8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking Encrypting the Sun by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong

8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking Encrypting the Sun by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong. Edited by Stephen Zacks (Actar, Spring 2025)

Energy generated by nuclear fusion of the Sun reaches the surface of the Earth in 8 minutes and 20 seconds. 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds imagines an architecture based on renewable energy, caching forms of energy that are essentially inexhaustible and persistent, and virtually non-denumerable in quantity. It anticipates a post-scarcity era enabled and reorganized by a new form of housing that serves as an arbiter of post-sustainability human settlements. 

Proposing a new form of housing only achievable through advanced manufacturing we ask: “what if what was a housing asset becomes a new form of energy asset whose downstream by-product is shelter?”