Oct 8, 2009, 10:43 GMT
Buenos Aires - Matias Konstandt has travelled a lot, but he has always kept his base in Buenos Aires.
'I love crossing the Andes or walking in the desert,' Konstandt said. 'But I don't like tents or caravans quite that much. It's always so tight in there. Whenever I have been in a beautiful place surrounded by nature, I have always wished for a small, beautiful house, to be able to stay there a couple of months.'
Since he could not find something like that, Konstandt, 46, a business administration graduate turned architect and designer, finally resorted to his drafting board. The result was the 'Molecule,' a structure made of thin aluminium rods - approximately 30 centimetres long - which Konstandt has since obtained a patent for.
About eight years ago he built a house for himself in a suburb of Buenos Aires: a 300-metre-square surface on two floors, demarcated by some 16,000 aluminium rods that were simply screwed together.
Most outer walls are made of chipboard and polystyrene, and then plastered with a mix of cement and lime. Others, however, hold glass panes, so that the geometric design out of aluminium rods stays visible and so that the light can go through.
'I find this very aesthetic,' Konstandt told the German Press Agency dpa. 'But of course everyone can do it as they wish. The rods are just the structure - people can put plastic sheets, laminate, cement, glass or fabric around it, whatever they want.'
In Konstandt's own home, the bed, the kitchen table and even the bath have been built partially with aluminium rods.
The rods are light. A metre square of Konstandt's building structure weighs only about 4 kilograms, when other houses can weigh 150-200 kilograms per metre square.
'Besides that, it is fire- and earthquake-proof and really easy enough for a child to build. You only need a sort of screwdriver and absolutely no technical knowledge,' the architect said.
But there are also some drawbacks.
'This house where I currently live is of course not fit to take away,' the inventor admitted. 'Even though one could pull it down and build it up somewhere else faster and in a more environmentally-friendly fashion than many other houses.'
'I just wanted to build a large house to experiment with the system,' he said.
The smaller version - the true house to take away - only exists on paper so far, but the prototype stage is not far into the future.
'Perhaps it would not fit into a rucksack, but definitely in a small car,' Konstandt said.
It should be larger and more stable than a tent, but equally quick to mount. The disadvantage in relation to a caravan is that the house to take away does not have a bathroom or a kitchen.
The larger version of the house got plenty of praise from Argentine media.
'A house that can be built up almost as fast as a tent - a true step forward in the direction of the future,' said the daily La Nacion.
'Futuristic and functional at the same time,' wrote the specialist magazine Diseno y Decoracion (Design and Decoration).
Konstandt's own neighbours were not quite so impressed.
'They have always looked at me with great mistrust, because the house obviously looks very different from all others here. The mayor wanted to convince me not to leave it grey but to paint it colourful. But when the first people came and took photos, they all went quiet.'
Among architecture students and on the internet, the house is the object of heated debate.
'It is very interesting,' says Karina Manghi, an Argentine image consultant with her own design blog. 'But how on earth does one clean the many rods?'
This is the most frequent focus of criticism, Konstandt admits.
'But fortunately I have a cleaning lady.'
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