8 Minutes, 20 Seconds Book Launch

Join authors Eunjeong Seong and Michael Bell to discuss their recently published book 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds.

The conversation, moderated by Alicia Imperiale, explores renewable solar energy, post-scarcity housing, advanced manufacturing, and housing as an “energy asset” shaping future settlement and infrastructure.

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8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing after Banking, Encrypting the Sun

By: Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong

The book envisions a near-future economy and landscape for housing shaped by the converging forces of the climate crisis and artificial intelligence—conditions that threaten to erase the forms of labor that once sustained access to housing and, more broadly, patterns of human settlement. In this imagined world, inexhaustible solar energy becomes a universal basic income for habitation, distributed through advances in manufactured housing. Eunjeong Seong and Michael Bell propose a future in which the house itself is reimagined as an active instrument—one that captures and redistributes the sun’s power as the foundation of a new social and spatial order.

Energy generated by nuclear fusion in the Sun reaches the surface of the Earth in 8 minutes and 20 seconds. 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds imagines an architecture based on renewable energy, caching forms of energy that are essentially inexhaustible, persistent, and virtually non-denumerable in quantity. It anticipates a post-scarcity era reorganized by a new form of housing that serves as an arbiter of post-sustainability human settlements. Proposing a form of housing achievable only through advanced manufacturing, we ask: “what if what was a housing asset becomes a new form of energy asset whose downstream byproduct was shelter?”

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Publisher: ACTAR, Barcelona and New York, 2025

Editor: Ramon Prat

Text Editor: Stephen Zacks

Design: Ramon Prat and Eunjeong Seong / Michael Bell

Includes design projects by Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong with contributions by Michael Pilliod, (formerly, Tesla and Apple materials science) / Wills Sweney (formerly, Tesla, supply chain and manufacturing) / Zak Kostura, ARUP / Jesse Keenan, climate and real estate and Rosanne Haggerty, Community Solutions.

This event is open to the public.