Chapter 50 10.1 All-weather and all-round access

Barcelona, ​​Spain, is a city full of hardcore optimists.Its citizens welcome not only trade and industry, art and opera, but also the future.In 1888 and 1929, Barcelona hosted two Universal Expositions.This was the equivalent of today's World's Fair.Barcelona is eager to host such an intimate event of the future because, as one Spanish writer puts it, the city "...exists without reason...so [it] keeps making grand visions to reinvent itself ". In 1992, Barcelona's self-made grand vision was the Olympics.Young athletes, mass culture, new technology and a lot of money—it's an alluring sight for a stodgy city of sound design and honest business spirit.

In such a down-to-earth place, the legendary Antoni Gaudi built dozens of the strangest buildings on earth.His buildings are so avant-garde and eccentric that it was only recently that Barcelona and the world understood what they really were.His most famous work is the unfinished Sagrada Familia.Begun in 1884, the part built during Gaudí's lifetime is full of stirring organic power: a façade of dripping rocks, arches and flowers adorns it like a vegetal flourish.The four spiers are like a honeycomb of many hollows. While showing the ruggedness, they also serve as supports.At the upper third of the rear of the building, a second set of towers stands. Huge bone-shaped pillars rise from the ground, propping up the church obliquely and keeping it stable.From a distance, the pillars look like the pale thighbones of a long-dead creature.

All Gaudí's works are full of waves of life.Ventilation ducts protrude from the roof of his Barcelona apartment, where a host of alien life forms swarm.The window eaves and roof gutters are curved, natural and smooth, not following mechanical right angles.Gaudí captured this unique active response and let it cross the square lawn of the campus to outline a shortcut with a beautiful arc.His buildings seem not to be made, but to grow. Imagine if an entire city were Gaudí's buildings, an artificial forest of implanted homes and organic churches.Imagine if Gaudí didn't have to stop at making still images of slate faces, but was able to give his buildings the ability to behave organically over time, thickening their windward sides, or changing uses as their occupants And adjust the internal structure.Imagine that Gaudí's city is not only built according to organic design, but also has the ability of adaptability, flexibility and evolution like a living thing, forming an architectural ecological group.This vision of the future is not even ready for an optimistic Barcelona.But this is the future, and it's coming to us with adaptive technologies, distributed networks, and synthetic evolution.

Scroll through old issues of Popular Science from the early 1960s, and you'll see that the idea of ​​"living" homes has been around for at least a few decades, and that's not counting the brilliant sci-fi stories that came before that.The Jason family in the animation lives in such a house and talks to such a house as if it were an animal or a person.I think this metaphor is close to the truth, but not quite right.The adaptive home of the future will be more like an organic eco-garden than a single creature, more like a jungle than a dog. The components of an ecological house can be seen in ordinary modern houses.I've been able to set the thermostat in my house so that it operates the furnace to keep the house at different temperatures on weekdays and weekends.Here, fire and a clock are networked.Our VCRs will tell the time and talk to the TV.As the size of the computer becomes smaller and smaller until it shrinks to a small point and can be placed in all electronic products, then we can expect our washing machines, stereos, and smoke alarms to form a "home area network" and Make calls in it.One day not long ago, when a guest rang the doorbell, it turned off the vacuum cleaner and let us hear the bell.When the washing machine finishes the laundry, it sends a message to the TV telling us to put it in the dryer.Even furniture becomes part of the living wood.A microchip in the recliner senses when someone is sitting on it and heats the room.

The home area network -- as envisioned by engineers in some labs right now -- is a common interface, in every room of every home.Everything is plugged into it: phones, computers, doorbells, furnaces, vacuum cleaners, all plugged into this network for power and information.These clever interfaces distribute 110-volt "nutrient juice" to "qualified" units, and on demand.When you plug a smart thing into your home network, its chip announces its identity ("I'm a toaster"), its state ("I'm on"), and its need ("Give me a 10-watt 110-volt toaster"). ").Children's forks or broken cords are not powered.

Interfaces exchange information all the time and power appliances when needed.Crucially, these interconnected interfaces bring many wires together into one general interface so that it can draw information, energy, and even intelligence from any point.You plug the doorbell button into an outlet near the front door, and you can plug the doorbell horn into any outlet in any room.Plug in a speaker in one room and enjoy music in other rooms.The same goes for clocks.It won't be long before a universal time signal is loaded on all electrical and telephone lines.Plug an appliance anywhere, and it will at least know the date and time, and automatically correct for daylight saving time under the command of the master clock at the Greenwich Observatory in England or the Naval Observatory in the United States.All information connected to the home area network will be shared.A furnace's thermostat provides room temperature to any interested device, such as a fire alarm or a ceiling fan.Anything that can be measured—light levels, occupant activity, noise levels, etc.—can be shared across the home area network via broadcast.

Homes with smart wiring will help the disabled and the elderly alike.Bedside switches allow them to control the lights, TV, and other security gadgets throughout the house.Ecological buildings will also be more energy efficient.Journalist Ian Ellerby has been covering the budding smart home industry."You wouldn't get up at 2 a.m. to run the dishwasher to save a quarter, but it would be nice if you could pre-program the appliance to go on," he says. , this decentralized power consumption is quite attractive, and its benefits are much greater than building a new power plant. So far, no one can live in a smart house. In 1984, electric companies, building trade associations, and telephone companies came together under the umbrella of the Smart Home Partnership to develop protocols and hardware for smart homes.By the end of 1992 or so, they had built more than a dozen model homes to attract journalists and raise investment.They eventually abandoned the catch-all standard set in 1984 because the goal seemed too aggressive in its early stages.As a transitional technology, smart houses use three types of cables, and provide three types of sockets (DC, AC and communication lines) on the junction box to distinguish different functions.This ensures "reverse compatibility" - giving clumsy switching appliances the chance to plug in without replacing them all with smart devices.Competitors in the U.S., Japan and Europe are experimenting with other ideas and standards, such as using wireless infrared networks to plug in widgets.This opens up the possibility of accessing the network for battery-operated portable devices and non-electrical devices.A semi-intelligent chip can be installed on the door, which can "connect" to the network through an invisible signal in the air, so that the home ecosystem can know whether the door is closed or whether there are guests in the living room.