There are quite a few rotating buildings in the world,
houses for people who want their view to follow the sun.
Maybe they're built as an architect's dream house,
maybe as an engineering challenge,
or sometimes to give the best angles for solar power.
Over the years, I have asked to film in a few of those houses,
but I've always been turned down.
They're private homes. But this one,
near San Diego, California, is now on sale.
The real estate agent got in touch
and asked if I wanted to have a look around.
To be clear, this is not an advert.
They're not paying me.
But I just wasn't going to turn this down.
Because there are two things I want to find out.
First of all, how on earth does the plumbing work?
And second, if this is someone's dream house,
and it is,
then why are they selling it?
- My wife and I decided we're going to build a house.
Just so happened, this lot went on the market that same day.
We happened to see the sign,
we bought it.
I'm trying to figure out what to build.
I said, you know, why not a round house?
That way, more rooms will have more view.
And my wife said, fine.
Then I thought, some rooms still have to look at the mountain.
So I said, why don't we rotate it?
To my surprise, she said, fine!
And I thought, crap, I've got to figure out how to do that!
So I started to figure out how to actually build
something that would rotate, so every room would have every view.
- Yes, of course I asked if I could flip the switch and control the rotation.
- Go up to a thousand.
Good.
That's it.
- It's very strange to push a button and then have the world
start to rotate around you. - That's right!
- That's lovely.
- My wife and I started construction in 2000.
It took a good two years to get to the point
where we had a structure.
We did hire some people and had them working here,
and I found that they would go home at four o'clock
and I would be here 'til seven fixing what they had done,
because they're used to building square and this was round.
The fella at San Diego County would go over our plans
and he says, "I just want to tell you,
"you're building something that's way stronger than it needs to be.
"No way you can rotate that much mass and and have it work."
So I said, "do you care if it rotates?"
He says, "hell, I don't care if it rotates".
And I said, "well then can we just agree to disagree
"and you let me go ahead and build the damn thing?"
And he said "all right".
In doing all the calculations,
I came up with needing a five-horsepower motor,
so I put in a five-horsepower motor.
Have you ever driven your car in fifth gear at 25mph?
It goes like that, and that's how the house was moving.
Cut it down to a one-and-a-half horsepower motor.
It goes through a 25:1 reduction transmission,
a 71:1 torque hub that drives the two 16-inch diameter wheels.
We can turn the house in 45 minutes.
You can go to bed to the sunset,
and wake up to the sunrise in the same bed.
You have guests over, during dinner, we'll turn the house so that
everybody at the dinner table gets to see the sunset.
- In a lot of rotating buildings, it's only part of the floor that rotates.
the things that require plumbing, like the kitchen and bathroom,
don't move at all.
But here, the sinks and toilets and electrical sockets
all rotate as part of the house,
and all the explanations I can find seem to hand-wave the details.
They just say that there's a central non-rotating core
that handles the pipes.
For electricity, there are off-the-shelf components
that can deal with rotation.
- There's a thing called a slip ring.
Which is a very standard piece of equipment.
Just like a merry-go-round.
A merry-go-round goes around and around and around,
and it doesn't have to go backwards.
Same thing here. It happens to be a fancy one,
16 brushes that go around a copper piece about that big,
and they ride on the copper and that is your connection.
- For telephone and internet, there's also an off-the-shelf component.
A mercury slip ring, a sealed connector with a small pool of mercury,
conductive liquid metal, in the center.
Both sides can rotate.
They just stay connected to the liquid.
But that's not the difficult part.
I can understand having one connection going through the middle,
for water or wastewater or gas.
They can just sit on a central pipe and swivel.
But how can you have all three going through the same central hub?
The topology doesn't work. They can't all occupy the exact center.
But if they're offset, then as the house rotates,
surely the lengths of the pipes and cables has to change?
Or if there's slack, surely they'll get twisted.
Turns out Al has a very clever solution to that.
- Obviously you don't want to mix
the gas, the gray water, the sewer, the drinking water.
So I designed a slip ring for those services.
Big piece of steel, about that big around.
This is fixed. We grooved it,
it's about a 3" by 3" groove all the way around.
Top groove is sewer. The next groove is gray water.
The next groove is drinking water. The bottom groove is gas.
And there are holes drilled through this from the sewer,
from the gray water and so forth,
They're all separate holes that come out the bottom.
Then there's a piece that comes down the outside.
This piece rotates with the house.
You have a sewer line that comes down and connects to the outer piece,
and then you have gray water, then you have drinking water,
then you have gas.
There are seals inbetween each of these grooves.
They're all alarmed.
There's a seal, a sensor ring, and a seal.
A seal, a sensor ring, and a seal,
so forth for all of them.
You would have to have two seals and two sensors fail
before you had any mixture of fluids
The seals are good for 75 years,
so I don't think we're gonna have a problem!
- Yes, I had to commission some graphics to explain this.
It's really clever and I did not understand it
until Al explained it to me.
It's like four intersecting funnels.
- The total maintenance, once a year, is to lube the bearings.
We have a young man who has done it several times.
It's done in an hour.
- Which brings me to the other big question I had.
After designing and constructing this place,
after 20 years of living here,
why sell it?
= I've had 18 heart procedures.
My wife is in perfect health.
The odds of me outliving her are zero.
She was born and raised in Coronado.
We're moving back to Coronado.
Because this is a complex house, even though I think it's simple!
For her to try and teach somebody else how to run everything and do everything
would be difficult if something happened to me.
So we're just kind of jumping ahead.
And Coronado's a pretty nice place to go.
- Will this place sell quickly?
I don't know. I'm not a real estate agent,
but I certainly hope that there'll be people
who want to live somewhere with this view
in a home that's this different.