Building Advantages

To understand the two kinds of NewVistas community buildings—multipurpose buildings and apartment buildings—it’s important to know several basic NewVistas building advantages.

Mass-Produced Buildings

To enable advanced engineering and worldwide scalability, all NewVistas community buildings are assembled using modular, stackable, mass-produced elements.

Each floor is 14′ tall, allowing 8′ for room height and another 5′ for the bridge element, in which supplies and equipment can be stored and automatically let down as needed.

Vertical elements are about 4′ square so they can contain private bathrooms, multifunctional workstations, or connecting hallways.

Durable Buildings

In each NewVistas community, all buildings are constructed to resist earthquakes, fire, pests, mold, hurricanes, tornados, and other threats.

The community pattern is meant for the entire planet, meaning that it must work in all climates without being prohibitively costly or ecologically disruptive. NewVistas has found that the best construction materials to meet these requirements are stainless steel and glass.

Capped at five stories, NewVistas buildings are lightweight enough that they don’t need a deep, extensive foundation like most buildings today.

Rather than fastening buildings to stiff foundations that allow no play, NewVistas constructs buildings using a rail system that allows them to move with the earth during a quake.

The buildings are strong and heavy enough to withstand natural disasters, but when needed they can behave not unlike a floating boat, which minimizes damage.

Movable Buildings

Building an entire NewVistas community all at once would be impractical, so the pattern enables a community to initially disburse NewVistas buildings in an already-developed area and later realign the buildings into the correct plot pattern.

For example, a future NewVistas community could start with just one household unit placed in the backyard or side yard of a single-family home and rented out as an auxiliary apartment. A single unit can expand to two units side by side, then three or four units, and eventually into a 42-unit apartment building housing about 100 people.

Additional apartment buildings could be added in the general area, and when appropriate a public multipurpose building could be assembled nearby.

Eventually, all the buildings would be moved to adjoin each other in plot-prescribed formation as a village, and other villages would form nearby until a district was created.

NewVistas buildings will hook into existing public utilities to start with, and eventually, advanced appliances will be added so buildings can function independently off the grid.

Transforming Spaces

Rather than inefficient, single-purpose buildings and rooms, NewVistas buildings feature technology that allows one space to be used for numerous purposes, including subdividing the space as needed.

In community buildings, NewVistas transforming technology includes two main components:

• Soundproof, motorized walls that automatically lower or raise to form many sizes of rooms, from assembly halls to personal bedrooms
• Automated storage is built into 14′-tall ceilings for easy access to supplies and equipment, so rooms can be used for a wide variety of purposes, such as an office by day and a bedroom by night.

Noncentral Air Systems

Rather than using central-air systems that are less efficient and can spread contamination, NewVistas buildings purify and condition air in a decentralized manner.

Numerous small heat pumps draw fresh air into ducts built into the floors, where the air is filtered, sanitized with UV light, and heated or cooled.¹ Thus, every household module has its own mini air system.

In public hallways and breezeways, air is separately processed every eight feet, with air flowing from floor to ceiling and back to the floor.

Perch-Based Grid

The diamond-shaped NewVistas community grid is based on the perch, an old English unit equal to 16.5 feet.

Key measurements include the eighth-perch, quarter-perch, half-perch, two perches, four perches (also called a chain), eight perches, and 40 perches (also called a furlong).

Easements play a major role in the NewVistas grid. Along with the perch, the plot uses the foot, and the perch and foot dimensions rationalize with each other.

For example, a living module is based on the half-perch, which allows for an ergonomically correct living width of eight feet. A half-perch measures 8.25′, which leaves .25′ easements for walls.

Expanding or reducing any prescribed dimensions even just a little would throw off the entire community grid. Strictly following the prescribed grid has prompted NewVistas to develop, for example, thin, unbreakable, liftable glass walls that help keep building elements lighter in weight and less expensive.

Thus, the pattern provides the right amount of space for each person, which allows it to be scalable and sustainable for the entire human population.

1. Heat pumps can be used either in heating mode or cooling mode, as required by the user. When a heat pump is used for heating, it employs the same basic refrigeration-type cycle used by an air conditioner or a refrigerator but in the opposite direction, releasing heat into the conditioned space rather than the surrounding environment (Wikipedia).[↩]