Visions for the homes of China’s future actively transform, adapt, provide greater comfort when sharing small spaces, grow food and even prepare for extraterrestrial lifestyles. The theme of this year’s HOUSE VISION exhibition is “NEW GRAVITY,” focusing on finding solutions for practical problems in China’s living environment while combining “human wisdom with modern science and technology to explore the ideal way of living in the future.”

Designers were encouraged to think about elements like the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, energy consumption and communication while producing their full-scale prototypes. All ten models will be on display outside Beijing’s iconic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium by architects Herzog & de Meuron through November 4th, 2018.

Founded in 2011 by Japanese graphic designer and curator Kenya Hara, HOUSE VISION is “a cultural research project that combines architects and companies to build a future home with the concept of ‘’new common sense of the future’… The project hopes to use ‘home’ as a medium to think about the future lifestyle and even the development of the world.”

Company Housing for MUJI by Go Hasegawa and Associates

How can you give multiple occupants of a single living unit more comfort and privacy without actually walling off any space for bedrooms? Japanese retailer MUJI teamed up with architect Go Hasegawa to find inspiration for a future shared housing concept within China’s history. In Shanghai, the upper floors of residential buildings are often a little too tall for single-story housing, but not tall enough to fit two levels inside. For spaces like these, the company envisions micro apartments for staff working at its Shanghai office, who are currently commuting up to three hours to get to work every day.

The shared area is open and spacious, with amenities that are hard to come by for single occupants on a budget in a big city. There’s plenty of space for storage, relaxation, cooking, dining and bathing on the ground floor. Meanwhile, private bedroom units are lofted up toward the ceiling in open-ended cantilevered boxes, allowing them to look out onto the city through the windows. Their orientation gives them privacy from each other and from the common space below.

Infinite Living Pavilion by Crossboundaries

Theoretical inhabitants of the Infinite Living Pavilion by Beijing-based firm Crossboundaries could use yet-to-be invented technologies to infinitely shape their living space. Instead of being stuck in a static grid like most residential interior layouts, ‘Infinite Living’ offers seven zones in which to “recharge, refill, refresh, update, standby, energize and entertain” using a variety of interior partitions, pop-out elements and transforming furnishings. Smart floor, ceiling and wall elements slide, rotate and retract to create pockets for certain activities or open up the entire volume. Produced in collaboration with electronics company TCL, the house uses televisions as virtual reality interfaces to expand “all the functions of the modern mobile device and integrating them with the spatial dimension of everyday life [sic].”

Urban Cabin by MINI LIVING and Dayong Sun

“Big Life, Small Footprint” is MINI LIVING’s motto, so naturally its contribution to HOUSE VISION is compact, innovative and playful. Within a surface area of just 15 square meters, the cabin explores how to create a sense of community in a small space while also maintaining maximum quality of life. Taking inspiration from China’s historic hutongs, which are residences arranged around courtyards and alleyways, the cabin features folding windows and tables that open or close the interiors to the outdoors, while protrusions on the roof channel daylight into the space. The golden mirrors give the oddly-shaped home a sunny disposition.

Living Garden by MAD Architects

MAD Architects seek to ground us by reconnecting our daily lives to the outdoors. Their ‘Living Garden’ does away with enclosed interior spaces entirely, with floating, organically shaped roof dipping down toward the ground on one side to create a shelter. The roof is covered in translucent waterproof glass to protect the space from rain, and integrates enough solar panels to power the daily needs of a family of three. While this proposal is probably a little too open to be realistic as it is, it emphasizes some of the coolest aspects of tropical en-plein-air architecture commonly found in places like Singapore.

400 Boxes by BLUE Architecture Studio

Any building can remain infinitely reconfigurable when its interiors aren’t defined by doorways and walls, preserving its utility for a wide variety of occupants far into the future. BLUE Architecture Studio inserts wooden boxes into a large open space to add furniture, planters, bedrooms and other private areas, closets and more. If your needs change – say, you decide your kitchen could be a little bigger and you aren’t really using your second bedroom – you simply swap out some of the volumes for new ones, or expand the ones you have. No need to renovate or move. Plus, the volumes act like room dividers.

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10 Architects 10 Homes Of The Future The 2018 China House Vision Exhibition

Pluck these structures out of their environments and photoshop them onto a Martian landscape and you’d never know they’re real, physical buildings interplaying with ordinary scenery in cities all over the globe. Some strike a somewhat ominous tone while others are almost cartoonish in their Space Age aesthetics. Many of these alienesque buildings are designed by just a handful of architecture firms with a flair for dramatic silhouettes – Zaha Hadid, MAD and Delugan Meissl being chief among them.

Lucas Museum by MAD Architects, Los Angeles

Fittingly enough, MAD Architects’ Lucas Museum of Narrative Art looks like a futuristic spaceship landing on a grassy patch of land in Los Angeles. The building, which is in the early stages of construction, will contain at least $400 million worth of paintings, illustrations, movie memorabilia and more. It’s expected to open in 2021.

Chaoyang Park Plaza, Beijing, China

As Reddit has already noticed, there’s something distinctly alien about the Chaoyang Park Plaza in Beijing. Also designed by MAD Architects, the complex fuses the ‘artificial landscape’ of the city with shapes from China’s natural scenery like mountains, rocks, valleys and forests. The asymmetrical towers are like two peaks rising up from the edge of the lake at Chaoyang Park, with a transparent atrium connecting them at the center.

Festival Hall by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, Erl, Austria

Delugan Meissl Architects explain that the unique shape of the Festival Hall in Erl, Austria takes inspiration from the topographical conditions around it, relating both to the rock formations of the landscape and the existing Passionsspielhaus nearby, which was built as a Christian theater in the 1950s.

“The new building increases existing qualities of the natural and architectural environment,” say the architects. “Aside from the geometry, color also enhances the duality between old and new. While the white surface of the Passionsspielhaus stands out optically during the time of the summer festival, the changing of seasons brings upon a chromatic reversal of the ensemble. The configuration of the Festival Hall resembles a tectonic stratification. Its crevices and faults lying in between indicate the way into the building’s interior. At night the incisions and folds in the distinctive facade allow insight into the radiant foyer.”

The Selfridges Building by Future Systems, Birmingham, UK

Part of the Bullring Shopping Center in Birmingham, England, the Selfridges Building has become an iconic (if bizarre) work of ‘blobitecture,’ its undulating, organic form covered in aluminum discs often compared to the body of an armadillo. Designed by Future Systems (Amanda Levete and the late Jan Kaplicky,) the Selfridges department store stands in sharp contrast to the more traditional architecture that surrounds it. The skybridge to the parking garage next door looks a bit like a long nose stretching out of its one-eyed face.

Harbin Opera House by MAD Architects, Harbin, China

Beijing-based MAD Architects wanted the Harbin Opera House to look like an organic outgrowth of the landscape, and it does – but in a rather sci-fi way. Encompassing nearly 850,000 square feet on a total of 444 acres, the opera house rises from the watery site like overgrown artificial sea shells most of the year, but virtually disappears when it snows. Staircases lead from ground level all the way around the exterior of the buildings to their peaks for views of the city. Inside, honeycombed ceilings bathe the glossy white interiors with daylight.

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Unearthly Architecture 13 Structures That Look Like Aliens Built Them

The buildings and infrastructure of the not-so-distant future might look like they were dropped here from an alien planet thanks to the complex geometries and curvaceous surfaces robotic building technologies are able to produce. 3D printing in metal and concrete are among the biggest breakthroughs, but robots can also set building materials like bricks into place with unprecedented precision and produce prefabricated timber modules of the sort usually created by craftspeople. These 13 recent projects give us a glimpse at what we might be able to expect over the next couple decades.

3D-Printed Metal Bridge by MX3D

Looking like it was airlifted here from another planet, this metal bridge by MX3D took four robots six months to print and it’s almost ready to be set in place across one of Amsterdam’s oldest canals. “This bridge will show how 3D printing finally enters the world of large-scale, functional objects and sustainable materials while allowing unprecedented freedom of form,” says Joris Laarman. “The symbolism of the bridge is a beautiful metaphor to connect the technology of the future with the old city, in a way that brings out the best of both worlds.”

Prefabricated Load-Bearing Timber Modules Made by Robots

Think old-fashioned timber construction could escape the grip of digitalization? ETH Zurich proves that isn’t true with the creation of load-bearing timber modules prefabricated by robots in the company’s new laboratory. A single robot guides each beam as it’s sawed, and a second drills holes before the two robots collaborate to position the beams in the correct spatial arrangement. The result is a geometric structure that can be joined with other units to create a three-dimensional volume.

Robotically Fabricated Shanghai Gallery Facade

An undulating facade on an art gallery in Shanghai shows off a beautiful robotic masonry fabrication innovation as part of a recent renovation by Archi-Union. The facade’s curving protrusions couldn’t have been shaped with such precision by hand-laying techniques; a robotic mechanical arm arranged the old reclaimed bricks to ensure they’ll hold up to modern standards

3D Printed Formwork for Concrete

Looking almost like it was sculpted from clay and fired in a massive kiln, this truss-style support is actually made of concrete that was poured into a 3D-printed mold. The firm XtreeE programmed a robotic arm to extrude concrete into the shape of the outer layer of the structure, poured more concrete inside, and then filed the envelope away.

3D-Printed Structures Inspired by Thai Architecture

Traditional Thai handicrafts made of coconut leaves informed the shape of unusual 3D-printed structures by Thailand-based cement manufacturer Siam Research and Innovation Company (SRI.) “The weaving pattern is designed to be modular and implement in a concrete block,” says the company. “The concrete is being extruded using 3D printing to increase its dimensions as its weaving appearance. After printing, the 3D printing concrete panel is fabricated with the pattern and serves as as structure for holding its weight. After fabrication, the weaving pattern of final module acts as a truss for structural purposes.”

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Constructing The Future 13 Recent Advances In Robotic Building Technology

Stormwater flooding, too few places to park and a lack of green space are three of the main issues plaguing every major city, and this strange but kind of brilliant building concept attempts to solve all three at once. ‘POP-UP’ by Danish architecture firm THIRD NATURE places a five-level parking garage topped with a public park on top of a stormwater reservoir, with the building’s height changing depending on how much it has rained lately.

On a dry day, all that’s visible of the POP-UP structure is the rooftop park, which essentially sits at ground level. But when rain falls, it fills the underground reservoir, causing the parking structure to rise higher in the landscape, highlighting its adaptability in the face of changing weather. The architects present it as an alternative to constructing a rainwater reservoir that’s empty most of the time or a mono-functional parking facility that takes up valuable urban space.

“By 2050, the Earth’s population is expected to grow to over 9 billion people,” says THIRD NATURE. “The migration to cities is on the rise and urban spaces are under pressure from the growing numbers of cars and traffic in the streets. With the quest for green, livable and human-scale cities cars and car parking have become an increasing challenge fighting for m2 in the dense cities – often at the price of urban areas and parks.”

“At the same time, climate changes require cities to handle huge amounts of stormwater generated by more and more powerful cloudbusts – this by building large water reservoirs under roads and squares. The situation calls for a rethinking of the way we establish parking, storage of stormwater and new urban spaces.”

They compare the building to a piece of cork in a glass of water. Hydraulic and mechanical lifts would help balance the weight ratios of parked cars in the structure to make sure it’s able to move up and down smoothly without changing the water level underneath. The two lowest levels of the parking structure would be off-limits, remaining underground to ensure the stability and buoyancy of the building.

Though an approach that reduces the number of individual vehicles allowed into a city would arguably be more practical, it’s also true that many places (especially in the United States) are likely to remain car-centric for the foreseeable future. Is this a realistic compromise?

In the future, will our autonomous vehicles simply sit within our homes like a part of the living space, eliminating the need for garages and parking spots? Probably not. At least, not for most of us. Concepts like the new SYMBIOZ car and house combo are clearly made for the richest among us, and it’s not likely that most existing housing will be retrofitted to accommodate our driverless cars, especially since many people will likely use car services instead of owning their own vehicles. But Renault’s concept shows off one vision of how some of us might integrate autonomous cars into our lives in the decades to come.

“The way we use our cars is changing,” says Thierry Bolloré, Renault’s executive vice president and chief competitive officer. “Already a car is more than just a way to get from one place to another. It’s becoming an interactive and personalized space that connects passengers to other cars, people and objects around them. Looking to 2030 we imagine new scenarios with more efficient energy use, connectivity and autonomous driving scenarios that will improve how we live and travel.”

Presented at the 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show, the SYMBIOZ concept envisions the emissions-free,  all-electric car as a room within a room, entering the home to offer additional seating and make the transition between home and travel more comfortable. It’s easy to move objects and children back and forth between the home and the car, and once the car is brought inside, it starts to charge from the home’s energy systems automatically. The car can even act as an energy generator in case the power goes out.

Clean energy means the car won’t bring in nasty exhaust fumes. The car-home combo shows it parking on a special circular pad that can be raised up to the second level on demand, freeing up space below and keeping the vehicle secure. Inside the vehicle, you’ll find a retractible dashboard and front seats that pivot to the back to enable easy conversation between passengers. What do you think – would you take advantage of technology like this, if it were accessible to you?