An eco house design is anything but boring. And to prove it (and other valuable lessons) architects KieranTimberlake offer Cellophane House.

Cellophane House is a five-story, 1800 square foot, two bedroom, two bathroom concept dwelling commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Designed to be fabricated off site and assembled literally almost anywhere, Cellophane House can operate off-grid.

What is even more notable though is that KireanTimberlake applies a very different premise to the conventional thinking of the permanence of a house structure. The internationally famous architect Arthur Erickson once said he thinks a building “should look as though it has always been there.” The thought behind Cellophane House is almost the complete opposite – the structure obviously hasn’t always been there, and its future asks or perhaps even pleads for renewal.

Cellophane House can grow or shrink to customize the life and lifestyle of its inhabitants. The structural frame is made entirely of off-the-shelf aluminum, upon which additive materials are collected rather than fixed.

The eco benefits of this are huge because most of the waste in our landfills is construction discard. If the house is no longer needed, or the land is needed for a higher purpose, Cellophane House can simply be disassembled and the materials used again somewhere else or at some other time.

Moving into an economy where transitional needs will rule the day, Cellophane House is a kind of toolkit for architects of the future. Part of the genius is that this concept is a likely precursor of homes built for need rather than solely for desire.

The recent MoMa exhibit of which Cellophane House was a part of was titled “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” and although there are (very) significant differences in product, the current modular movement hearkens back to the Sears catalog mail order homes that were shipped ready for assembly by the buyer. As Alphonse Karr once said, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Media: Cellophane House