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Quik House: Neal Stephenson's U-Stor-It?
Meet the quik house - a prefabricated kit house made from recycled shipping containers. It even comes in a natural rust color. The basic model has three bedrooms and two and one-half baths in 2,000 square feet. From container ship to luxury housing - almost.
In his 1992 classic Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson refers to the U-Stor-It home of Hiro Protagonist and his roommate Vitaly Chernobyl, a spacious 20x30 storage unit. As he puts it:
But there are worse places to live… slum housing, 5-by-10s and 10-by-10s where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets. (More...)The quik house sounds much nicer; you can get stainless steel kitchens with appliances, custom carpets and so forth. Read more about it at quik house prefabricated kit house from recycled shipping containers. You might also be interested in reading another SF in the News article, Shelter After Katrina, for a look at other forms of recycled or "quick" housing.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 3/24/2004)
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