Bent light.

Machine a habiter? The Porsche 997 may not yet cost more than your flat but as a mobile status symbol it can partially explain the skewed prominence of high performance vehicles over high performance housing. Architecture costs money. An aspirational vehicle is a cheaper way of acquiring designer living. WHAT_carchitecture re-presents the car as Villa(in).

The WHAT_architecture office post code of EC1Y 2BP equates to a latitude of 51.525192 North, longitude -0.087985 West. This means the distance from the office to the site is 18,200km yet this foreign project is progressing without the input of a local executive architect to oversee and administer the site works saving both professional fees and communications complexities. The tolerance for the steel frame is around 10mm over 10m or 0.1%. A process of building that would not have been possible 10 years ago, this project is a product of our zeitgeist thanks to design-build team embracing fast-moving but low-resolution design-communication technologies. SketchUp BIM + Skype comms = Steel installation…

Our client designs planes; we design houses. Flying houses? Refer Laurent Chehere.

With the 048per_ project in Auckland, the relationship between car and house is omnipresent. In the inner city Auckland suburbs, houses built at the turn of the 19th century preceded the arrival (and thus accommodation) of the automobile. Today houses have been re-parked: jacked up, pushed back and shoved sideways to house off-road in-situ cars. The logical extension of this development (gasoline consumption v urban density) is the total subsumption of the car into the house.