8 ms·

Robert and Virginia Heinlein's Colorado Springs House

100 points by benbreen 8y ago

dsr_ 8y ago
This is a house so efficiently designed for its purpose that it could never adapt to new needs. That might be the right thing to do in certain circumstances: if you live near a city, odds are pretty good that when your needs change, someone else will want your house. On the other hand, I bet every built-in appliance is a non-standard size that is somewhere between painful and ridiculously expensive to repair or replace. There's probably something deeply philosophical from this that would be applicable to writing programs.
- Retric 8y ago
  One story houses are not inherently that expensive to modify. At 1150 SF they could probably replace it every 15 years for less than many modern 5000+ SF houses. Sure, some houses take 5+ years to build others take 5 days once you have a foundation.
- phyller 8y ago
  Similar to the black suit. I bought one 20 years ago, it still makes me look sharp for any occasion that requires dressing professionally. If this wasn't the Heinlein's house it would be unsellable today. The cost to tear down the house would probably be subtracted from the value of the empty lot to determine how much it was worth. I need to buy a house soon in an area with a lot of old houses, some more than 100 years old. Here are my list of house attributes with staying power: - high ceilings - open floor plan - generous dimensions (particularly bathrooms and kitchens) - light (and air) from the outside - durable water-tight construction - no wood on exterior (it rots, maintenance nightmare) - a good view - land These might seem obvious, but apparently not everyone has gotten the memo (I'm looking at you England). It seems to me that commercial properties even from hundreds of years ago are much more likely to have these attributes than residences from 1960 and earlier. If you can't afford brick or stone exteriors, stucco is cheap and seems to last for a long time. A tasteful metal roof is great. My grandfather was before his time and built his entire house in hot, humid Florida out of steel many decades ago. Steel panels on the outside, steel paneled roof, steel frame. It's been hit by quite a few hurricanes and looks as good as new. The other wood frame houses around his are looking pretty shabby now. Not sure why steel construction didn't catch on.
  - eitally 8y ago
    I'm not saying you're wrong to hold this list of desired attributes, but the short of it is that houses are generally built the way they are to satisfy demand at the lowest possible construction cost. When you consider the average time people stay in a given home is only about 7 years, durability doesn't carry particularly much sway. FWIW, the reason there are so many crappy houses in the Bay Area is that the climate is so mild that even the most poorly constructed shacks have staying power... and with the cost of remodeling/construction here, there isn't much incentive to rebuild unless you've got significant disposable income.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Something like my circa 200 year old New England farmhouse that’s pretty typical hits about half the list but you’re starting from a place where rooms were small. I’ve opened up the first floor a lot but ceilings are still low and the renovated bathroom, which wouldn’t even have existed in the original house, is small. And it’s the only one in the house.
  - danans 8y ago
    > [air] from the outside That's probably the only thing from your list that you are likely to find in a 100 yr old house that hasn't been recently renovated. And that is a result of the far less precise building and sealing methods from that time, and not that fresh air was a design goal of the old house. Those old houses tended to leak water and air like sieves, resulting in very high energy consumption and lower comfort. On the plus side, the materials they were probably built with (solid wood) were far more tolerant of moisture than today's synthetic building materials (OSB, etc), and with all the air leakage that occurred, they dried out quickly. That's why many of these old houses' structures have lasted, while newer, tightly sealed houses with moisture penetration have failed. Also the air leaks provided fresh air. > ... water-tight construction Not only is this not likely to be the case on an old house, without a modern mechanical forced ventilation system installed, a water-tight house (with the windows shut) incompatible with the requirement for "[air] from the outside".
    - phyller 8y ago
- ryandrake 8y ago
  It’s refreshing, in contrast to today’s beige cookie-cutter McMansions that check off generic “typical vanilla homeowner” needs but have no soul or uniqueness in form or function. Go to some open houses: Everything built within the last 20 years is just a big box built out to the edge of the property line, with the exact same boring “high ceilings, granite countertop, open floor plan, faux-everything” design. Yuuuuuck! It must have been nice to live in the age where you could hire an architect and sit down and draft a custom home just for yourself and not have it cost an arm and a leg. My old man did this back in the 70s and he was barely middle class at the time!
  - HarryHirsch 8y ago
    What makes it worse is that everyone with children will have to go for the high-ceiling box with open floorplan because everything else comes with intolerable schools.
- munificent 8y ago
  It's exactly like highly optimized code. Very efficient for today's requirements but complex, calcified, and difficult to adapt when requirements change.
- VRay 8y ago
  Dude, there's no way Heinlein designed a house like that. The value and importance of standardized, easily-replaceable parts is a plot point in his book, The Door into Summer (BTW, I strongly recommend everyone here read it. The main character is an engineer, and it's shocking how insightful and relevant you'll still find his observations about businesses and the way engineering is done, 61 years after the book was first published)
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    Heinlein was full of contradictions. Look at the built-in furniture: there's no way to change it if you discover it doesn't work for you, other than by ripping it out and redoing the walls. That's not modular or replaceable. The rolling table between the kitchen and dining room is unnecessary for one person, great for two, and inconveniently small for four. And yes, Heinlein designed it. The two volume biography by Patterson is completely uncritical and at times fanboyish, but it seems to have the facts straight.
vvpan 8y ago
Why is 1776 a special number in this case? The yeah of declaration of independence?
- krustyburger 8y ago
  Yeah!
- kop316 8y ago
  That is correct, 1776 is the year the US signed the Declaration of Independence, and is considered the year the USA was created.
- throwanem 8y ago
  Yes. It's an extremely Heinlein choice; he's regarded by the sympathetic as having been highly patriotic, by the unsympathetic as virulently nationalistic.
  - natechols 8y ago
    I never thought of Heinlein as especially patriotic or nationalistic; he was, on the other hand, a big fan of revolutions against oppressive regimes.
    - berbec 8y ago
      And he had some... interesting... ideas about who makes a good sexual partners. [1] 1; https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441748600 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441748600
      - sneak 8y ago
        See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect
      - natechols 8y ago
        Full disclosure: I never bothered to read anything of his written after "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", since the universal consensus seems to be that his later books are very, very strange.
pseudolus 8y ago
There's "everything to please a housewife in the kitchen including an 'office' with phone and typewriter". There's nothing more amusing than reading print periodicals from the early part of the 20th century to the mid-1980s. The ads are also always a particular highlight.
- parrellel 8y ago
  Did you like the bit about the soundproofing and the two shower heads in the bathroom. Or the bit about the extra large beds. Certainly, these things are for work and efficiency, nothing more.
  - MisterOctober 8y ago
    Well, it's a sort of work, isn't it
seltzered_ 8y ago
I get really intrigued by these designs (went through a folding obsession phase) then try to judge how usable/learnable the design choices are. FWIW, I constantly find myself comparing the current wave of home automation / IoT to the 1958 film Mon Oncle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9t98Gox60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9t98Gox60 This said the heinlein house sounds pretty usability-focused: “There are no rugs or any need for them. All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, comfortable and clean footing. Nor are there any floor lamps or table lamps. The illumination is built into the house. General lighting for the living room comes from cold-cathode tubes concealed behind a box molding. These illuminate the ceiling. Adjustable wall spotlights are located at all work and relaxation areas in the house. All electric convenience outlets are at comfortable hip height. I'm through stooping over to the baseboard."
stevenwoo 8y ago
The house they moved to after this in Santa Cruz is unique (from the outside at least) http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html
jotux 8y ago
Looks like there are photos of the house in it's current form on zillow[1]. It's obviously been remodeled, a lot. [1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Colorado-Springs-CO/13672320_zpid/4172_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/38.790487,-104.858758,38.78867,-104.861641_rect/18_zm/ https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Colorado-Springs-CO/13...
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  They finally gave in and got rid of the flat roof. People eventually find out that they will develop leaks that are impossible to find.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Which is pretty evident if you’ve ever spent time in typical commercial flat-roofed buildings. Who hasn’t seen buckets catching drips at some point or other?
    - erichurkman 8y ago
      Ah, I always have fond memories of office buckets. At eShares, we had one in our first office. It dripped when it rained, but inexplicably so: we were on the ground floor.
    - chaoticmass 8y ago
      My current apartment building was built in the 1960s and has flat roofs. I'm on the top floor and have had maintenance fix a leak in my bathroom ceiling like 3 times and it keeps coming back.
  - eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
    I was thinking the same thing, despite the article saying flat roofs were fine as long as they were reinforced against load. The load is rarely the issue, but as you stated, flat roofs seem to ALWAYS leak.
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
khr 8y ago
Mirrors in skylights seems like a very obvious improvement to increase the amount of natural sunlight in a space. It seems adaptable to north-facing top-floor suites. Mirrors could be installed such that the sun would reflect into the suite throughout the day. It seems to be such an obvious improvement, but I've not noticed such a system anywhere in my city. Maybe the regular cleaning of the mirrors is enough of a deterrent for building owners to invest in something like this?
- wefarrell 8y ago
  Something like a deck prism would have a similar effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_prism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_prism
- Wistar 8y ago
  Not a sunlight but Mitsubishi's new synthetic-light "windows" appear to be pretty spectacular. I want one. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45827812/mitsubishi-windows-shine-alarmingly-realistic-fake-sunlight https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45827812/mitsubishi-w...
  - r00fus 8y ago
    Doesn't sound like full spectrum light. I'd live to see the CRI on those things.
    - Wistar 8y ago
      I did a little digging and, it appears that Mitsubishi and CoeLux have partnered on these artificial skylights and, although the CRI isn't listed, the CoeLux site says this: "CoeLux systems combine LED lighting that reproduces sunlight spectrum, direction and brightness with optical systems and nano-structured materials that reproduce the endless distance of the sky and sun." If it actually does reproduce the sunlight spectrum it'd have to have a very high CRI, no? Toshiba has their TRI-R LEDs claimed to be capable of 95% of the sunlight spectrum and they are rated at a CRI of Ra97. Yuji has LEDs with claimed CRI of 98, so it seems within the realm of possibility that these fake windows are very convincing.
mrbill 8y ago
The fancy bed was auctioned off in 2013. http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-second-best-bed/ http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-second-... It went for just over $2K. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins-Bed-/251317839942 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins-Bed-/25131783994...
- pkamb 8y ago
  One of the worst "you might also like" algorithms I've ever seen! https://i.imgur.com/Vy0dSUZ.png https://i.imgur.com/Vy0dSUZ.png
buserror 8y ago
Oh well, here goes a few karma points ;-) Does anyone else dislike Heinlein? I mean, I read hundreds of SF books, followed dozens of authors, and I'm pretty sure Heinlein is the one I ended up giving up on and actively disliking. I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin-daughter clones and fucking them. The thing is, it's just pretty much always the same, perhaps that example is 'extreme' (quite frankly I don't know -- nor do I care- if I read it all) but it pretty much always gravitate toward something or other like that. Now, if the world building was nice, and the other plot lines were great etc etc I'd accept the wierd navel-gazing as part of the entertainment, but in the case of Heinlein, I always felt it was the other way around!
- ghaff 8y ago
  Sure. Lots of people though I’m not one of them. Don’t much care for his juveniles and some of his later books were real stinkers. But, overall, with books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough for Love I have to give him a lot of credit even if it requires a certain dose of historical perspective. I did grow up with him to some degree. I wouldn’t really expect someone reading Heinlein for the first time today to have the same reaction.
- benbreen 8y ago
  OP here - I think disliking Heinlein is probably the norm among SF fans these days. A lot of his stuff hasn't aged well. That said, I am kind of fascinated by his life. I dug up these pictures of his Colorado house because I often drive past his follow-up to it, another space age house in Bonny Doon, in the Santa Cruz mountains. It's in a very rural area, and although you can't see it from the road, whenever I'm driving past I have reveries about the era of mid-60s utopian American engineering it came out of. There's something melancholic about it. I also find the story about him indirectly inspiring L. Ron Hubbard to create Dianetics to be totally fascinating - the claim that it was due to a bet about creating a religion seems apocryphal, but based on the sleuthing here [1] it seems like there is some truth to the general outline. I'm actually planning on looking into his correspondence with Hubbard in the next few month (which is held by UCSC's special collection library). Will write something up about it if I find anything new. [1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2671/is-there-any-evidence-for-the-bet-between-robert-a-heinlein-and-l-ron-hubbard https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2671/is-there-any-...
mturmon 8y ago
"A house is a machine for living in." I hold largely to this view, and it is reflected in the design of this house, and indeed the design of my own house. But it's also important to introduce some elements of style, whimsy, randomness, impracticality. Especially for an engineer, it's important to not let practicality be the sole design value. The Eames's house and Alvar Aalto's house are some guideposts I've found valuable.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
Sort of an obituary for the house: https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=652 https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=652 Which apparently was completely remodeled in 1995. Sad, but not entirely unexpected.
ucaetano 8y ago
> Heated air enters the bathroom through a duct beneath the tub, warming the bathtub and the floor I can hear the collective yawn of a few million Romans from the afterlife not impressed with this "modern" copy of their tepidaria and hypocausts.
dogfishbar 8y ago
Robert Heinlein's nephew Terrance Heinlein (Terry) is a brilliant architect. Bob Muller
informatimago 8y ago
I’m surprised they seem to have actively rejected the hypercube architecture. ;-)
otikik 8y ago
"All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, clean and comfortable footing" I bought a second hand home, which had cork. It's warm, yes. And maybe comfortable. But it is not clean. Cork is very porous and once a speck of dust finds its way into the material, it's difficult to pull it out. Drop some one on the floor and you might be able to clean most of it, but some of it will stay there, forever. Stick to wood. Maybe a bit less warm that cork, but much cleaner and equally comfortable.

100 points by benbreen 8y ago

dsr_ 8y ago

This is a house so efficiently designed for its purpose that it could never adapt to new needs. That might be the right thing to do in certain circumstances: if you live near a city, odds are pretty good that when your needs change, someone else will want your house. On the other hand, I bet every built-in appliance is a non-standard size that is somewhere between painful and ridiculously expensive to repair or replace. There's probably something deeply philosophical from this that would be applicable to writing programs.

Retric 8y ago
One story houses are not inherently that expensive to modify. At 1150 SF they could probably replace it every 15 years for less than many modern 5000+ SF houses. Sure, some houses take 5+ years to build others take 5 days once you have a foundation.
phyller 8y ago
Similar to the black suit. I bought one 20 years ago, it still makes me look sharp for any occasion that requires dressing professionally. If this wasn't the Heinlein's house it would be unsellable today. The cost to tear down the house would probably be subtracted from the value of the empty lot to determine how much it was worth. I need to buy a house soon in an area with a lot of old houses, some more than 100 years old. Here are my list of house attributes with staying power: - high ceilings - open floor plan - generous dimensions (particularly bathrooms and kitchens) - light (and air) from the outside - durable water-tight construction - no wood on exterior (it rots, maintenance nightmare) - a good view - land These might seem obvious, but apparently not everyone has gotten the memo (I'm looking at you England). It seems to me that commercial properties even from hundreds of years ago are much more likely to have these attributes than residences from 1960 and earlier. If you can't afford brick or stone exteriors, stucco is cheap and seems to last for a long time. A tasteful metal roof is great. My grandfather was before his time and built his entire house in hot, humid Florida out of steel many decades ago. Steel panels on the outside, steel paneled roof, steel frame. It's been hit by quite a few hurricanes and looks as good as new. The other wood frame houses around his are looking pretty shabby now. Not sure why steel construction didn't catch on.
- eitally 8y ago
  I'm not saying you're wrong to hold this list of desired attributes, but the short of it is that houses are generally built the way they are to satisfy demand at the lowest possible construction cost. When you consider the average time people stay in a given home is only about 7 years, durability doesn't carry particularly much sway. FWIW, the reason there are so many crappy houses in the Bay Area is that the climate is so mild that even the most poorly constructed shacks have staying power... and with the cost of remodeling/construction here, there isn't much incentive to rebuild unless you've got significant disposable income.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Something like my circa 200 year old New England farmhouse that’s pretty typical hits about half the list but you’re starting from a place where rooms were small. I’ve opened up the first floor a lot but ceilings are still low and the renovated bathroom, which wouldn’t even have existed in the original house, is small. And it’s the only one in the house.
- danans 8y ago
  > [air] from the outside That's probably the only thing from your list that you are likely to find in a 100 yr old house that hasn't been recently renovated. And that is a result of the far less precise building and sealing methods from that time, and not that fresh air was a design goal of the old house. Those old houses tended to leak water and air like sieves, resulting in very high energy consumption and lower comfort. On the plus side, the materials they were probably built with (solid wood) were far more tolerant of moisture than today's synthetic building materials (OSB, etc), and with all the air leakage that occurred, they dried out quickly. That's why many of these old houses' structures have lasted, while newer, tightly sealed houses with moisture penetration have failed. Also the air leaks provided fresh air. > ... water-tight construction Not only is this not likely to be the case on an old house, without a modern mechanical forced ventilation system installed, a water-tight house (with the windows shut) incompatible with the requirement for "[air] from the outside".
  - phyller 8y ago
ryandrake 8y ago
It’s refreshing, in contrast to today’s beige cookie-cutter McMansions that check off generic “typical vanilla homeowner” needs but have no soul or uniqueness in form or function. Go to some open houses: Everything built within the last 20 years is just a big box built out to the edge of the property line, with the exact same boring “high ceilings, granite countertop, open floor plan, faux-everything” design. Yuuuuuck! It must have been nice to live in the age where you could hire an architect and sit down and draft a custom home just for yourself and not have it cost an arm and a leg. My old man did this back in the 70s and he was barely middle class at the time!
- HarryHirsch 8y ago
  What makes it worse is that everyone with children will have to go for the high-ceiling box with open floorplan because everything else comes with intolerable schools.
munificent 8y ago
It's exactly like highly optimized code. Very efficient for today's requirements but complex, calcified, and difficult to adapt when requirements change.
VRay 8y ago
Dude, there's no way Heinlein designed a house like that. The value and importance of standardized, easily-replaceable parts is a plot point in his book, The Door into Summer (BTW, I strongly recommend everyone here read it. The main character is an engineer, and it's shocking how insightful and relevant you'll still find his observations about businesses and the way engineering is done, 61 years after the book was first published)
- dsr_ 8y ago
  Heinlein was full of contradictions. Look at the built-in furniture: there's no way to change it if you discover it doesn't work for you, other than by ripping it out and redoing the walls. That's not modular or replaceable. The rolling table between the kitchen and dining room is unnecessary for one person, great for two, and inconveniently small for four. And yes, Heinlein designed it. The two volume biography by Patterson is completely uncritical and at times fanboyish, but it seems to have the facts straight.

vvpan 8y ago

Why is 1776 a special number in this case? The yeah of declaration of independence?

krustyburger 8y ago
Yeah!
kop316 8y ago
That is correct, 1776 is the year the US signed the Declaration of Independence, and is considered the year the USA was created.
throwanem 8y ago
Yes. It's an extremely Heinlein choice; he's regarded by the sympathetic as having been highly patriotic, by the unsympathetic as virulently nationalistic.
- natechols 8y ago
  I never thought of Heinlein as especially patriotic or nationalistic; he was, on the other hand, a big fan of revolutions against oppressive regimes.
  - berbec 8y ago
    And he had some... interesting... ideas about who makes a good sexual partners. [1] 1; https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441748600 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0441748600
    - sneak 8y ago
      See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westermarck_effect
    - natechols 8y ago
      Full disclosure: I never bothered to read anything of his written after "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", since the universal consensus seems to be that his later books are very, very strange.

pseudolus 8y ago

There's "everything to please a housewife in the kitchen including an 'office' with phone and typewriter". There's nothing more amusing than reading print periodicals from the early part of the 20th century to the mid-1980s. The ads are also always a particular highlight.

parrellel 8y ago
Did you like the bit about the soundproofing and the two shower heads in the bathroom. Or the bit about the extra large beds. Certainly, these things are for work and efficiency, nothing more.
- MisterOctober 8y ago
  Well, it's a sort of work, isn't it

seltzered_ 8y ago

I get really intrigued by these designs (went through a folding obsession phase) then try to judge how usable/learnable the design choices are. FWIW, I constantly find myself comparing the current wave of home automation / IoT to the 1958 film Mon Oncle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9t98Gox60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE9t98Gox60 This said the heinlein house sounds pretty usability-focused: “There are no rugs or any need for them. All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, comfortable and clean footing. Nor are there any floor lamps or table lamps. The illumination is built into the house. General lighting for the living room comes from cold-cathode tubes concealed behind a box molding. These illuminate the ceiling. Adjustable wall spotlights are located at all work and relaxation areas in the house. All electric convenience outlets are at comfortable hip height. I'm through stooping over to the baseboard."

stevenwoo 8y ago

The house they moved to after this in Santa Cruz is unique (from the outside at least) http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/history/bonnydoon1.html

jotux 8y ago

Looks like there are photos of the house in it's current form on zillow[1]. It's obviously been remodeled, a lot. [1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Colorado-Springs-CO/13672320_zpid/4172_rid/globalrelevanceex_sort/38.790487,-104.858758,38.78867,-104.861641_rect/18_zm/ https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Colorado-Springs-CO/13...

HarryHirsch 8y ago
They finally gave in and got rid of the flat roof. People eventually find out that they will develop leaks that are impossible to find.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Which is pretty evident if you’ve ever spent time in typical commercial flat-roofed buildings. Who hasn’t seen buckets catching drips at some point or other?
  - erichurkman 8y ago
    Ah, I always have fond memories of office buckets. At eShares, we had one in our first office. It dripped when it rained, but inexplicably so: we were on the ground floor.
  - chaoticmass 8y ago
    My current apartment building was built in the 1960s and has flat roofs. I'm on the top floor and have had maintenance fix a leak in my bathroom ceiling like 3 times and it keeps coming back.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, despite the article saying flat roofs were fine as long as they were reinforced against load. The load is rarely the issue, but as you stated, flat roofs seem to ALWAYS leak.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago

khr 8y ago

Mirrors in skylights seems like a very obvious improvement to increase the amount of natural sunlight in a space. It seems adaptable to north-facing top-floor suites. Mirrors could be installed such that the sun would reflect into the suite throughout the day. It seems to be such an obvious improvement, but I've not noticed such a system anywhere in my city. Maybe the regular cleaning of the mirrors is enough of a deterrent for building owners to invest in something like this?

wefarrell 8y ago
Something like a deck prism would have a similar effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_prism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_prism
Wistar 8y ago
Not a sunlight but Mitsubishi's new synthetic-light "windows" appear to be pretty spectacular. I want one. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45827812/mitsubishi-windows-shine-alarmingly-realistic-fake-sunlight https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-45827812/mitsubishi-w...
- r00fus 8y ago
  Doesn't sound like full spectrum light. I'd live to see the CRI on those things.
  - Wistar 8y ago
    I did a little digging and, it appears that Mitsubishi and CoeLux have partnered on these artificial skylights and, although the CRI isn't listed, the CoeLux site says this: "CoeLux systems combine LED lighting that reproduces sunlight spectrum, direction and brightness with optical systems and nano-structured materials that reproduce the endless distance of the sky and sun." If it actually does reproduce the sunlight spectrum it'd have to have a very high CRI, no? Toshiba has their TRI-R LEDs claimed to be capable of 95% of the sunlight spectrum and they are rated at a CRI of Ra97. Yuji has LEDs with claimed CRI of 98, so it seems within the realm of possibility that these fake windows are very convincing.

mrbill 8y ago

The fancy bed was auctioned off in 2013. http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-second-best-bed/ http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-second-... It went for just over $2K. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins-Bed-/251317839942 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins-Bed-/25131783994...

pkamb 8y ago
One of the worst "you might also like" algorithms I've ever seen! https://i.imgur.com/Vy0dSUZ.png https://i.imgur.com/Vy0dSUZ.png

buserror 8y ago

Oh well, here goes a few karma points ;-) Does anyone else dislike Heinlein? I mean, I read hundreds of SF books, followed dozens of authors, and I'm pretty sure Heinlein is the one I ended up giving up on and actively disliking. I think the world building was poor, and it seems to all be around making up some sort of personal fantasy, up to the point of cloning himself into twin-daughter clones and fucking them. The thing is, it's just pretty much always the same, perhaps that example is 'extreme' (quite frankly I don't know -- nor do I care- if I read it all) but it pretty much always gravitate toward something or other like that. Now, if the world building was nice, and the other plot lines were great etc etc I'd accept the wierd navel-gazing as part of the entertainment, but in the case of Heinlein, I always felt it was the other way around!

ghaff 8y ago
Sure. Lots of people though I’m not one of them. Don’t much care for his juveniles and some of his later books were real stinkers. But, overall, with books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough for Love I have to give him a lot of credit even if it requires a certain dose of historical perspective. I did grow up with him to some degree. I wouldn’t really expect someone reading Heinlein for the first time today to have the same reaction.
benbreen 8y ago
OP here - I think disliking Heinlein is probably the norm among SF fans these days. A lot of his stuff hasn't aged well. That said, I am kind of fascinated by his life. I dug up these pictures of his Colorado house because I often drive past his follow-up to it, another space age house in Bonny Doon, in the Santa Cruz mountains. It's in a very rural area, and although you can't see it from the road, whenever I'm driving past I have reveries about the era of mid-60s utopian American engineering it came out of. There's something melancholic about it. I also find the story about him indirectly inspiring L. Ron Hubbard to create Dianetics to be totally fascinating - the claim that it was due to a bet about creating a religion seems apocryphal, but based on the sleuthing here [1] it seems like there is some truth to the general outline. I'm actually planning on looking into his correspondence with Hubbard in the next few month (which is held by UCSC's special collection library). Will write something up about it if I find anything new. [1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2671/is-there-any-evidence-for-the-bet-between-robert-a-heinlein-and-l-ron-hubbard https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2671/is-there-any-...

mturmon 8y ago

"A house is a machine for living in." I hold largely to this view, and it is reflected in the design of this house, and indeed the design of my own house. But it's also important to introduce some elements of style, whimsy, randomness, impracticality. Especially for an engineer, it's important to not let practicality be the sole design value. The Eames's house and Alvar Aalto's house are some guideposts I've found valuable.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Sort of an obituary for the house: https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=652 https://www.contrapositivediary.com/?p=652 Which apparently was completely remodeled in 1995. Sad, but not entirely unexpected.

ucaetano 8y ago

> Heated air enters the bathroom through a duct beneath the tub, warming the bathtub and the floor I can hear the collective yawn of a few million Romans from the afterlife not impressed with this "modern" copy of their tepidaria and hypocausts.

dogfishbar 8y ago

Robert Heinlein's nephew Terrance Heinlein (Terry) is a brilliant architect. Bob Muller

informatimago 8y ago

I’m surprised they seem to have actively rejected the hypercube architecture. ;-)

otikik 8y ago

"All floors are surfaced with cork tile that provides a warm, clean and comfortable footing" I bought a second hand home, which had cork. It's warm, yes. And maybe comfortable. But it is not clean. Cork is very porous and once a speck of dust finds its way into the material, it's difficult to pull it out. Drop some one on the floor and you might be able to clean most of it, but some of it will stay there, forever. Stick to wood. Maybe a bit less warm that cork, but much cleaner and equally comfortable.