8 Minutes, 20 Seconds
Housing after Banking, Encrypting the Sun
Michael Bell, Eunjeong Seong
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8 Minutes, 20 Seconds
Housing after Banking, Encrypting the Sun
ACTAR, Barcelona and New York City
Book Description
Energy generated by nuclear fusion of the Sun reaches the surface of the Earth in 8 minutes and 20 seconds. 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds imagines an architecture based on renewable energy, caching forms of energy that are essentially inexhaustible and persistent, and virtually non-denumerable in quantity. It anticipates a post-scarcity era enabled and reorganized by a new form of housing that serves as an arbiter of post-sustainability human settlements. Proposing a new form of housing only achievable through advanced manufacturing we ask: “what if what was a housing asset becomes a new form of energy asset whose downstream byproduct was shelter?”
8 Minutes, 20 Seconds envisions an innovative architectural design centered around renewable energy sources that utilize and cache forms of energy which are essentially inexhaustible, persistent, and virtually limitless in quantity. This forward-thinking proposal anticipates a transformative post-scarcity era that is enabled and restructured by a groundbreaking new type of housing that functions as a vital arbiter of environmentally sustainable human settlements, integrating advanced technological efficiencies and sustainable practices.
In proposing this progressive new form of housing, which can only be realized through advanced manufacturing technologies and innovative materials, we pose the thought-provoking question: "What if the concept of what has traditionally been viewed as a housing asset transforms into an entirely new category of energy asset, whose downstream by-product is the fundamental necessity of providing adequate shelter for all individuals, ensuring equitable access to living spaces?
Part One, Housing After Banking, outlines a history of housing focused on major, but also less studied events in the last 100 years of its policies and economics. We work through foundational premises in housing asking if the future of each might be more fragile than they appear. It leads to the early days of federal research on renewable energy; before the formation of NREL or the DOE but as globalization and the financialization of housing began a dramatic expansion. Instead of imagining renewable energy as an adjunct to the forms of scarcity that often define today’s housing markets, what if it displaced the nexus of development we know? Eclipsing the economies that normally define housing markets in the United States and around the world. A movement towards abundance.
Part Two, Encrypting the Sun, presents proposals for both a new type of housing—as renewable energy asset—and a new type of design team that could expand access to shelter by fusing the potential of advanced materials, manufacturing and energy harvest.
Our collaborators Michael Pilliod, Wills Sweney and Thomas Powers were critical in shaping this work.
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Publisher: ACTAR: Barcelona and New York, 2025
Editor: Ramon Prat
Text Editor: Stephen Zacks
Book Design: Ramon Prat and Eunjeong Seong / Michael Bell
Includes design projects by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong
With contributions by Michael Pilliod, (formerly, Tesla and Apple materials science) / Wills Sweney (formerly, Tesla, supply chain and manufacturing) / Zak Kostura, ARUP / Jesse Keenan, climate and real estate and Rosanne Haggerty and Nadine Maleh, Community Solutions.
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