Our daughter recently sent us link to a July 13, 2016 story in the Co.Design website by Diana Budds called The House Divorce Built – This floating home breaks up as fast as your relationship (and can get back together just as quickly). http://www.fastcodesign.com/3061767/the-house-divorce-built?utm_content=buffer463f7&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer Ms. Budds said:
It’s a fact of life that people fall in and out of love. Around 40% to 50% of marriages in the United States end in divorce, and it’s rarely a clean break. Studio OBA, an architecture firm based in Amsterdam, wants to make one part of that process a little less painful: splitting up property. The firm’s prefab Prenuptual Housing concept, developed in tandem with Omar Kbiri, an entrepreneur and marketing specialist, is a single house that splits in two.
Recognizing that many people live on floating homes along Amsterdam’s canals, Studio OBA took advantage of the maritime setting and created a lightweight timber and carbon-fiber structure that’s composed of two sections that can drift apart and function as two separate houses when necessary. While the house is still in its conceptual phases, the architects plan to build a prototype, and Kbiri aims to begin taking orders for the prefabs in 2017.
We can stabilize the home front during an otherwise very hectic time,” Kbiri told Dezeen. “With this concept you namely don’t need to relocate after a breakup.
It just makes sense to create a design that can accommodate the complex realities of human partnerships.
In the past, architects have experimented with the notion of living spaces designed for after a relationship sours. Considering the volatility of housing markets—both rentals and sales—it just makes sense to create a design that can accommodate the complex realities of human partnerships. Additionally, the design would work for families: Parents of the boomerang generation could finally get their kids out of the nest by splintering off their half of the house.
While making a clean break is sure to entice some people to the design, those intent on a “happily ever after” ending take note: The two halves can rejoin into a single structure whenever the couple wants.”
In the January 21, 1983, the New York Times published the following story entitled “A House Divided: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/21/us/a-house-divided.html
CENTRAL CITY, Ky., Jan. 20— Virgil M. Everhart chopped and sawed away at the insides of his house today in the glare of television lights, cutting it in half because his wife had asked for an even property settlement in their divorce. He stopped after a judge criticized his ”cute trick” and awarded his wife temporary child support and alimony. Mr. Everhart, a 57-year-old welder who called his plan ”the only way I could figure to fight the system,” hacked through the floor, walls and ceiling to carve a line that would leave the interior in two equal portions, one marked ”His,” the other ”Hers.” ”The only thing standing between you and the jailhouse door is your job,” Judge Dan Cornette said today in Muhlenberg County Circuit Court. Janice Everhart said she did not want to bring charges against her husband, the father of her two teen-agers. ”All I want is my freedom,” she said.
This may show how far we have come. Couples don’t have to saw houses in half anymore, they can just take them apart!
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