Remote Controlled Excavation

In Canada, a man has been excavating his basement. This much is not news. The surprising part is his choice of tools: Remote controlled cars. Every Sunday, he sends down the remote controlled toys, sends them to part of the basement, has them dig, dig, put the dirt into a rock-crushing like machine, in miniature, of course, and haul the dirt to a centralized location for later hauling away. There are two reasons for doing it this way. One, he's a remote-control hobbyist, and has a lot of remote controlled things on hand. Two, the area is not conducive to humans most of the time, reaching temperatures as low as -30C every winter. This system of his gives him an ever-enlarging basement that can be used for storage in his business, all without leaving the heated, comfortable part of his house. Of course, the mad engineering way to do this would be to also automate the direction of the machines, which would then perpetually enlarge the basement according to a central computer's plans. The initial setup would be very very difficult, but thereafter, your basement would slowly grow (downward) with time. Humans might need to occasionally build a floor, stairs, and a ramp for the RC vehicles.

Reconfigurable House

If we didn't have plumbing, electricity, or communication devices, houses would be pretty simple. In fact, before those things, houses were. Four walls and a roof to keep the rain out. Floors came later.
So, I remember hearing on some TV show or other, probably either the science channel or the home improvement channel, that someone invented pre-fab walls that contain electric wire and pipes, and can be reasonably reconfigured. Throw together an arbitrary arrangement of walls and at least 99% of the time, the electrical wires, pipes, and telephone cables would all properly connect to each other. Admittedly there are some extremely bad problems if they don't. They did this so that one could just buy a bunch of these walls, slap them up over a cement slab, and call it a house. This saves a whole bunch of time. Especially all that window-fitting, plumbing, electrician time....
Housing is pretty strange worldwide, and even today in 2010, there are people living in straw huts. (Mostly because this is all they can afford.) Charities aim to change this, and with this system, they don't have to ship over a building team. Just a bunch of walls.
In fact, I remember one technology taking it further, and requiring only a bicycle-sized machine, a bag of cement-ish stuff, and the local dirt. This made cinderblock-like bricks by the metric ton, which was soft at first (and thus could be fit with pipes and whatnot), but hardened after a day to granite-like hardness. The machine cost $1000, a bag of the quasi-cement was $20, and together with a $30 shovel could build about three houses. $5000 would build an entire village, and between the 30 or so families that live in it, they could definitely scrape that much together on their own.
Whatever helps us live better, I'm all for it. Also, I have the strangest feeling of deja-vu about this post, like I wrote it before.

Fishtank House

What if we combined a fishtank, and a house? Instead of solid opaque walls, the walls would be made of a clear polyvinyl, the difference between them filled with water? Doorways would likewise be clear, and stepping through one would take you beneath a foot of water. Electrical and phone lines would need a waterproof casing, of course. The water would need circulation via pumps, filtering as to not become algae riddled or toxic, and a combination of fish and plants should be introduced that won't horribly destroy each other. Preferably for lower maintenance, a food-chain should be established to minimize the need to feed the fish.

Actually, let's make this an office instead of a house. Bedrooms, bathrooms, and changing areas would need opaque walls anyway, and doing this for just the hallways, living room, and kitchen doesn't seem worthwhile.

So we'd have this office complex, and the walls and ceiling are not only filled with water, but have fish living in the water. Aquarium plants sway in the undersea currents, and fish idly observe the employees and the boss working hard all day. The tank would be maintainable from the next floor up, which may or may not be the roof depending on the size of the building. Bubble stones would be in strategic areas of the tank's floor, merrily bubbling away.

Would the aquatic tranquility reduce office stress? Would the fact that people can see into the boss's office encourage transparency in other areas in the workplace? Would the fish multiply, and if so, would they be harvested or merely allowed to reach an equilibrium? If they were harvested, would they be company property?

Would this even function as an office at all, or would it just be yet another expensive avant-garde art display?