Space-Age Houses

An anonymous reader writes "The dream of building the Jetson's Skypad Apartment may come to true because technology designed for space could become the basis of the new German Antarctic station. The same ultra-light composites that ESA uses onboard its spacecraft for antennas and solar panels, will be used to make a self-supporting lightweight shell-like structure able to withstand severe earthquakes. This approach is in sharp contrast to many contemporary design solutions that use ever more steel and concrete..."

Comments

Sounds perfect for Florida...

[BerntB]

Should be perfect for Florida and other places with "high winds", using ultra-light composites... :-)

Re:Sounds perfect for Florida...

[Rei]

I agree that they'd probably handle storms quite well. And I agree about the cost issue. However, as for "length of lifespan", you don't get much less durable than wood and concrete. I'd be incredibly surprised if carbon fiber was somehow less durable. Not to mention that this is carbon fiber reinforced *plastic* - plastics have notoriously long lifespans. You'd probably have more of a concern with making the house recyclable so that it need not last forever as it might in normal circumstances.

I think "Looks" is the number one problem. People have been predicting plastic houses for ages; few have touched them. People feel comfortable in a shelter that "breathes", that feels "solid" and "heavy", etc. It just makes you feem more comfortable. Even people who opt for "nontraditional" houses (such as dome houses, like my aunt owns) have them built out of conventional materials. Plastic in general feels a bit too alien to live in; perhaps the carbon fiber reinforced plastic isn't as bad - I don't know.

Not to mention, imagine how much static electricty you'd build up scuffing along the floor/walls... ;)

Re:Sounds perfect for Florida...

[Uggy]

What kind of poor concrete house do you live in that can only withstand a category 3-4? When Georges passed over Puerto Rico in 1998, we didn't lose a single concrete house. Not a one (well except for mud slides in mountainous regions, but there's no helping that).

The winds that hit my house were 140+ and in other areas in a direct path with the eye got even worse. San Juan metro area looked like Hiroshima afterwards. I never realized how many buildings there were with all the trees gone. But we don't have mobile homes where, and very little wood construction. Everything is concrete boxes.

Don't know what sort of building codes you have over there, but I'd pit my house against a category 5. Not like I'd like it, but I think we could handle it.

I guess since we live on an island, there's no place to evacuate to, so we've got build our houses tough.

What's cooler?

[bobhagopian]

"The house is designed to be autonomous. It uses energy-efficient solar power as well as advanced systems for recycling and cleaning water. Another idea, now on the drawing board, is to include a system to remove pathogenic particles in the sub-micron range from the air."

I think this is the coolest part about the house, not the ultra-light composites. Think about never having to pay an utility bill again! Sure, you can do that for just about any house, but one that's built with self-sufficiency in mind is nice.

Re:What's cooler?

[Woody77]

California and PG&E have programs for net-0 houses. Houses which pull from the grid at night/in the winter, and feed back into the grid during the day.

It helps the utilities by lowering their production costs, and it helps the home-owners by decreasing their usage.

The deal is that if you produce as much in a month as you consume, you pay nothing for service. Over the year, this is very unlikely, due to cloudy days and wintertime lack of sun.

Houses with electro-mechanical meters will literally spin backwards and production negates consumption.

The other big benefit is that hot summer days, the days with the most solar power generation capability are also the days of the highest use due to air conditioning loads.

Good idea

[macshune]

These houses totally look cool and the design is awesome, but they use exotic materials that are probably only produced in huge quantities when large institutions have the money to get someone to cook up a batch. Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (more commonly, just Carbon Fiber)? Can't buy that at Home Depot, last time I checked:)

It's a great exercise and it's exciting to the see the future take shape (literally!), but until regular folks can buy up some of this stuff to build homes out of, that's all it's gonna be.

Sounds familiar

[nytes]

Of course, you could also jump into your time machine and visit the house of the future at Disneyland, circa 1957.

It was made so well that the wrecking ball just bounced off of it when they tried to demolish it. They had to bring in a crew with saws.

Re:Deja vu

[shis-ka-bob]

Yup, I was thinking that too. I never really understood why Bucky was so concerned about the weight of a house. For compressive loads, a good cheap concrete seems quite reasonable. If you are talking about an aircraft, then cost is a function of weight. But I don't buy that arguement for a house. You can already drive a mobile home to a lot and install it an afternoon, but mobile homes are not considered 'premium' because of their mobility. Can any Slashdotter explain why lightweight is an asset in a house?

I can understand the 'money as function of weight' argument for an Antartic station that is air lifted, but that is rather exceptional. I'm wanting to understand why Bucky's design never took off (pun intented.)

Re:Deja vu

[BelugaParty]

As the other poster pointed out, Buck was concerned with air dropping, if not the entire structure, then the materials. Also, one of his more wild eyed theories was to have geodesic spheres and domes held up by poles, like veggies on a skewer (or a sky city). He felt such vertical construction would limit the suburban sprawl of the time and still allow each family to have their own 'house'.

His designs never really 'took off' because they required a lot of change in habits and expectations from the consumer eg: his houses included water misters instead of water faucets and showers; and his target market was, in his own mind, people who need very basic shelter and very basic sanitary utilities, so he paid little attention to decor or style of the time. His designs also did not allow for easy expansion or remodeling.

I visited a geodesic dome, built on the same lightweight principles as the dymaxion house, and found it to be very elegant in design. From the living room and kitchen at the bottom floor, there was a beautiful spiral staircase that went to the top (about 4 stories up). The various rooms of the house were vertically staggerred along the walls, with the master bedroom overlooking it all. When you looked down from here, it was like being in cloud city or something. Three things to note though: its not a good place for privacy, it could get noisy, and the temperature at the top was considerably warmer than at the bottom. Still, I like some of his designs, but they are really for the spartan/stoic among us.