P2P Research Center - Chiang Mai

Suggestions by Eric Hunting

Your description suggests something along the lines of a studio-office of the sort common to internet start-ups and small design firms. What sort of isolation between these spaces are you anticipating? Will they be largely closed-off or are you thinking of a more open plan arrangement? Most studio-office arrangements tend to have some enclosure for conference space both for noise isolation and to allow for dimming of light to support video or projector displays.

For economy-sake I would suggest a DIY furnishings approach, particularly using Grid Beam, T-slot, or any of the more commercial modular furniture buildings systems. A 'Living Structures' or 'furnitecture' approach to furnishings as demonstrated by the old designs of Ken Isaacs will maximize use of volume in the spaces and allow for novel compartmentalization of spaces. But how well this approach works -and which building systems or products you might be limited to- will depend on available workshop space for yourself and your local supporters. The more open and contiguous the space the more effective this approach would be. Buildings already highly compartmentalized are tougher to work with.

I saw an interesting Living Structure recently that really looks straight out of the Isaacs and Nomad Furniture books of the 60s and 70s. However, instead of being based on Grid Beam, it was based on scavanged materials the designers found in a one block radius of their office space. A bit rough around the edges, but ingenious.

http://www.everydaydesign.ca/index.php?/installart/mobile-office/

Today, you can do things like this with a much more refined look if preferred, as illustrated by this apartment 'pod' designed for Jade Jagger's condo project in NYC that is centered on the enclosure for a bathroom which then consolidates utilities into a deployable structure for the appliance elements of all the other zones of a home;

http://coolboom.net/interior-design/jade-jagger-for-yoo/

This Z-Box employs this same concept with some different materials and more DIY construction. It's centered on a bedroom.

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/hot-tip/dan-hisels-zbox-023135 http://www.danhiseldesign.com/ (the designer's site has a nice video showing the assembly of a second more refined version of this)

I call these 'supercabinets' and I've seen this same concept employed using other rooms as their 'core' where some higher privacy is needed in an otherwise open plan space. I've employed the concept myself in pavilion home designs where a supercabinet becomes the core partition structure of an open plan space, integrating utilities like a backplane. I anticipate elements like these becoming the basis of later-generation adaptive housing systems where these supercabinets, along with flooring and roofing systems, feature advanced interconnection systems, concealed slides or casters, and active electronics and become the primary demountable and moveable structural elements of buildings. But right now they are pretty doable with simpler materials where there's a clear-span structure to host them as free-standing elements. With the usage you are thinking of as an example, you could center such supercabinets on conference room (using three walls for projection display, whiteboard, and teleconference display with storage and electronics flanking the entrance door), a sofa/bed lounge, or bathroom with the their surrounding exterior elements defining the other functional spaces and providing partial partitioning of activity zones. Other possible 'cores' include bulk file storage, libraries, server clusters, wine cellars, tea rooms, tiny machine shops, saunas, and so on.

Getting into the more fanciful, if you had a much larger space to work with I'd suggest Shigeru Ban's mobile room approach as used in the Naked House design. Here you would put office cubicles and other small rooms into self contained boxes on casters, using their exteriors for storage cabinets, shelving, and appliance installation. They might be equipped with ladders (concealed by a cabinet door) to access their tops as 'lofts' that could host bedding, storage systems, electronics, and the like.

http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_WORKS/SBA_HOUSES/SBA_HOUSES_24/SBA_Houses_24.html

What area of space do you have available in this building? Is it contiguous, or separated in sections or floors? What is the ceiling height and what type of doorways are there? Where are the windows and what type are they? What type of ceiling system is used? What is the general type of construction for the building? You noted this was a house so I would imagine the construction was similar to other houses of the region and probably has a lot of room compartmentalization. But if it served as a kindergarten then there was probably some large span space already created and a 'staff lounge' room similar to a conference room.

Renewable energy use depends a lot on the disposition of the building, it's sun and wind exposure, and the positioning of windows. One of the easiest things would be solar thermal heating for hot water in the kitchenette and bathroom. The makers of vacuum tube solar collectors sometimes offer demonstration units to their dealers based on a smaller number of tubes -the free scalability of these is one of their key advantages. These are just the right size for a small application like a kitchenette water heater. This could also be complimented by a small sized greywater hydroponics or sub-irrigation container planter unit that would be easy to cobble together from found containers. PV systems remain expensive. A studio-office will probably demand a 2-3kwh system depending on the amount of computer gear (excluding air conditioning overhead) which puts you in the $10,000 range, though this may be much cheaper in your area given more availability of Chinese manufactured components. You can also save on costs through grid-intertie rather than batteries. Wind turbines are pretty easy but unless you go with turbines 1m or larger in blade radius they are largely useless as energy producers. This puts you in the $2k-$3k range by default. Vertical turbines are usually more attractive in the urban setting but there is a little performance trade-off for them. An often overlooked renewable energy technology that is one of my favorites is heliostat based fiber optic lighting systems like the Himawari;

http://www.himawari-net.co.jp/e_page-index01.html

These systems use a rooftop heliostat unit to gather natural light that is directed to emitters in dark interior areas of a building by fiber optic cable. They can theoretically be combined with the conventional light pumps of other fiber optic lighting system, though I've always found it strange that the Laforet company in Japan never availed themselves of the very large assortment of fiber optic lighting products from other companies. The Himawari is a more elaborate design for these. I've heard of simpler panel designs being in development, but no others seem to have gotten to market.

So there are some ideas off the top of my head.

Eric Hunting