Architecture | WorstPlans.com updates every Monday!

April 23, 2018

Chalk up another astounding win for the Internet of Things: another major plague on humanity is BANISHED thanks to a wireless chip in your blender.

Background:

People occasionally forget to lock the door before leaving the house, or leave a stove on by accident, or any number of other things.

“Internet of Things” aficionados often suggest that you could, say, turn on and off your stove from your phone, but now someone on the Internet thousands of miles away can also turn on your stove at a random time.

Proposal:

If your appliances could report their status wirelessly to a receiver on your door, then you could check your home’s status as you leave.

Anything that is amiss will glow in an obvious fashion that calls for more investigation (see mockup in Figure 1).

Fig 1: Since this panel is on your main exit door, it’s nearly impossible to accidentally leave something on / forget to lock the door / leave the microwave popping popcorn for 90 minutes instead of 90 seconds / etc.

Conclusion:

Since this is a one-way channel of communication, you don’t have to worry about hackers turning on your microwave. (Additionally, high security is not crucial here; exposing the information “your microwave is on” to a hacker 8000 miles away is probably not a realistic concern unless you’re making a contrived scenario for a made-for-TV movie.)

PROS: As with all Internet-of-Things things, it solves a problem that actually does (juuuuust barely, anyway) exist, and (more importantly) provides a great hobby for engineers.

CONS: In five years, when your smart home hub supplier is out of business, none of your new appliances will work with your system. And when you buy a new dryer, you’ll have to research it for 80 hours to to see if it’s compatible with your version of the Smart Home hub, and then you’ll to have to dig around on the internet for a firmware update named SmartHouse_v_2.7_North_America_41.80.24b.dat.zip. Which will then turn out to be malware that turns your hub into a Dogecoin miner.

November 6, 2017

You will TRULY appreciate art after surviving the ART OBSTACLE COURSE! Brave a swamp of deadly crocodiles in order to catch a single glimpse of “Dogs Playing Poker”—you’ll never accuse it of being kitsch art again.

Background:

Something that is difficult to obtain tends to be appreciated more than something that is easy to obtain.

For example, people rate the same wine more highly when it has an expensive price tag.

We can use this information to design a new style of art museum that will be a huge hit with all art aficionados.

The issue:

Traditional museums (Fig. 1) barrage the viewer with fine art at a relentless pace. It becomes hard to appreciate the technical skill of a single painting when 948 of the world’s finest 19th century impressionist paintings are crammed into a single.

So we need to both slow down the viewer and make them feel like they are engaging with the art, rather than being bombarded by it.

Fig. 1: When people expend a lot of effort (or money) on something, they tend to more highly value it. But this art museum just has the art hanging right there on the wall—no effort required!

Proposal:

The solution is to turn every art gallery into a harrowing obstacle course. It won’t be possible to just dismissively waltz through a gallery that represents 40,000 hours of oil painting effort. No—if you want to see the art in this gallery, you will need to work for it.

Lift a heavy wall that is obscuring a work of art (Figure 2).
Swim through an underwater passageway (Figure 3).

The trial that you must endure in order to view the art could also follow the theme of the art in some way. For example:

Sit on a wooden plank for an hour, baking in the hot sun, with no food, shelter, or water. If you can manage that, then the plank will lower into a vault that hosts The Raft of the Medusa.
Traverse a hallway that is constantly being pelted by paintballs from an automated gun in order to prove your worthiness to view the Jackson Pollock collection.
Order some soup at the art museum cafeteria. Then present your receipt to an attendant in order to be admitted to the Andy Warhol collection.
Push an enormous boulder up a ramp and onto a pressure plate in order to gain entrance to the Titian collection, featuring The Myth of Sisyphus.
Face your fears and wade through a pit of snakes in order to view . . . oh wait, it’s just the gift shop? No wonder no one buys anything.

Fig. 2: If you want to see the famous work of art at the end of this hallway, you’ll need to lift a heavy wall and hold it up (or convince someone else to) while you appreciate the artwork.

Fig. 3: You’d better leave your cell phone behind before you swim under the wall. Hopefully the art on the other side is worth it. Extremely noteworthy works of art might also be defended by electric eels.

Other options would surely present themselves to a creative museum curator. A few ideas:

Hold perfectly still in front of a sensor. After 2 minutes, a window will open, allowing you to see the artwork. If you move, the window closes again.
Use a pair of binoculars to find the work of art, which has been placed in an alcove on a distant high-rise apartment.
Pedal a bike fast enough to generate the power required to electromagnetically lift shutters that block your view of a painting.
Climb a knotted rope up to a lofted gallery.
Work together with several people to press a set of buttons simultaneously, which will briefly reveal a work of art.

PROS: This museum will let art aficionados really demonstrate their dedication.

CONS: Many rich museum donors are 80+ years old, and would be at high risk of being devoured by crocodiles in the “rope swing” obstacle. This would prevent them from making further donations to the museum.

October 3, 2016

The FDA doesn’t want you do know about this amazing cure for reverse-seasonal-affective-disorder, which could totally be a real thing! Increase your home’s resale value by 0 or more percent with this amazing new “rain window” architectural innovation.

Background:

Although people usually prefer it to be sunny rather than rainy, there are locations in the world where it hardly ever rains. Plus, there are some people who prefer an occasional rainy day even when the weather is sunny and cheerful.

Besides, sometimes a sunny day doesn’t match the tone of the actual events going on in your house: for example, if you were indicted for tax fraud for setting up a fake goat-based charity, would it be metaphorically appropriate for it to be a nice and sunny day? No: you should learn the bad news while sitting at a huge mahogany desk while in front of a window with raindrops streaming down it.

The issue:

You can duplicate the “rainy day at any time” effect by attaching a sprinkler to a hose and pointing it at your window, but this has two disadvantages:

You have to actually own the land right outside your window, so it won’t work at a high-rise apartment or zero-lot.
It wastes a lot of water, and may be forbidden by local ordinances.

window-sun

Fig. 1: An unacceptably sunny day. We can fix this with TECHNOLOGY. (Or a sprinkler.)

Proposal:

The proposal is simple: a transparent LCD screen is attached to the window. This screen can be relatively bare-bones; it can be grayscale and low-resolution, since we’re only going to be displaying raindrops on it.

rain-overlay-with-frame

Fig. 2: Left: a bare window frame (with transparent glass in it). Right: a transparent LCD screen (shown darker than it normally would be—when it wasn’t in “rain” mode, the screen would be almost 100% transparent).

rain-window-install-process

Fig. 3: Left: the installation process is very simple—the screen sticks onto your existing window glass. Right: the final result. Rain on demand! Maybe combine it with a speaker system to get the full soothing-rain-sound experience.

PROS: No longer be at the mercy of the weather; now you can get a rainy day on demand.

CONS: Installation might complicated due to the lack of a “standard” window size.

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August 29, 2016

THE CITY GRINDER: The one relentless trick that will DRAMATICALLY CHANGE your property values! Read up before you buy property, or soon you will weep bitter tears of despair!

Background:

Modern cities face a number of issues due to old buildings. For example:

Housing that isn’t up to code
Abandoned buildings
Absentee owners who don’t maintain their property
Urban decay

Proposal:

Fortunately, with an amazing new idea, we can revitalize urban development and create guaranteed construction jobs.

Specifically, the proposal is as follows:

Build an elevated circular track around City Hall (or some other centrally located building).
Next, build an enormous miles-long spiked roller that rests on this track (Fig 1). The outer edge of this “city grinder” should reach to the farthest extent of the city.
The city grinder will now make a slow revolution around the city, consuming everything in its path.

city-grinder

Fig 1: The “city grinder” is a giant spiked roller (left) that levels everything in its path. It is mounted on an elevated circular track that is centered on city hall (right; the building with a yellow roof). In this example, the roller is traveling counter-clockwise (see arrow). Not shown: the roller should actually be rotating quickly in order to grind the buildings it encounters.

The actual time required for a full rotation could be set based on the circumstances of the specific city. Perhaps 100 years for a full rotation would be reasonable.

Although this idea may seem unorthodox, it isn’t without precedent: some places have 99-year leases or even 999-year leases instead of permanent ownership.

Thus, the “city grinder” is just a strong formalization of the 99 year lease—except a property won’t just revert to government ownership after 99 years, but instead will be ground into dust.

city-map

Fig 2: An example of city grinder transit over a 100 year period (as indicated by the numbers; note that the grinder is in the top-right corner of the map in both 1900 and 2000). The star indicates the city hall (or other “center” location). At 100 years for a complete revolution, the city grinder will only need to cut through 3.6 degrees of the city per year. For a circular city that is 10 miles across, the outermost (fastest) point on the city grinder would be traveling at a mere 4.5 feet per day (or 1.4 meters / day). (City circumference = π × 10 miles = 31.4 miles. 31.4 miles / 100 years = 4.5 feet per day).

The only remaining logistical question is: how does traffic pass through the region being ground up? Luckily, this can be easily solved by breaking up the roller into many independent-operating sections that can be elevated. So only a small portion of the city grinder would be blocking traffic at a given time, and this segment could easily be driven around. This wouldn’t be any more difficult than dealing with railroad crossings, which all cities already handle.

PROS: Prevents accumulation of obsolete and decaying buildings in a city. Improves urban beautification. Architects and construction workers will have guaranteed employment.

CONS: The roller may be expensive to operate and maintain.

May 2, 2016

Exercise self-control and never wantonly snack again with this amazing new home design tip! Your kitchen will thank you.

Background:

When a fully-stocked kitchen is just one room away from you, it’s really easy to constantly snack at non-officially-sanctioned mealtimes.

The issue:

But the tyranny of prescribed mealtimes must be obeyed if one is to avoid eventually becoming completely spherical (due to being completely full of delicious snacks).

cake

Fig 1: A delicious snack in your kitchen. Devour it like a wild beast!!!!!!!

In ancient times, our ancestors had no trouble avoiding constantly eating delicious snacks, because 1) snacks did not exist and 2) they would have to kill a woolly mammoth or something if they wanted to eat mammoth jerky. That isn’t something you can just go one room over and do (unless you’re an unusually successful stone age tribal chieftain.)

But how to we keep from constant snacking in the modern era?

Proposal:

By simply making it more difficult to access the kitchen, we can prevent casual snacking at minimal cost. For less than the cost of a hundred cakes, a custom door can be fitted to one’s kitchen door.

Here, we will run through the options:

Fig 2a: A very heavy kitchen door with an auto-closing mechanism (not pictured). This is the “base model” door with no bells or whistles. Since it is slightly annoying to open (and it closes automatically), it may discourage extremely casual snacking. But it can be improved upon, as seen in Fig 2b.

door-rotary

Fig 2b: This door has a nautical-style rotary opening mechanism, with a twist—in order to open the kitchen door, the kitchen-accessing individual must turn the handle one hundred times. This will give the person a good forearm workout and discourage unnecessary trips to the kitchen.

door-pull-up-bar

Fig 2c: As an alternative to the rotary opener, this pull-up bar door requires the user to perform at least 10 pull-ups before they can go into the kitchen. A door could also include both the rotary mechanism and the pull-up bar.

door-puzzle-from-the-witness

Fig 2d: Finally, this door features a complicated maze puzzle that the user must solve before it opens. Although this does not improve physical fitness, it still creates a mentally taxing obstacle to the delicious foods that reside in the kitchen. (This specific style of puzzle is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witness_(2016_video_game) )

Conclusion:

This is a low-cost method of encouraging healthy eating habits. Talk to your architect and/or interior designer about it today!

PROS: Improves physical fitness / mental acuity with minimal effort on the user’s part.

CONS: Since it is so difficult to access the fridge, an individual might take out a bunch of food at once, leave it unrefrigerated for a while, and then eat the spoiled food (which otherwise, in absence of this door, would have been properly refrigerated).

December 14, 2015

Regain hours of your life every day with this one weird anti-procrastination tip that may involve horrifying injury! You’ll never believe what happened next.

Background:

Sometimes, a difficult task or obligation hangs over a person, and is said to be “heavy” or “crushing.”

The issue:

However, until now, there has been no way to properly represent a person’s currently unresolved obligations in a three-dimensional space.

Proposal:

In order to reduce procrastination and make it easier for a person to determine how far they are along in resolving their current to-do list, the proposal is as follows:

In certain important rooms of the user’s house, or potentially in their workplace, a huge metal plate is installed on one end of the room, immediately in front of a wall. (Ideally, this location would also be directly across from a door on the opposing wall, although this is not mandatory.)
This metal plate is attached to a telescoping arm that can push the plate away from the wall and into the main space of the room.
In this fashion, the metal plate can take up as much of the room as needed, partitioning it into a “still usable” space and a “hidden behind the crushing wall” space.
The crushing wall would be linked the user’s email and calendar programs. If the user has many un-resolved email messages from days ago, and a large number of outstanding obligations (for example, “do taxes” or “repaint living room”), the wall will extend to take up a large amount of space in the room.
When the user resolves these tasks, the wall will retract back towards its origin. For example, if the user only has a few minor tasks to do (e.g. “go shopping for bread”), the wall will retract so that it only takes up a few inches along the wall.

Fig 1: In this figure, the crushing wall is mounted on the left wall. The remaining usable space in the room (right side) has only a table and door in it. Judging from the position of this wall, the user has a large number of currently outstanding tasks that they need to resolve if they want the crushing wall to retract.

Fig 2: Side view of a room similar to the one above. Blue area (left): a heavy-duty mounting bracket to attach the crushing wall to the floor and ceiling. Green: a telescoping hydraulic arm to allow the wall to move. Yellow: the crushing wall. In this diagram, the wall is taking up approximately two-thirds of the room.

Conclusion:

This new room furnishing will make it easy for a person to visualize how many un-resolved tasks they need to work on, and will provide a satisfying sense of accomplishment when a task is complete and the wall retracts a few inches.

PROS: Provides sense of accomplishment. Reinvents the classic to-do list in three-dimensional form.

CONS: May result in injury, especially if the crushing wall is installed in a fashion such that there is no door on the opposing wall. More details, including a video re-enactment of this scenario, can be found by doing an Internet search for the term “Death Star trash compactor.”

June 15, 2015

Increase downtown property values by developing un-used space above the roadway, an amazing weird trick from an unlicensed city planner with extensive SimCity experience

Background:

Many cities have serious shortages of buildable space in the most desirable areas—most land that is available for development has already been taken.

Proposal: Allow building of a “second level” of city on the un-used space above the streets

Fortunately, there actually is a large amount of unused space in each city (generally, approximately 5–10% of the total area in question). And it’s not even privately owned!

Specifically, it is the area above the sidewalks and public streets. (See Figure 2 for an example of a four-way intersection.)

All we have to do is allow structures to be built on stilts on top of the roadway. This will shield pedestrians and cars from rain, snow, and hail, and will keep the roadway comfortable and cool even on the hottest days. Additionally, it will increase the number of structures built in the city, which will help fund public education via property taxes.

This idea has extensive historical support in dystopian and cyberpunk fiction, so presumably most of the details of it have already been worked out.

street-above-construction-side-view

Fig 1: Building a second layer of city above the roadway would be a great way to increase the tax base and allow people to live closer to their place of work.

A) are supports for the second level, which can be placed on the sidewalk just like telephone poles / utility poles. B) is the second level of the city and C) are the houses that are built on top of this platform. D) is the original roadway. E) shows the minimum clearance for the second level (in this example, the dashed line shows 30 feet from the roadway, although the specific heights may be different, depending on local requirements).

street-build-overhead

Fig 2: In this overhead view of a four-way intersection, there are buildings (dark gray) on all four corners and a sidewalk (light gray). There is significant un-built (but highly desirable) space being occupied by the roadway and sidewalks.

street-above-overhead-view

Fig 3: In this terrible diagram, we see the elevated area (blue) above the street (white). Sidewalks are in green for some reason. Features of interest: A) Staircase leading from the upper level to the ground-level sidewalk. B and C) Elevators. D and E: a skybridge connecting the buildings at near points D and E. F: a skybridge connecting the upper-level buildings directly to the building at F (perhaps it is a shopping center). Who made this diagram anyway, it is awful. Oh well!

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PROS: Makes the city more like a cyberpunk dystopia. Adds new buildings that will pay property tax, increasing city revenue. By increasing population density and decreasing commute distance, we create a more eco-friendly city.

CONS: Doesn’t work in areas with significant over-the-road infrastructure. Also, this idea never seems to work out in works of fiction.

Category: Architecture