Paper walls, office cubicles & other good ideas

The design world is thrilled with an innovation in building materials called the Soft Wall. Created by a Canadian architectural firm, Forsythe + MacAllen Design, the Soft Wall is a flexible, accordian-like, translucent paper structure. It is a real crowd pleaser for covering all the bases:

• environmental - it's 100% recyclable and UV light resistant
• sociological - affordable housing for emergencies and the homeless
• superficial - it's pretty

Another supposed selling point is that the Soft Wall allows for flexibility, and by extension creativity, in defining public and private spaces. Says one of the architects behind the invention, "There's also an abstract sculptural quality to the system, which can transform a home environment into a place of work(...)"

The Soft Wall is great in theory but it's a pipe dream. It operates under the assumption that something cheap, portable and attractive is good enough for the plebs. Sure, the Soft Wall features sound-dampening properties and is relatively opaque but it still doesn't offer the privacy of a solid wall. But maybe victims of natural disasters, the poor and the homeless don't have a right to privacy.

In essence, the Soft Wall is just an environmentally friendly version of the office cubicle or even the trailer house. All place an emphasis on affordable, flexible solutions for herding the masses, with little respect for their privacy or personal breathing space. And I'm sure cubicle dwellers must groan at the architect's idea of making home and work spaces interchangeable.

Overly designed housing solutions that ignore the human element are all too reminiscent of early public housing projects like Regent Park in Toronto. What started in design as a "garden city" of affordable housing became a labyrinth of violence, drugs and poverty.

While it is hard to imagine the Soft Wall driving people to commit crime, I bet the inventors of the Soft Wall have never thought of their award winning invention covered in graffiti, barely muffling the cries of a displaced child, or blocking an overworked pencil-pusher's view of the window.