but rather a complete departure from traditional housing design offering solutions to most of the drawbacks of the housing being built today almost everywhere with antiquated and wasteful technologies. •Use of a quasi-triangular basic structure gives it far greater integral strength to resist earthquakes and other natural disasters, and greatly improves the building’s ability to capture sunlight in northern climes and convert it into natural heating for the inhabitants. The shape provides far more sunlight to each dwelling than the classic box shape used in most of the housing being built today. The shape also virtually eliminates many dangers associated with traditional box-shape dwelling construction. •Use of innovative construction techniques (which reduce labor and material costs to a never-before-achieved level) --- combined with air-rights design --- bring total building cost (cost of site acquisition plus construction) to a fraction of the cost per square meter of the flimsy gimcrack building being built everywhere today. Not just beautiful and practical, the Sunshine Building may be the least expensive quality housing ever designed for the masses. •Replacement of fixed wall design with movable wall units incorporating living features creates flexibility in living styles and adaptability never achieved or even approached in traditional fixed-wall designs. •The spacious atrium provides protected, weatherproof space for recreation and social interaction never before provided by low cost housing, offering inhabitants a totally different and better life style than that offered by traditional housing forms. •Its suspended design provides additional space for parking, social interaction, and play --- a huge departure from traditional designs and a real breakthrough in housing construction design for use in crowded cities.

Describe the critical need your solution addresses.

The Sunshine Building in its current state is only a set of rough 3D drawings, an attempt to put into digital format the concepts of its design and construction techniques. Fortunately, the drawings already give a fairly good idea of the final appearance of the building, and a good indication of its unusual approach to the use of natural light for illumination and heating.

Step Two: the creation of complete detailed drawings, including the louvered external walls, the stairwells combining steps, slides, and sliding block ‘elevators’, and detailed designs of the moveable wall units.

The final drawings will incorporate animation which will demonstrate clearly the changes in the building’s natural lighting as the sun moves across the sky and the seasons change, and changes to the configuration of the dwelling to take advantage of the various seasons: larger terraces in warm weather, and conversion of terrace space to interior space in cold weather.

Additional 3D animations will reveal the complete construction cycle, providing comparison of the two proposed construction techniques. The observer will be able to watch the building grow from just the foundations to the finished structure ready for inhabitants.

Step Three: Once the drawings have been finalized, a scale model of approximately 1/24 scale will be built using fiberglass and resin in place of the cement and stretched steel of the full-sized building design. Analysis of the building process will allow a relatively accurate estimation of the cost of construction, and reveal potential problems in the design so they can be corrected before it is implemented on a large scale.

Step Four: Funds remaining from the $100,000 prize after the above steps will be used to finance a campaign to approach investors, banks, and governments world-wide for financing for the first pilot full-scale Sunshine Building.

Explain your initiative in more depth and its stage of development.

Social - Incorporates atrium and protected ground space for improved recreation and cooperation among inhabitants, play space for children, and exercise space for adults.

Environmental - Non-barrier design leaves most of land over which it is built in virgin state so that humans and animals use it and also can pass beneath it.

•Over 2 million Americans have been evicted from their homes in 2008. The need for low-cost, healthy, attractive, energy-efficient housing has never been as great as now.

•First designed to take advantage of the sun’s energy in temperate climes, but the building’s movable walls mean the building can be lived in comfortably without any design modifications even in very hot climates.

•Reduced heating costs mean diminished CO2 footprint, and building’s form means reduced impact on the land and the environment into which it is introduced.

•Pre-stressed concrete design uses plentiful and relatively inexpensive materials to create multiple-family dwellings of extraordinary strength and longetivity.

•The planned detailed animated 3D drawings and scale model allow the concept to be implemented and tested at low cost.

•Increased capacity (floor space) can be added without disturbing current tenants of the building. Length of building can be varied from a few dozen meters to a kilometer or more with no requirements for new plans or blueprints.

How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key issues?

I’m what is sometimes referred to as a ‘Renaissance Man,’ although I find that phrase pretentious and much prefer putting it another way. I have, as Joseph Conrad’s wrote of one of his characters, ‘ability in the abstract.’ I have been discovered to have surprising strength and know-how in over a dozen varied disciplines, sometimes as if I was born knowing how to excel in them…. However, as one of the original ‘Renaissance Men’ put it (Da Vinci) --- ‘If people knew how hard I worked to acquire my talent, they would not be so surprised by it.’

The Sunshine Building is my only venture into architecture, and thus I am surprised to see to what degree it solves problems which have stymied professional architects for the last two centuries, and the degree to which it fits the requirements of this challenge. I have no idea where this inspiration comes from --- I’m just glad it came. One day I saw the St. Louis arch. Soon after that a friend explained to me the principles and advantages of pre-stressed concrete construction.… and a year or so later the entire design of the building, including its revolutionary construction technique and movable walls, had mapped itself out in my mind.

At that time I did some drawings and showed them to some officers of the FHA in Seattle. They seemed somewhat impressed and urged me to apply to Washington with the idea, but I got side-tracked at the time (35 years ago.)

Recently the design has come back into my consciousness, and I’ve begun visualizing it in 3D drawings. They caught the attention of a close friend, Madame Ayten Aydin, who urged me to submit it to your Institute’s 2008 Challenge.