test units going public in 2019. Fast Company reports: The name "Backyard" might imply that Airbnb just wants to build Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), those small cottages that sit behind large suburban houses and are often rented on Airbnb. [Airbnb chief product officer and cofounder Joe Gebbia] clarifies that is not the case. "The project was born in a studio near Airbnb headquarters," he says in an interview over email. "We always felt as if we were in Airbnb's backyard -- physically and conceptually -- and started referring to the project as such."
Backyard is poised to be much larger than ADUs, in Gebbia's telling. Yes, small prefabricated dwellings could be in the roadmap, but so are green building materials, standalone houses, and multi-unit complexes. Think of Backyard as both a producer and a marketplace for selling major aspects of the home, in any shape it might come in. "Backyard investigates how buildings could utilize sophisticated manufacturing techniques, smart-home technologies, and gains vast insight from the Airbnb community to thoughtfully respond to changing owner or occupant needs over time," Gebbia says. "Backyard isn't a house, it's an initiative to rethink the home. Homes are complex, and we're taking a broad approach -- not just designing one thing, but a system that can do many things."
Backyard is poised to be much larger than ADUs, in Gebbia's telling. Yes, small prefabricated dwellings could be in the roadmap, but so are green building materials, standalone houses, and multi-unit complexes. Think of Backyard as both a producer and a marketplace for selling major aspects of the home, in any shape it might come in. "Backyard investigates how buildings could utilize sophisticated manufacturing techniques, smart-home technologies, and gains vast insight from the Airbnb community to thoughtfully respond to changing owner or occupant needs over time," Gebbia says. "Backyard isn't a house, it's an initiative to rethink the home. Homes are complex, and we're taking a broad approach -- not just designing one thing, but a system that can do many things."
Hate Air BnB (Score:1)
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Agreed about the shared/gig/techbro economy needing to burn down. But then again, this is pretty benign. Pre-fab houses have been around since the early 1900s, nothing new.
Problem is that the majority of costs associated with housing are land costs, at least in areas where there are jobs and people want to live.
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Sharing/gig economy companies were driven forward by the last recession, and are more likely to succeed as the economy slides back into a recession. Desperate people willing to do anything or let people use their stuff are the primary driving force.
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From a restaurant, sure. From a grocery store, it can easily get cheaper than the gas when the cycler gets cheap enough. Also, if you're working 80 hours a week, you really might not have time.
You assume they own a car, and use Uber for convenience. Alternatively, you may be able to afford an Uber, but not a car payment.
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What's weird is that subletting rooms in your house was pretty normal, say up through maybe the 1950s? I mean people did have full-on rooming houses in some larger homes.
I think it was largely the post-war economic prosperity that got many families into single family houses and a lot of lower income single people either out of their parents' homes or into their own apartments vs. something like a rooming house or the really old-school residential hotel where rooms were let by the week.
I often can't help bu
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Agreed. Please avoid using anti-semitic companies like AirBnb [google.com]. It's not even been that long since the Overland Park shootings. They're no need to encourage these people.
Fuck Off (Score:1)
In the UK house prices are already absurdly high due to net immigration that has been around 350,000 to 400,000 per year for the last 20 years. Hardly any new houses have been built, so this has simply lead to huge house price rises and considerable declines in living conditions. The rise of buy-to-let mortgages have also pushed house prices up massively and tenets end up paying to mortgage for wealthy landlords, along with some extra to cover expenses and profit. The landlords then use the profits to bu
20+ years in the industry... (Score:2)
AirBnB are to be commended. Nothing has changed in building, industry or technology. Maybe they can move the course of History. I see men who want to follow in the footsteps of Jesus - a carpenter. I meet engineers whose ideas are vaguely similar and unchanged since the pyramids. Technology isn't even comparable to the Romans, since our concrete used today could not remain standing the test of time as have the great works.
Being built today will be razed, dumped and reused structures that have no intent
California houses (Score:2)