UCL in the News: Hybrid cars - the furniture of the future

Imagine driving home from work, parking your car in the front room and settling down in the back seat-cum-sofa to watch TV.

That's how Neil Spiller, a professor at the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, sees us living in the not too distant future.

He has presented the idea as part of an online debate that launched today on hybrid cars and the impact of greener transport on the way cities are built. …

He argues that an integration of vehicles in the home would improve the urban environment by removing parked cars from city streets and enabling the development of multilayered cities.

"Tunnelling would be much easier and cheaper, since there would be a reduced need for large-scale ventilation," he says. "It would be less problematic to allow cars into any enclosed space. Roads could therefore extend upward more easily, with highways running through towers and across gantries."

His vision has been brought to life with a series of illustrations. These show how a home could be adapted to accommodate vehicles and how the Millennium Dome site might look if parks and woodland were introduced to city centres.

The online debate can be found at The Hybrid Debate. …

Chloë McCulloch, 'Building'