Often it has seemed to me that, no matter how much cleverness I might apply to the design of a home, the idea of being able to afford anything with the shamefully small stipend of Supplemental Security Income is utterly unrealistic. This has often led to my exploration of novel financing ideas, ways to turn my prospective home into a product or some source of income that would allow it to pay for itself. In the late 1990s a new trend emerged where an increasing diversity of things were being financed through commercial sponsorship. Computers, internet and phone service, cars, school supplies, even weddings and rocket launches were being financed, in part or in whole, by commercial sponsorship based on the use of these things as a venue for marketing.

This inspired me to consider the possibility of a commercially sponsored non-toxic home project using a model similar to that of the PBS TV show This Old House, which exploits commercial sponsorship to co-finance the tools, materials, and labor used on each home rennovation project. There was no point in going to the This Old House producers themselves with this idea because my needs didn't fit their profile. They only share a portion of the costs of renovations to exclusively old homes -and their tendency is to choose projects where the architecture is of 'traditional' style and the homes of rather high value. It seems like homes with a value under a million dollars are rather rare on that show and I can't recall ever seeing a disabled adapted home project. If I were to use this tactic I would need some medium of my own. I briefly toyed with the idea of creating my own PBS show but that proved infeasible. The system for PBS program development is inaccessible to the lone individual. It's not public access TV. But the World Wide Web offered a medium with just as large a potential audience and it is accessible to the lone individual. Thus I hit upon the idea of a web-based multi-media project journal which would document the construction of my home from beginning to end and serve as a medium for marketing, allowing me to simply trade on-site advertising space and in-project product showcasing for the materials, tools, and labor my house would need.

But doing this proved to be more complicated than simply creating a web site. I needed to convince a collection of corporate executives to become sponsors and that presented a special problem. In my many years of searching for home-based employment I have learned the hard way that the majority of American corporate executives have an abject fear of and contempt for disabled people, no matter what the nature of their disability. So a project based on the premise of 'disabled adapted housing' would be doomed from the start. To make matters worse, American executives are notorious non-readers. To present my project proposal in the form of just text would be utterly futile. I've made that mistake before. If you can't explain something in a single paragraph, you've lost these people. And then there's the common problem of social class discrimination. There is a tendency among executives to simply assume every idea that does not originate with people in their same social class to be completely worthless. If you're not one of them then nothing you have to say matters.

There was clearly no point in trying to fight these problems. One person can't force a culture to change. I needed a way to cope with them and the obvious solution was to make myself more-or-less invisible to my own project by relying on someone else to 'front' it. The logical choice was to seek out an architect of some notoriety to be the first sponsor for the project and to create a set of design images for my initial presentation web site compelling enough to attract these non-reader executives and also interesting enough to attract the potential technophilic audience of Internet users. The role of the house as non-toxic housing to suit my disability was to be disguised by virtue of the fact that non-toxic housing has become something of a fashion trend for upper-class housing in the US. As long as the design could speak for itself there would be no need to get into details about who the home owner would ultimately be or why the use of non-toxic materials would be required by the program. It would be simply a 'lifestyle choice' and I would simply be a web site developer using a house project as a novel marketing venue. With this objective in mind I began a search for architects who might fit the bill of combining name recognition with novel design and experience with materials I knew to be inherently non-toxic. I contacted dozens of them, using my Simplicity design concept as a crude model of what I was hoping to create, simply explaining my disability and my need for non-toxic housing, and detailing my plan to exploit commercial sponsorship through a web journal.

But for this idea to work I needed to be fully up-front to the prospective architects about who I was and what my needs for the house would be. And that's where this project concept went awry. I soon discovered that the very same prejudice I was trying to circumvent with corporate executives was just as prevalent among architects. I naively expected avant garde architects to be more open minded than the average American by virtue of their creative character. It seemed logical that people who's livelyhood depends on novelty would have at least some interest in such a new approach realizing a home -especially when it offered them prospects of global exposure for their work and contact with a collection of corporations who would all be prospective clients for other projects. But, alas, none of these people saw things this way.

In most cases my attempts at contacting architects were simply ignored. E-mail, letters, or phone calls would simply never elicit a response of any kind. Of those that did respond, most seemed to demonstrate a peculiar inability to communicate coherently or to comprehend the simple premise of commercial sponsorship as an alternative to traditional bank financing. I was shocked that some of the most famous architects in the US could not manage to compose even a single intelligible paragraph! Those that could write more-or-less coherently seemed to think I was asking them for monetary donations, had no clue whatsoever as to what I was trying to propose, were plainly annoyed that anyone would presume to contact them by addresses they themselves published for that purpose, or expressed a peculiar fear of having any involvement with corporations on the grounds that contact with corporate executives would somehow corrupt the integrity of their design. That last suggestion always seemed a bit suspicious to me considering that the vast majority of professionally designed buildings are, of course, corporate buildings.

But perhaps the most frustrating sort of responses I encountered were those where the architect at first responded very positively, seeming to completely understand my idea and being very enthusiastic about it then, one or two message exchanges later, would just flake-out with no explanation, ignoring all subsequent attempts at contact. This is a kind of behavior I had frequently encountered with corporate executives and it is very troubling. It's easy to overlook this as simple flakiness on the part of the people you're contacting when it happens a few times. After all, Attention Deficit Disorder is practically an epidemic in America. But after it happens a couple dozen times it starts to make one rather paranoid. You start to wonder if you've been put on some kind of secret Black List, or if your mail is being intercepted and blocked by someone, or if somehow your messages are communicating something negative you were somehow unaware of. I've gone so far as to have my correspondences examined by a university professor colleague to see if I was inadvertently making a bad impression with them and have even toyed with the idea of faking a series of exchanges with an imaginary corporate executive in order to test if my mail was being intercepted. Ultimately, though, I had to accept that this bizarre flake-out behavior was most likely the product of simple laziness or the delayed realization that -for whatever reason- I wasn't worth their trouble.

Naively thinking that, perhaps, the problem with my presentation was that the project concept was just too boring for these creative people, I considered spicing things up by suggesting a very novel form of high-tech architecture which had never been explored before and which would present an interesting engineering and design challenge. Certainly, this would do well to enhance the entertainment value of the project journal since the Internet's technophilic audience is instinctively drawn to things with a high-tech angle. I began describing my project as an 'Eco-Tech' project intended to demonstrate the latest in sustainable technology. This phrase is well known to Europeans but it seemed to leave these American architects confused. Imagine my surprise when even Phil Hawes, the designer of the Biosphere II complex, had no idea what that term meant even though it was his work that served as one of the key inspirations for the Eco-Tech design movement! (ironically, today he seems quite proud of the Biosphere but when I contacted him he -like many other people involved with that project- seemed embarrassed by it and had become completely dedicated to the low-tech earth based architecture that has become the orthodox approach to sustainable design in the US. He declared quite sternly that he would NEVER again consider building a structure using space frame systems)

Cable City - Megastructures

Over time my search for an interesting concept with which to 'sell' this project coalesced around the recollection of an image in an old book from the 1960s called "Megastructures" which documented the brief Megastructure design movement from that period. It was a picture of a city structure called Cable City which was based on the idea of using a web of tension cables strung across a canyon as the superstructure for a city built of modular retrofit structures. This image inspired the idea of a home built in a similar fashion and thus emerged a concept I dubbed the Dream Catcher.

Dream Catcher would exploit the synergy between the found architecture of a natural rock form and the saddle polyhedral geometry which would emerge from tensioning a grid of steel cables between the rock face and the ground in the same manner as a spider's web nestled in the corner of a room. The cable grid serves as a kind of space frame serving as a mullion system for an enclosure 'skin' of silicone jointed planar glass and ceramic plates. It also serves as support for a system of suspended mezzanine platforms made with tensegrity trusses and room 'pods', each dedicated to a specific room task and varying in elevation. Lighting fixtures and other functional elements in the home would likewise be suspended within or from this cable matrix creating the effect of a home fashioned in the manner of a string sculpture or a native American dream catcher charm, hence the name of the design concept. I imagined similar structures being used to host other external elements of the home; exterior decking, walkways, a electric and thermal solar panel arrays, wind turbines, and more. Right away I realized that the most challenging aspect of this concept would be the crafting of the exterior skin panels which, most certainly, would demand the use of CAD/CAM technology. This, of course, would put the project well beyond the ideal of a aminstream form of non-toxic housing. But the point here was to devise something challenging enough to attract a lot of attention.

Unfortunately, this novel idea did nothing to make my project more appealing to the architects who were apparently far more concerned with who I was and my social status than anything I was trying to do. After several years of this rejection I was forced to abandon the web sponsored home project concept altogether, the collapse of the dot-com business sector destroying all possible credibility for anything based on a web site.