Build a House Out of Recycled Cardboard

Uosdwis writes "Well for a better environmental option to a new house that is affordable, "low cost". Australia architects Stutchbury and Pape have created a house out of recycled cardboard, Velcro, nylon wing nuts and tape. Also , most of the house is recyclable too. It can be built in six hours by two people and can be transportable in a light commercial vehicle. Viva homeownership!" We had a story a few years about a school built out of cardboard.

Comments

Old hat.

[Fallen Andy]

Yes, you can make houses out of almost anything.
Thomas Edison was playing with this idea almost 100 years ago (with concrete prefabricated house shells). The bad news is that a shed is still a shed. Unless you have damp course (to stop water from the soil) you will have serious problems with our friends the fungi. After WWII, in the UK, there was an attempt to rebuild infrastructure using "prefab" houses (mostly asbestos etc). Took a long time to get everyone out of what was supposed to be temporary housing even there in UK. Nice in theory, ugly in practice. Might be fun here in the med where its drier though...

Now, which island do i want my cardboard house on.
(2000+ to choose from)?

Cheers,
Andy Allen
Athens Greece

Politics of poverty

[poptones]

This is no different than the skillion other "homes for poor people" sales pitches. So what? We already have habitat for humanity and they're in just about every community in the US. Fact is this is all about nothing but selling shit and putting more people in debt, because people in debt are going to be "more responsible" and feed the machine.

You want to provide people a chance at home ownership, get rid of the bullshit local "building codes" that exist for no other reason than to keep contractors and hardware stores in business. There are homes all over Euroupe, Asia, and the Mideast that have stood for hundreds of years and are made of nothing more than mud. Cob homes, in some parts of the world, are now becoming "fashionable" again and sought by well-to-do who want something with quality and character - attributes long lost to modern construction. But because building a cob home doesn't financially benefit anyone but the nearest dirt farm and an army of unskilled laborers, it's disallowed in just about any non-rural area in the US.

At the other end of the affordable/quality spectrum, you can buy a used trailer home in ths country for just a couple thousand dollars - but most local ordinances won't allow people to put these low cost homes on their own fucking property.

You want to afford poor people the opportunity to own their own homes, give them the freedom to do with their own property as they see fit. Set appropriate national MIMIMUM standards for sanitation and structural integrity and set barriers to local communities mandating higher, purely politically motivated, standards.

Re:Politics of poverty

[wass]

You want to provide people a chance at home ownership, get rid of the bullshit local "building codes" that exist for no other reason than to keep contractors and hardware stores in business.

You seem to be a really paranoid person, do you actually really believe this in your conspiracy-theory mindset? Okay, sure building codes can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, but they are essential other times.It's the attitude like yours that encourages demolishing antique colonial-era houses to put up cookie-cutter rowhomes with vinyl siding. It's the attitude like yours that drives non-Americans to claim we have no culture.

Have you ever been to Santa Fe or Laos, in New Mexico? These cities are really cool because most houses are built of adobe. I'm not sure if city law requires this (it probably does), but it's really neat to walk around there and feel it. If someone dumped a few trailer homes in the middle if the adobe houses, it would ruin the character of the city. Do you think restrictions to preserve a city's character are there to keep the adobe hardware stores in business?

Another example is Savannah, Georgia. That city center is one of the most beautiful I've seen. It's one of the first planned cities in the USA, and there are lots of parks amidst all the ante-bellum character mansions. I don't know what kind of building codes exist there, but I do know that some hotel chains (I forget which) built hotels in the city center. These hotels were built very cheaply and stand our like a sore thumb against the rest of the city center. Again, do you think they should be able to build what they want, create eye-sores, destroy heritage and character, just to save a few bucks?

Okay, another example now comes from the neighborhood in Baltimore where my girlfriend and I just bought our house. This area is designated 'historic' by the city and state, and this is to preserve the historic character and charm of the neighborhood. (Our house is in the cheapest little corner of the entire neighborhood, most of the other houses there are huge mansions).

When you drive around this area, the houses are really pretty and quaint, and we want to preserve this character for the future. This means any major construction projects or paintings have to meet the approval of the architectural board. if we didn't do this, the character would be lost. Already some cheap-ass home 'flippers' (ie, they buy a house, do the cheapest shoddy renovations they can, and sell it for double the price later) tried to get away with very cheap non-characteristic 'repairs'. Luckily, most of their attempts failed. Note that this is only the outside appearance of the house. You are free to do what you want inside.

If you want to put up a trailer home to save costs, then you shouldn't be living in this neighborhood but in the thousands of other places that such a home would be allowed.

You might not be able to comprehend this, but there's actually character and culture here in the states, some of which is architectural. And it's not a conspiracy to want to preserve the living history.

My house is 50 years old

[purduephotog]

Well, 54 now. But I'm not counting (save for the $15K I've put into it- or in that case, not saved).

I live in the snow region which, as of last year, had up to 3 foot deep snow ON MY ROOF. That the house occupies approximately 800 sq foot on the ground, thats about 3000 cubic feet of snow sitting above my head.

No offense to the posters of this article, but... That house is absolutely worthless in my region. But I'm sure that won't stop people from going on and on about how the US is a wasteful society and should model themselves after this... blah blah blah.

Parent is right. A house is a permanent structure and stays that way save for natural disaster, fire, or intentional destruction.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be wandering up onto the roof with another 400 lbs of salt soon- in preparation of the winter.