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.

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?”

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.

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Eunjeong Seong is the co-author of 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking, Encrypting the Sun (Actar, Barcelona / New York, 2025). A registered architect in New York, she is the co-founder of Bell-Seong Architecture and Visible Weather, a research and design collaboration focusing on advanced manufacturing, materials, energy, engineering, and housing finance/economics. Bell-Seong have worked with engineering teams at Tesla, Arup, OldCastle Glass and Lafarge and with Community Solutions.

Seong is Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture, CCE at Pratt Institute School of Architecture. Seong’s architectural and urban design work has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and her writing and design have been published by Architectural Design (AD), Technology, Architecture, Design (TAD), and Log. Seong holds a Master of Architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Michael Bell is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. Bell’s architectural design has been commissioned and exhibited by The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Venice Biennale; the Architectural League of New York; and the University Art Museum, Berkeley. Architectural design by Bell is included in the Permanent Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His Gefter Press / Binocular House is included in Kenneth Frampton’s American Masterwork Houses of the 20th and 21st Century. His books include: 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking, Encrypting the Sun; Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Glass; 16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House; Michael Bell: Space Replaces Us: Essays and Projects on the City; and Slow Space.

Bell is the founding Chair of the Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials, a multi-year research program hosted at GSAPP in coordination with Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design (ILEK) at the University of Stuttgart. He has taught at Berkeley, Rice, Harvard, Michigan, Cornell and been a visiting professor at Stanford University Center for Design Research, Mechanical Engineering, and was a Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard.

Alicia Imperiale, Ph.D., is assistant dean and teaches history and theory of architecture at Pratt Institute School of Architecture, with previous positions at Yale, Barnard, Cornell, and the University of Pisa. Her scholarship explores the impact of technology on art, architecture, and fabrication, with a particular focus on housing and urbanism in postwar Italy. She is the author of New Flatness: Surface Tension in Digital Architecture, Alternate Organics: the aesthetics of experimentation in art, technology & architecture in postwar Italy, and is completing Machine Consequences: the eccentricities of output. Her essays appear in Log, where she also co-guest edited an issue, Perché Italia?. She is a Graham Foundation grantee and former fellow at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities.

The Pratt Undergraduate Architecture program is grounded in a pedagogy that reflects the legacy of socially engaged, justice-driven, and environmentally responsible practice, that’s been the bedrock of the school for decades. Our curriculum prepares graduates to be critical thinkers, responsible designers, and dutiful custodians of the communities they represent, the environments they inhabit, and the profession they are committed to disrupting.

Head Hi is an organization dedicated to art, architecture and design specializing in publications and cultural programming with an espresso bar located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn by the Navy Yard. We feature a curated selection of publications from around the globe. Working with local and international artists, designers, publishers, community members and organizations in various fields, Head Hi is a space for exploration and interaction that hosts talks, book launches, art shows, music performances and other events.