SUBS #15: HISTORY, UTILITY THEORY
AND 14-PORT DISTRIBUTION HUBS!
*WRITTEN: 2003OCT10
*REVISED: 2009FEB13 =
revised, hexpanded and relEased.
My numbering was ALMOST perfect!
… But as usual, I’m a bit behind ;-)
SUBS HISTORY:
##############
I started thinking about
what led to SUBS in the
early 1980′s. ?1982?
By 1983 I had designed
the panel and connector.
By late 1984 I had built some
panels in the foyer of my
penthouse apartment, and
installed a sleeping loft
in my bedroom/office.
It worked fantastic!
It’s still my favorite
room I’ve ever had!
I built more lofts in
other bedrooms.
Way Cool!
At the time I was an
upwardly mobile hopeful
professional wannabe,
who was usually broke.
I met an old guy selling
tomatoes for 29 cents a
pound from a beater
pickup at the farmer’s
market in Santa Barbara.
He was hippie labor on a big farm.
I used to visit and we’d talk while I
ate his employer’s fantastic Early Girls.
He had a very interesting perspective!
A year later he called me and
said he was out of money so
his flop-house threw him out.
He was on the street with no
place to stay. So I took him in.
Things got really interesting!
He’d been estranged from his
mother for years, and wanted
to get back in contact. He was
hoping for a handout from her.
He had me call his uncle …
on IBM’s International Board
of Directors, who freaked out
when he heard Gilly was alive:
“the lawyers” had been looking
for him for months. He was down
in the basement doing laundry,
smoking cigarette butts he filched
from the ashtray, when I told him
his mother had died, and he was
a millionaire. It turned out to be
about $25 million. He showed me
his first dividend check, for $60K!
A few months later, another uncle
died and made him a beneficiary
of the Houston Oil Trust, worth
about $400 million to him. I was
unemployed and broke. He was
a junkie with no job and more
money than he could ever spend,
and about $2K/hour more
coming in, 24 hours a day!
So we hung out and bullshitted.
We spent hundreds of hours talking
about anything and everything of
interest. Philosophy, history, business,
marketing, cultural differences, whatever.
He was the first person I knew closely
who knew how the system really works,
not what the television tells you. It was
a critic part of my realpolitik education.
He had a private room and bath in
my apartment for about two years,
as well as a tiny rodeo drive sublet
office he seldom went to and I
never saw. He dressed like a
bum and usually stank bad.
He usually ate at McDonalds,
but occasionally went out to
fancy places with droppable
names like Sybil Shepard.
He was an establishment insider. He
played after school at Jay Rockefeller’s.
He knew Negroponte from prep school.
He banked at Brown Brothers, Harriman.
He was a life member of the Maidstone Club
He joined the ROTC, army, and CIA.
He was in Vietnam before the war,
planting electronic spy gear.
He had been a wall street hostile
takeover boy wonder and a venture
capitalist.. He was personal friends
with Rajneesh when he was a Poona
coffee-shop guru. He was close friends
with Tim Leary at Millbrook, [as part of the
CIA liaison] and one of the early acid heads.
He was involved in the ’68 Prague uprising.
He became a junkie in Bombay, infiltrating
supply networks, and had done some
importing himself. He had grown weed.
He knew this governor and that regulator.
He knew the system inside out,
from the inside, as a member.
He knew the game, and how it
is played by the good old boys.
But he wasn’t totally caught
up in it. He dropped out of
New York Society to be
a beach bum in Goa,
hung out with Rajneesh
and then fell into the
homeless underground
as a hippie-junkie, before
money rescued him again.
So he had a VERY
detached viewpoint!
He was a Burnt Out Case who
had already Done Everything.
I was a bright young hot shot,
still eager to make my name.
HE WAS THE PERFECT
TEACHER FOR ME THEN!
He hexploded my delusions about
how things worked while I was
designing SUBS, and hexpanded
my perception of possibilities.
He taught me how the rulers think.
I got his input about how he would
go about developing my industry.
He got me thinking big for real.
After a while, he forgot I took him
in when he was homeless, and all
the assurances of support he made
me, and started treating me like
another annoying peon servant.
So I threw him out. But he had
already transformed my thinking.
I had learned a little programming
in the early 1960′s, and by then
had word processing and primitive
30 baud BBS communications.
I wanted to be the Bill Gates
of the SUBS housing industry.
Design, Price and Order your
new building online! Pay by
credit card! Have it delivered
on a truck, tomorrow!, ready to
assemble with unskilled labor!
I COULD SEE IT SO CLEARLY!
My global empire beckoned!
But big loads of shit hit more than one fan.
I went homeless in 1993, which seriously
impacted my Captain Of Industry Fantasies
In about 2001 I was unemployed,
broke, homeless, hungry, and in
pretty lousy health. I was worried about
dying without getting SUBS established,
so I put it on the web to make it known.
A couple years later, in an up period,
I tried to patent it. We did the patent
search to find it IS new, and WOULD
be a billion-dollar patent, *IF* I hadn’t
already foolishly disclosed it publicly.
My patent lawyer was *SO* pissed!
I can’t really blame him!
But I was doing more design work
around then, and discovered a
unique plumbing fixture which I had
not thought of before, and therefore
had not disclosed to anyone yet.
THAT WAS STILL PATENTABLE!
So I wrote it up, but hung on to it
so I could patent and market it!
That’s the basis of this SUBS #15.
Since then, those fans are still spinning!
And some monkey keeps shitting in them!
I’m still semi-homeless, though miracle gifts
and part time job have me eating OK again.
I’ve given up on the “patent it/it’s mine/
pay me or you can’t use it” approach.
I’m too old [61] and don’t have the cash
or the lifestyle to get a patent or defend it .
I like inventing things and solving problems.
I invented the in-line roller skate in ’83 or ’84,
but promoting, haggling, arguing and selling
have never been my strong points. I just
invented it; I didn’t patent or license it!
… Obviously, someone else DID!
I’D MUCH RATHER WORK
IN THE GIFT ECONOMY!
Maybe I’m just lazy.
With the ongoing collapse of what passes for
civilization among those who know no better,
patents might soon be a thing of the past.
But SUBS will remain useful as long
as people still build houses to live in!
I’d hate to see it lost just because
I couldn’t make any money on it.
That would be a shaME!
As first I thought I would make billions of
dollars, and use that to create my fantasies.
SUBS IS A FANTASY I CAN FACILITATE DIRECTLY
BY PUTTING IT *ALL* IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN,
SO IT’S YOURS NOW, AND NO ONE CAN
PREVENT ANYONE FROM USING IT!
I can’t keep it. And that
wouldn’t do me any good.
BUT I *CAN* GIVE IT AWAY!
I MIGHT EVEN GET SOME
GOOD WILL BENEFITS …
WHILE I’M STILL ALIVE!
Maybe even some new
design or consulting work!
Or partnership offers!
You never can tell!
[Until you've done it.]
======================
BUT ONLY IF PEOPLE ARE
ACTUALLY *USING* SUBS!
======================
That’s what will make my reputation: lots of
real people living and loving in my designs!
This SUBS #15 and the
forthcoming SUBS #16
complete my core SUBS
system design to date.
There are lots of add-ons and spin-
offs, but they are RELATIVELY minor.
Maybe there’s more to come,
but I don’t see it yet: SUBS
seems pretty complete now.
Rather than being a
Captain of Industry,
which feels beyond
my reach now, and
maybe even not such
a good idea, *I DO*
have the power to
unleash a global SUBS
“Industry of Captains!”
who all do what THEY
CHOOSE with SUBS, not
what their boss or lawyer
tells them is permitted!
Maybe that’s better?
================
THAT IS POSSIBLE!
SO I’LL *DO* THAT!
================
WE’LL SEE WHAT
HAPPENS THEN!
UTILITY THEORY:
###############
In some ways, architecture
is remarkably like biology.
Life has cells.
Buildings have rooms.
One-celled animals are
like one-room buildings:
Their entire exterior surface is
exposed to the environment,
so they interface all over.
As cells or rooms are added, the
organization gets more complex,
As rooms or cells cluster, they
are no longer completely open
to the environment. They are
now partially exposed, and
partially screened by other cells
or rooms. Then some cells or
rooms are completely enclosed,
so they have no direct contact
with the external environment.
As more complex organization
develops, many cells/rooms are
hidden under multiple thick layers
of other cells/rooms. Think of
a person, or a high rise hotel.
One cell by itself easily takes in
solid, liquids and gases from it’s
environment, and excretes them
directly to it. Likewise it takes in
light, electricity, and information,
and transmits them too.
One room buildings are much
the same. They have doors,
windows and plumbing to
take in and excrete solids,
liquids and gases. They
receive and transmit light,
sound and other info.
That makes obvious sense.
Biological creatures design
buildings to house and
support biological creatures
… much like themselves!
Buildings are a extension of a
life form: an exoskeleton to live in
that is deliberately crafted, not
just found and moved into like
a hermit crab adopting a shell.
So architecture mimics and supports
all the basic functions of life itself!
As the cells/rooms become buried
in the INTERIOR, a CIRCULATION
SYSTEM develops to continue the
vital exchanges with the external
environment. In buildings we call
these systems UTILITIES.
BIOLOGICAL vs. ARCHITECTURAL CONSTRUCTION
############################################
There are some general differences between
biological and architectural constructions:
*Round vs. Square Pixels
Biology has rounded pixels, which
produces irregular rounded forms.
Architecture has rectangular pixels,
which produce flat surfaces and
right-angle geometry. Cells have
curved geometry with few corners.
Architecture has Square Corners!
*Wet vs. Dry / Ocean vs. Land
Biology is WET, like the ocean,
and the bio-building is done
chemically in a wet solution.
Architecture is done DRY,
and hopefully stays dry!
*Changing vs Static
Life always changes.
Architecture is static.
*Live vs. Dead
Life is spawned, born, lives,
reproduces, dies, and rots away.
Architecture is built, used, and junked.
*Recycle vs. Discard
Life recycles almost everything.
Architecture mostly discards.
*Blurring The Lines: Art Imitates Life!
SUBS makes architecture much
more organic and life-like! You
can start small and GROW your
building while in constant use.
It can change constantly. You
can dissemble and re-use it to
make a completely different
building, or even buildings!
THE “ABC”‘s of A
BETTER CONNECTOR:
####################
I made my connectors from a
twenty-foot stick of 6″ square
steel tubing. 3/16″ was the
thinnest wall thickness they
had in stock then, so that’s
what I bought. They cut it
into 6″ lengths for me, and I
drilled the four bolt holes in
the faces. Too much work!
There’s a better way to do it!
I’ve seen stop signs mounted
on 2″ square tubing, with holes
punched every inch on all
four sides, making it very
easy to bolt on the signs.
That’s a perfect 1/3 scale model
of the IDEAL SUBS BEAM for 6″
thick panels! All the holes come
pre-installed! No drilling required!
And because the holes are PUNCHED
in the flat sheet of steel before it is
folded and welded into tubing, they
can be square! That’s extremely
convenient, because that allows you
to use a carriage bolt, which has a
square head which LOCKS IN to
a square hole, so you don’t have
to hold the bolt on the inside of
the tubing when you tighten the
nut on the outside! WAY COOL!
Maybe they already make this style
of 6″ square tubing. If not, they
could obviously do so quite easily.
There will be plenty of demand!
Tubing comes in 20′ and 40′ sticks,
so you have perfect piers and beams
for any kind of huge construction.
If you cut 6″ connectors from it, you
don’t have to drill any holes, and you
get three holes per face, not one,
spaced 1.5″ apart, down the center
line of the beam/connector.
That should roughly halve the price
of connectors, which were costing
me around $10 each to make, as
punching those holes in hot metal
with a rotary punch is *hugely*
cheaper than drilling holes later!
And having 3 holes along the 6″
face is much better than just one!
That allows you to shift the connector
1.5 inches in either direction along
the duckt. Instead of using two
connectors to support the corners
of two wall panels bolted together,
you can do it with just one! Just shift
it over 1.5″ so it supports both panels!
A half-cost connector
that does double duty!
*NOW* HOW MUCH
WOULD YOU
*NOT* PAY?
But wait, it
gets better!
At every corner, there are
3 connectors. One-hole per
face connectors meet each
other at the corner to form
an almost continuous steel
half-cube of 3 ninety-degree
faces. If you use 3-holes-per-
face connectors, you can shift
each connector 1.5″ AWAY from
the corner! This is WAY COOL!
This means you can drill a hole
from inside a room, directly into
the 6″ [modulus] cube [which is
part of all three duckts coming
together at that corner] WITHOUT
HAVING TO DRILL THROUGH A
WALL OF STEEL! But all panels
are still perfectly supported!
THIS IS A HUGE BENEFIT!
DUCKT PATTERNS
################
Every SUBS room has four vertical
utility columns in the corners, which
can provide utilities to the floors above.
So you can have FOUR KINDS of
utility column in every room of every
building. You may not need that many,
but you always have that option.
For a test example, we can arbitrarily pick
out two mixes of utilities in a building, vaguely
corresponding to those in biological systems, cities,
and other highly structured physical activities.
Ordinary buildings have ducts.
SUBS has DUCKTS!
HOT DUCKT:
==========
POWER [power cables = 60 hertz hum]
HOT WATER [cpvc pipe or pex hose]
HOT AIR [flexible hose, or just the duckt].
[All these can run thru one duckt!]
COLDUCKT:
============
INFORMATION [low or no voltage cables for phone, video, fiber-optics, data etc]
COLD WATER
COLD AIR SUPPLY
AIR RETURN
WATER DRAIN
SEWER DRAIN
ROOF DRAIN
[Any of these, and some multiples]
You could also separate them as
POWER duckts vs. INFO duckts,
or divide them other ways.
This makes it much easier to design utilities:
alternate duckts, providing both to every wall,
keeping the hot from the cold, or the power
from the signal. Much like fluid flow through
a body: send and return, intake and eliminate.
If you have a regular rectangular room grid,
you can further separate by electrical and
non-electrical, giving you FOUR different
kinds of utility duckt IN EVERY ROOM.
Once you decide WHAT to circulate,
designing a building is much like
designing a body, or 3-D chip!
You need both Structure and Flow [of
people, air, water, light, data, power
poop, etc., within the structure].
SUBS lends itself perfectly
to scaling and replication.
For a more advanced example:
a trial four-way utility division:
HOT DUCKA:
==========
POWER
?HOT WATER
?HOT AIR
HOT DUCKB:
===========
*NO* POWER
HOT WATER
HOT AIR
COLDUCKA:
===============
INFORMATION
?COLD WATER
?COLD AIR
?WATER RETURN
?SEWER
?ROOF DRAINAGE
COLDUCKB:
================
*NO* INFORMATION
COLD WATER
COLD AIR
WATER RETURN
SEWER
ROOF DRAINAGE
HOT + LIVE +
COLD + INFO
are the four types
in that scenario.
This allows you to have
both an information only
and a power only access
corner in every room,
as well as both hot + cold
plumbing, heat + a/c, etc.
And yes, of course, you
could mix utilities differently
as in wet/dry, electrical/non,
but the point is that you get
four separate mixes of what
ever you want to have in
each room of the building.
HOT UP
COLD DOWN
These are just some of
the initially obvious choices.
The beauty of the system is,
you can configure it ANY WAY
you like to make it work for you!
Within the room, you still
need to connect the signal
and the power, plus the
cold and the hot plumbing
at your computer or hot tub.
Even if you separate power and
signal, as well as hot and cold
water, you still need to get them
all together someplace, because
I want a computer in my hot tub!
Room-side triangular duckts.
#######################
Run wires + pipes at edges
where the walls meet, in
the corner. A triangular tube
in the corner will hide them
if you like, making a small
right trangle roomside duckt.
This would be a flexible plastic
right-triangular tube with two
equal legs anywhere from 1″
to 6″. The top two sides would
be closed but not fastened,
so you could pry it open to
insert wires or pipes. This
puts the clutter our of sight.
You can still have shelving
into the corner, just cut a
triangle off the back corner!
All six edges of the room can
have interior corner duckts of
appropriate size for their use..
The pipes, wires or whatever
can enter through the very
corner points, 8 of them in
every standard room,
because we’ve shifted all
the steel connectors 1.5″
away from the corners!
14-PORT HUB GEOMETRY
#######################
The supply lines run through the duckts,
and meet at right angles in the common
cube of the three intersecting duckts.
That gives you one port in the center of
each face of the cube. = 6 And the feed
lines to each room run right through the
CORNERS of that same cube at a 45
degree angle to each wall! = 8
6 faces + 8 corners = 14 ports
It’s much easier to imagine than draw.
The basic hub body could be either a
sphere or a cube. The ports are simply
threaded connector holes, filled with plugs
if not needed. To add another feed,
simply unscrew the plug, and screw
in a nipple with a valve on it, right
though the extreme corner of the
room, at a 45 degree angle to
each of the three corner panels.
You can do this from inside the room,
though the access hole you drill thru
the very corners of the room.
Just turn the water off first, and
drain the system before opening.
You can plumb 8 rooms at
once with just 8 short nipples!
I thought a 14 port manifold/connector/hub
might be a patentable item, so I looked for
it in Patent Category 137, Fluid Control. I got
nowhere, over and over. Maybe I’m just lost
in the classification system. So I looked for
the simpler 6-way connector, through the
faces of the the cube. I didn’t find that
either. So I went to the plumbing store.
They never heard of a 6 way! OR a 5-way!
They only have 2, 3, and 4-way connectors.
They think I’d have to make a 6-way custom.
Maybe the 3-axis 6-port plumbing connector
has not been invented yet either? It’s hard
to believe, but so far it seems possible.
If so … it’s in the public domain now!
The 14-port geometry works for any utility.
You can use if for electrical connections
as well as piping. You get all three
electrical feeds in each port: hot, cold
and ground, so it’s more compact than
plumbing, which needs separate feeds
for hot, cold, and drain. Twist-lock plug-
in connectors are permanent, but easily
removed and reused with no damage.
Plumbing returns work by gravity,
so you only get 4 in a corner.
This works for threaded or glued pipe,
though threaded pipe has the advantage
of being removable and replaceable
from within the room serviced.
Screw 8 nipples into each hub,
screw a valve onto each nipple
within the room, where you can
easily get at it, and you’re set up.
Past the shutoff valves, you can
glue up your pipe if that’s easier.
Notice that with this geometry,
we can run a 2″ drain pipe into
the room, WITHOUT making a
2″ hole in ANY of the panels.
We trim *PART* of a 2″ hole off the
corners of THREE DIFFERENT PANELS!
NO HOLES IN THE PANELS!
JUST TRIMMED CORNERS!
Not only is that the least destructive
place to put the holes, but it’s the
perfect location to plug into our
14-port hubs! Way Cool!
Multiple Utilities: gas, water, sewage,
power, data, etc. share the same
distribution layout and access.
This also means that many
of your utility runs can be
STRAIGHT RUNS RIGHT
THROUGH THE BUILDING,
with daylight on both ends!
so you can SEE all the
way through from one
side to the other, and
run a string, snake, fish
line, etc. to fix or install.
Knowing what utilities are in
which corner helps you to
lay out the room properly,
with furniture, windows, and
functions using correct utilities.
Of course, you don’t have to run all
utilities in all duckts or to all walls now,
but if you do need them the pattern
tells you where to add them later for
easy integration with the rest of the
building structure and systems.
An obvious limitation is that you have
three ducks in one at every intersection,
which overcrowds that six inch cube if you
try to fill each duck with piping. But if you
are using the ducks for air flow, you
don’t want them crammed full anyway.
And if you use the 6″ junction cube for a
pipe distribution hub, only one will fit, and
not too much else beside wires and air.
14-port hubs are very elegant,
especially for high-density use,
but they are not the only option.
You could run continuous wires or
flexible piping like pex tubing from
your source directly to applications,
using 2, 3 or 4-way connectors to
branch distribution “normally”.
You could run electrical to plug-ins
located just OUTSIDE that 6″ cube,
in the duckt run, so just wires would
be in the modulus cube space.
It all depends on your needs.
We can supply all the utilities, without
having ANY pipes or wires running
INSIDE the wall panels, so we don’t
need to modify our panels at all, and
we don’t need to open up the wall
panels to get at the utilities inside:
BECAUSE THERE AREN’T ANY!
All the wires and pipes are in either
the square external duckts, or
the triangular internal duckts.
WAY COOL!
A building should be able to grow, like
a tree, while continuously functioning!
SUBS TRANSFORMS ARCHITECTURE FROM
COMPLEX RIGID ARTIFACTS TO SIMPLE ELEGANT
RECTANGULAR MALLEABLE PLASTIC GEOMETRY,
… IMITATING LIFE ORTHAGONALLY!
Using simple standard components,
SUBS allows you to express YOUR
personal art, by what elements you
put together where to do what how.
Without any years of
architecture school!
Happy Building
… and Living!
O
— )
\
Bill Dur = SUBS@net-prophet.net
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