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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.
The site says -
At a purchase price of just $35,000 this is a genuine short-term housing option that could be used in a variety of applications.
So, is that US $35,000 or AU $35,000?
If it's the latter, it's really quite cheap and could be helpful to build cheap, sustainable housing. Hell, I'm an out-door buff and I'd love to buy one of these that can be reused when I go on long treks and climbs.
Sure as hell beats living in a tent for weeks on end.
I can see folks like archaelogists loving this sort of thing - they go on long digs where they'd really need to set shop, and nothing would come close to something like this. Best of all, this provides for an excellent place for storing artifacts and the like and in setting shop.
However, I think that for Joe Regular to buy it, it would perhaps need to be a *little* cheaper - US $5,000 or so.
People have been living in card board boxes forever.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
*cough* that's better. Now, the fact is that down the in (British) West Country, we've been building sustainable housing for years. here's a straw house, for example - alas it fell foul of the planning regs and the local council are insisting it be demolished; but it'll be back up in a day or two.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
and possibly cheaper too...
adobe, a house made out of soil and clay...
(not the software company)
One of the companies I work for built a similar system recently.
We typically build patio sunrooms out of plywood laminate and foam-core insulation (Styrofoam in the middle), but as it turns out, the material also can be used to provide extremely inexpensive housing for Mexicans whose houses were destroyed in an intense storm.
So yes, American corporations are behind such technology. It's very profitable.
Could such a product be used in the united states? No, you're probably correct, such a product would likely not pass building code. It's hard enough to get the patio rooms to pass code in most of Florida, but to prove safety in actually living in the thing would prove impossible.
This would be more appropriate for building a geodesic dome..
..
Using the inherent strength of the dome to compensate for the fact you are using paper
Could still use the same sort of techniques, and be 'portable'.... Plus you get more 'space' for the same amount of material.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It turns out that Polystyrene (aka styrofoam) is also a viable and cost-effective building material, currently being planned for deployment in Afghanistan by the Federation of American Scientists. According to this blog entry, "the New Harmony House (in New Harmony, Indiana) was built using this material as a demonstration, with impressive results (including the house using 50-70 percent less energy than a conventionally-constructed home)."
Who cares about sledgehammers and pouring water on the outside. Here's some of the things I'd like demonstrated:
1 - Humidity resistance. Place the thing in humid conditions for a few years and let's see if there is any structural weakening or fungal growth. Normal cardboard will rot and absorb water from the air (making it heavier and weakening it structurally) very quickly.
2 - Flood damage. What happens if the thing goes under 1 foot of water. A normal house needs major interior repairs, but remains structurally sound.
3 - Insulation. Done right, cardboard is a decent insulator, and they can always put in extra, but for a house with a 20 year design life, I have a feeling that decent insulation has been omitted. The house also has a very low thermal mass.
4 - Paper Acid. Unless they're using acid-free paper to make the cardboard, the acid will eat and weaken the structure. Judging from how long books printed on paper with acid last, I'd say 20 years should leave the structure weak enough to be condemned. Of course, if they're using hemp cardboard, then they're in the clear (but it might get them into legal trouble).
5 - Wiring. Inverters don't grow on trees and using 12V wiring means much thicker wires will be needed. To provide 12kW of capacity (typical of a modern built house), the wires would have to sustain 1,000 A or current, which would entail some pretty fat wiring as well as precautions to prevent the self-impedence (which is substantial at 1000 amperes) from generating dangerous sparks. You'll also need an inverter for each of your appliances (unless you can find custom built 12V DC ones), and I just cringe at how expensive an inverter for central air conditioning is. Also, if you want to connect to the grid, you'll need a rectifier also capable of handling heavy loads. I really do wonder what they were thinking of using 12V. 12V is good for a boat or a car, but its got no place in a house.
6 - Hurricane and tornado resistance. If you live in hurricane country, I sure hope its tied down well, because that thing looks like it'll blow away being so light and having no foundation. Come to think of it, it probably acts a lot like a mobile home in a hurricane.
7 - Maintenance costs. I would disagree with their rosy outlook. If I have the normal amenities (air conditioning, heat, a computer, TV, telephone, cable), I'll be paying more per month for this house than a well built steel, concrete, or wooden house. High heating and cooling bills because of poor insulation. Unsightly wires because there's no place to hide them. Having to depreciate the thing over 20 years instead of the 100+ that a well built house will last. Hard to resell house, unless these things become very popular, so you'll take a big hit in moving unless you lug the piece of junk with you. If I were to buy a property with such cheap construction, it would be to get to the land, and I wouldn't pay a cent more than the land is worth minus demolition costs.
In Pigeon Cove, near Rockport, Massachusetts starting in 1922, a mechanical engineer named Elis F. Stenman built a house out of tightly rolled, varnished newspaper. He also built furniture for the house including tables, chairs, cabinets, bookcases, a piano, and a grandfather clock.
The front of the grandfather clock incorporates newspapers from the capital cities of each of the (then) forty-eight states, all oriented so that the name of the paper and city neatly face forward and are readable, although the varnish has gotten quite dark with age.
The house survives today. It is just off by itself in on a little nondescript road. There is relatively little publicity. No visitor's area or parking lot, you just park on the street.
I don't think I would travel a great distance to see it, but if I were in the Cape Ann area I certainly would take a look at it. Well worth half-an-hour of anyone's time. You are aware of being in the presence of someone very original who by gosh knew what he wanted to do and did it.
More here and here.
(Oh, and I think the Forest Products Laboratory of Madison, Wisconsin also has or had a demonstration house built out of some kind of cardboard-like material).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Wasn't the resolution to this disconnect the "Projects"
Basically, yes. Believing that people really just need a door to lock and place to sleep lead to the rational (but wrong) conclusion that projects would be an efficient solution.
People need a roof over their heads, but even the lockable door is questionable: most people in my NYC apartment don't lock their doors.
Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs have both written about what makes a successful residence, and monolithic blocks of cookie-cutter apartments isn't it. You need a graduation of public to private areas, places for people to gather both as individuals and groups, 24-hour activity in some places, a mix of commericial and residential at all levels, inviting outdoor areas, good public transit, etc.
It's virtual impossible to "fix" a giant low-income apartment building, but here are a few things you could do:
1) Convert 1 apartment per floor into a convenience store. Have long hours, and staff it as much as possible with people from the building. You want people to meet their neighbors, and small stores are a good way to do it. An active store = more foot traffic = less crime.
2) Add day-care centers (1 per 10 floors or so.) A mother with a child can't get a job unless there is someplace to leave her kid now and then.
3) Add a small health clinic. This is cheaper than the hospital's ER.
4) Break up the homogeneity: make a few two-storey rooms. Make these micro-community centers that show movies, host lectures, religious services, birthday parties, etc.
There are hundred more things you could do, but all are concerned with moving from a concrete box full of little locked apartments to a community where people know each other.
As environmentally friendly and frankly quite cool as this seems, the current price of $35,000 AUS (~$27,000 USD) seems a little steep for the uses (temporary housing, travel home) they're marketing it for. For that price in the US, you can get a decent trailer or RV that doesn't need to be disassembled to transport and is less likely to get water seepage and mildew when it rains...
If you want true affordable environmentally-sound housing for the poor, the best bet is to go with something like architect Nader Khalili's Superadobe shelter designs. The shelters are made with sandbags reinforced with wire and filled with earth from the site. Not only do these not require costly deliveries of wood and cement products, they can be assembled in a matter of hours and can withstand wind, rain, hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. They also have a cool "hobbit-hole" type of feel...
Yeah, the Tokyo land value/comparison is accurate, or was. The 'kicker' though, was all the billions and billions in loans that the biggest banks in Japan made, using borrowers' real estate 'value' as collateral.
When the real estate market collapsed (so to speak), the banks hit the tank. They still haven't come fully to terms with the non-performing debt, 15+ years after the fact.
A lot of the folks borrowed money to buy more real estate in Japan, Hawaii and the continental US, driving prices higher in those markets also, but those markets held steady. Yet when the Japanese market tanked, borrowers had no choice but to sell freshly-bought and/or developed property in the US, under 'duress'. (to satisfy a banking version of a 'margin call' when the loan/collateral ratio had become too skewed). When the 'now-nearly-worthless' is forcing sales, the 'sales' are of worthy items, but the mass sale of those items leads to their collective prices dropping, like dominoes. That's a classic 'crash'.
A friend picked up a hotel on Maui, for 12 million cash, that had been built one year previously... with 185 million in 'borrowed' cash... ouch. If you see a Japanese dude in one of these cardboard boxes, who knows, it might be a former real estate 'Baron'.
In most areas anyone can do the work, so long as it passes inspection afterward. But in some states it is illegal for anyone not licensed to do the work at all.
As you imply, it's not the building codes that are at fault; it's the licensing and permits (which I rant about in another post).
What the parent was really talking about was not building codes, but rather CC&Rs (aka covenants). These have nothing to do with building codes, and everything to do with "maintaining property values". Except that last is being grossly overapplied, often in ways that don't make any sense.
One example was the requirement in some California communities that all roofs be cedar-shake, so they'd all look nice the same way. But cedar is a high-oil wood, and even with fire-retardant, it's like storing gasoline on your roof -- as the big Oakland fire finally demonstrated in terms that even CC&R enforcement fanatics could understand. (Over 900 houses burned, mainly due to the susceptibility of cedar shake roofs to ignition by flying embers.) Suddenly they were no longer so interested in forcing people with fireproof tile roofs to replace them with cedar shakes.
Another example: I once looked at buying some acreage out in the middle of nowhere. It was at the very end of the road, right next to the oil lease (hardly a thing of beauty), and not visible from any other buildable property. Nonetheless, the owner-before-last (who was an architect and general contractor) had put a shitload of CC&Rs on it, such as minimum house size (rather too large for the shape of the lot), type of fencing allowed, and get this, even the colour you could paint your mailbox!! Needless to say, I didn't buy the place.
In a world that actually gave a shit about affordable housing, this isolated acreage would have allowed inexpensive housing such as a trailer, or a house built of cardboard, straw, bottles, or whatever. In California, guaranteeing contractor profits trumps affordability and even common sense.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
As a geek I find this house intriguing, as the possibilities for larger square footage are possible the cheaper the building material gets. Right now chances are that you live in a domicile extremely similar to this type of house. Wood and stucco houses are very common here in Las Vegas, and cardboard is, i am guessing, cheaper to produce and assemble than typical wood framed houses. I really like this idea, and think it could be combined with another cheap building material Shotcrete, a sprayable concrete, to make a concrete skin around the building for a more permanent structure.
Tyler: You don't know where ive been, Lou. YOU DONT KNOW WHERE IVE BEEN!!
The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has some interesting designs using waterproofed paper tubes - they are really beautiful. See Paper Architecture, A Case Study: Cardboard Shelters, Kobe Earthquake January 1995, Time's Innovators article on him, and a Google Images search of his work