USCA hacker house

[nibot]

Chateau co-op really is a special place in Berkeley. I don't know if I would want to live there myself, but I think it's the sort of place we need. You can spend hours there just absorbing the drawings on the walls. Unfortunately Chateau is the biggest headache for the USCA as well, with twenty-two neighbors banded together in an evil conspiracy to take Chateau off the map. And there are clearly problems at Chateau; very few people have taken contracts to live there in the fall.

Some of the proposals are patently ridiculous — such as to convert it to grad student housing or women-only housing. This would destroy Chateau, and there are already too many female vacancies in the USCA. Better plans involve various plans for "revitalization," which might or might not work. Protagonists cite Casa Zimbabwe as a success story; antagonists cite renovation at Cloyne as less-than-sucessful. Another proposal is to split the house — which is physically three houses, side by side — into three distinct co-ops, which would have the advantage of boosting personal responsibility in any given house. But I have not gone to any of the meetings about the Chateau situation, so I don't know what is being seriously considered.

I can't help but think this might be a good opportunity to put one of my pet project ideas into the general consciousness: designate one of the Chateau houses as a hacker house engineering theme house. We have a grad student house, two women-only houses, an african-american themed house, a queer house, and a vegetarian house. I think an engineering house could be particularly interesting. We don't have one (although CZ might come close in spirit). Engineering/tech themed houses have achieved considerable success and notoriety at other schools. MIT has ΤΕΦ. Caltech has Blacker House. Brown University has Technology House.

An engineering themed house would provide an environment (a great place) in which the housemates would collaborate on their assorted crazy projects. This could even be a resource for the USCA, as such a house could be a development center for useful co-op technologies, such as solar energy, or the planned co-op to co-op wireless network. The main resource at the house would of course be the collaborative powers of the residents, but I am sure the ensuing accumulation of equipment (tools, components) would also be very handy. Combining the house with an arts theme could have particularly interesting results. A major goal is to foster engineering culture.

I think that it would be great to have such a house in Berkeley, and as part of the USCA in particular, and perhaps the situation with Chateau is a good opportunity to begin talking about this idea, even if it's not implemented at Chateau. (As I said, I think Chateau itself is an important place that needs to preserved, and not razed from the face of this city, as the neighbors would have it.)

P.S. Check out this awesome directory of bay-area cooperative housing. PS2. On another note, why don't we have any kind of inter-coop electronic bulletin board / mailing list, so that we can correspond easily with the coopers at schools nearby (UCSC) or far away (UMich co-ops)?

Psst! Party at Oscar Wilde tomorrow!

Comments

[janviere.livejournal.com]

Wrong side of campus. Ridge and Cloyne are as close to engineering theme houses as you're going to get. Now, the Cloyne nerd spirit is pretty cool, but they already have a house, and it's 30 seconds from where they need to be.

The other problem with Berkeley is that there is no engineering spirit. Most of the cool and creative engineers (you excepted, of course) to go real schools, like MIT and Caltech. An engineer house here would look like Cloyne and be as interesting as Foothill.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Wrong side of campus.

That's true, but (1) such a house wouldn't actually have to be at Chateau, and (2) the location could be leveraged as an advantage. A southside location could act as a filter to increase the fraction of True Believers versus those who just want cheap housing near Soda. Moreoever, it might encourage a greater diversity. I would hate to live in a house that was entirely CS people. I was thinking of a good mix of CS, EE, Physics, Mech E, ... , Art Practice, etc. Chateau is conveniently located to Wurster Hall, and Architects are awesome.

I wasn't really aware of the Cloyne "Nerd Spirit." The other day I did vow to return to Berkeley for the sole purpose of living in CZ.

The other problem with Berkeley is that there is no engineering spirit.

Well.. maybe, just maybe, we can change that.

[janviere.livejournal.com]

Wait, I thought you were proposing a solution to the Chateau woes. I don't think any of the northside houses would appreciate being officially taken over for such a cause. I figured you meant lots of techie people, but the point still stands: Evans, Leconte, Hearst Mining, Bechtel, whatever, are all much closer to northside, and engineers are the most likely to want to be able to roll out of bed 5 minutes before class and be there on time.

I know one architect in the co-ops and he's moving to a Northside apartment.

As for the Cloyne Nerd Crew, I think that's along the lines of what you're looking for. There seem to be a lot of math/physics people in the long-term CZ crowd, too. But I think you might have a hard time convincing them that they really want to give up the possibility of house-cest with non-geekhouse-type residents.

[easwaran.livejournal.com]

Mathematicians don't build cool stuff but artists do.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

As far as actually having cool stuff built, I think that, in general, artist-types would be far more helpful than mathematicians. It's pretty much the job description of an artist to have a vision for some abstract thing and then bring it to reality via the materials at hand and an exercise of creativity. Mathematics, per se, is the formulation and proving of theorems. This is not to say that mathematicians aren't helpful — witness the mathematical complexity of the spiral fresnel surface (http://splorg.org/people/tobin/projects/spiralfresnel/index.xml), for instance, or in a geodesic dome. As for "building cool things that work" — that's the job description of an Engineer.

Membership in a build-cool-stuff themed house wouldn't actually be restricted to any particular major, and I'm sure we'd attract some mathematicians — but probably the subset who have a flare for craft and application. The top-floor Soda sculptures are the work of such types, and the Wurster Hall people are always creating nifty things. You don't see so much of this in Evans, though.

I think that adherence to one particular label is doomed to fail, since the creative types I'd like to attract rarely fit under any one such term ("engineer" "artist" "mathematician" etc). One of my colleagues in the Smoot lab was John Jacobsen (http://www.johnj.com/) — he's a particle physicist three days a week and a professional artist the rest. Escher insisted that he was a draftsman.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Of course math requires imagination and creativity. But it does not usually involve building things.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

I have been pretty impressed with the culture of the CSUA (http://csua.berkeley.edu/).

[blackrock.livejournal.com]

Except I go to Caltech, am a member of Blacker, and all the engineers are in other houses. We're full of physicists who like to think they're engineers, I guess, because we do have the reputation of building cool stuff.

[nibot.livejournal.com]

We're full of physicists who like to think they're engineers, I guess, because we do have the reputation of building cool stuff.

I don't care what you call yourselves, as long as you build cool stuff. Whether I call myself a physicist or an engineer is an entirely stochastic process anyway.

I don't know how Blacker is today. I only know them from legend.

Good but...

[(Anonymous)]

Any USCA nerd house would have to be on northside to be close to Soda and Cory Hall. Most nerds would probably not appreciate being so close to People's Park either.
I lived in Cloyne for 4 years and was part of the "nerd crue" and I have to say that Cloyne and Ridge are as close to a nerd house as the USCA gets.

Re: Good but...

[nibot.livejournal.com]

Most nerds would probably not appreciate being so close to People's Park either.

If they're fazed by People's Park, then maybe we don't want them anyway. (-:

I lived in Cloyne for 4 years and was part of the "nerd crue" and I have to say that Cloyne and Ridge are as close to a nerd house as the USCA gets.

I think there's a difference between a hacker/engr house and a "nerd" house, but of course these labels are always problematic. Why do you call Cloyne and Ridge "nerd houses"? What did they/you do?

Dumb idea.

[channel6.livejournal.com]

I've been to Riddick, Blacker, Ricketts, those places are total anti-social festerpits. Total sociopathic breeding grounds. It's bad enough "hackers" think they're better than everyone and use complexity to hide their laziness at designing decent computer interfaces. If you isolate engineers away from (face it) their CLIENTELLE, you're going to get issues like unusability of products, sociopathy, which could have disastrous results (http://www.livejournal.com/users/zestyping/31555.html#cutid3). I say the opposite infact should be true; you should FORCE engineers to realise that although engineering is important, it's not the only way to make bling bling in the world, and thus they really should learn to design for a !engineer clientelle.

Also, you're on the wrong side of campus to snarf free wavelan from Soda. And the chateau pool is disgusting. Ridge is better and has hotter chicks (tm). Kidd hall is your best chance, if you move in 9 ppl into kidd hall you have majority bloc.

Re: Dumb idea.

[channel6.livejournal.com]

let me define anti-social festerpit:

students at blacker were taking apart xsitor radios to build stun guns to shock / possibly kill the cats around the southhouses because they thought "huh huh that's cool and geeky to build".

Re: Dumb idea.

[blackrock.livejournal.com]

...and then there are those of us who have cats who try to protect the animal life from stupid people. Most of the time, student activities tend to involve burning things and/or dropping things off the roof, not killing animals. I've lived here for two years and haven't seen any of this allegedly antisocial stuff. Potentially dangerous, maybe, but not outright cruel. Maybe it's changed.

Re: Dumb idea.

[channel6.livejournal.com]

I saw it in 1989/1990 during the summer term, where some teckers were staying in their houses and working on stuff and were generally bored. Things probably have gotten better (more kinder and gentler I believe was the promise for that year).

They still flooding Ruddock Courtyard for Intermural?

Re: Dumb idea.

[blackrock.livejournal.com]

As far as I know Ruddock hasn't flooded their courtyard in the last few years. (They did turn a room into a hottub though.) Blacker and Ricketts tend to be the ones who flood.

[erinmack.livejournal.com]

I've thought of living in the co-ops (F & I probably won't live together if/when I go to Berkeley), but I'm so anal about clutter and cleanliness that I don't think there's a good one for me -- I've heard that Loth, the veg co-op, is among the filthiest in the system.

it's all about

[channel6.livejournal.com]

The Lothlorien Food Orgy.

Geek Haus would be great

[(Anonymous)]

This is a really cool idea. As a former coop resident and Berkeley alum, I would love to see something like this happen because it's the sort of house I would want to live in. The cool thing about geeks is that, given a bunch of them and the right combination of personalities, they begin to create at a phenomenal rate. Sure, some of the things built will be silly or inane, e.g. transistor radio cat stun guns, but some of the things will be the seeds of amazing technologies we all take for granted, e.g. the GIMP or Google.

This raises two questions for me. First, how do we achieve the necessary critical mass of geekdom? This is of particular concern given the issue that some expressed with the distance between Chateau and the campus engineering buildings. Second, how can we optimize the house social structure to encourage creative geekery? Bi-weekly or monthly hack sessions perhaps?

Regardless, if you build it, they will come. Though in the case of a geek haus, I think it's more like, if they come, they will build!

(Dan)
dans@csua.berkeley.edu

Re: Geek Haus would be great

[nibot.livejournal.com]

First, how do we achieve the necessary critical mass of geekdom?

I'm not entirely sure — but I do think it's a sort of "if you build it, they will come" situation (like you say). Maybe start with a core group of people with some particular project in mind, stock the place with a few machine tools.

It has been done before — somehow a core group of true believers was found for Lothlorian and for Wilde, for instance. Actually, does anyone know the story of how the USCA theme houses were started?

[cheeseparade.livejournal.com]

hmm i seem to have stumbled upon this post after a series of haphazard clicks on the berkeley wiki...

and i think a geek/nerd/hacker/whatever-you-want-to-call-it house is a great idea. and i'm only a cogsci major. i would live there because i think that stuff is cool, i just dont want to major in it. i would also appreciate having friends who know more than i do about computers because it will make me smarter, and having lots of fun gadgets laying around to play with. however, it must strive to remain inclusive of the lesser nerds (e.g. those of us not in EECS and/or strictly the "hard sciences"), because i get intimidated by being the only relatively "fuzzy" person in a highly "techie" environment. in conclusion, i think you are way cool, and the wiki just gets better and more amusing with time.