GLOBAL INTEREST AND APPLICATIONS

Since production began on the Ecocapsule this year, Nice Architects has been flooded with questions — 15,000 emails a day. They’ve grown their Facebook followers from 200 to 25,000 and won the hearts of Hollywood movie stars such as Susan Sarandon. Peter Arpin, host of U.S. radio show ReNewable Now, plans to hoist an Ecocapsule atop a campus building at Rhode Island College (which hosted a seminar on it this past January) and broadcast from it for a month. “We’d hold meetings, do a daily show. I want to test-drive it.”. Uses Ecocapsules can be used for a vacation getaway, artist’s retreat, cottage in the mountains, guest room, or in-law suite. It can be a housing solution for miners, doctors in developing countries, teams at natural disaster sites, and can also be used as a small power plant and water filtration unit. Kudos it’s comfy Nora Sarga, organizer of Vienna’s Pioneers Festival where the Ecocapsule was featured last spring, says it’s roomier than expected. “I sat inside it with three other people. I thought it would be a lot smaller from the inside, but it was spacious and very nicely made. It felt cosy.” Designers have made great use of interior space, Arpin says. “There’s a lot of flexibility. How things disappeared or folded up, and then came back down and became living space, intrigued the architects.” Challenges At 88,000 ($129,400), Sarga thinks the price tag is a bit steep for the consumer market. “There’s still a long way to go before people will be willing to pay so much more for an environmentally friendly solution, even if the investment pays off in the long run.” They need to target their buyers, says Arpin. “I’m not sure they’ve defined their brand and marketing well enough. I wasn’t sure if the market is mostly recreational. I could see a lot of applications for college campuses in emergencies, in military applications.”

The future

“It’s like NASA giving birth to so many different industries, changes and improvements,” says Arpin. “They’ve designed a lot of efficiency around water, kilowatt production, powering modern conveniences and we can apply a lot of that to our space. If they get it into mass production and get the price down I think they have a home run. Georgie Binks

At 88,000 ($129,400), the price tag is a bit steep, which means consumers may be reluctant to pay for the high-tech abode even if it’s environment-friendly