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Machine-Grown Housing
Eric Harris-Braun writes "Over at Wired, Bruce Sterling has a story about a new way of looking at architecture and building. In fact, computer sculpting of housing is already being done, and non-planned building as an architectural philosphy, is as old as we are, as you can read in The Hand Sculpted House."
This tactic allows him to avoid hidebound European safety regulations when he proposes, for instance, a steel footbridge whose design, sketched using industry-standard CAD software, has been radically distorted by a computer virus. Ask Europeans to cross a buggy footbridge and they'll balk, quail, and consult the 80,000 regulatory pages of the EU's acquis communautaire. Tell them it's art, and they'll flock to it in droves, sit on it, and drink Beaujolais nouveau.
And when it collapses under the weight of that flock...
wtf... this dude is nuts.
*yawn*
Essentially, you build as you need. So if you need a shelf in a certain spot, then you build it there. You can't know everything about how you will use all the space in your house, so the key is to wait until it becomes obvious that something will always be done in a certain way and build to that "spec".
I believe that they did this in UC Berkeley. Instead of building sidewalks, they put some sod on the quad and let the students "create" the trails across the grass. Once the paths were established by thousands of students walking on the grass every day, the school built sidewalks on top of the paths and that is how the sidewalks on the quad at Berkeley were built. No one uses those sidewalks anymore, though, because the grass is so much nicer to walk on than concrete.
So the key is to build as you need, but not to build to the point where you start to avoid the thing you were building it for in the first place.
The moon or Mars would be a natural venue for the concept, a place too hostile for mankind, where viabs could work around the clock: Let robots spit out a city, then settle in when it's ready.
You'll land in the bathroom/livingroom/spacedock shaped like a booger, and then you can relax in the bedroom/backyard or use your machine-built PC in the garage
I just fail to see how this amorphous abstract thing would be practical. Admittedly, it would be cool looking and unique, but still.
Randomly constructed, on demand buildings. Sounds like the makings of a termite mound....
Seriously, why can't I just get a house with a friggin laser beam on its roof.
To UGLY and BROKEN houses and buildings. There's a large percentage of
... Oh, and my family is about 60% architects.
architecture as a human activity that involves creativity and the ability to
solve new problems as they come up.
If you tell me you can help design a bridge or a road with the aid of software,
then i'll buy it, but designing homes (what architecture is about) is way beyond the cold structure design.
Where I live, there's some kind of rivalry (sp?) between architects and what
in my country is referred as a "civil engineer", which is an engineer specialized in structural design and buildings. Both are able to build a house,
but most of the times you can easily spot the difference between a house built
by an architect and a house built by an engineer: Houses built by engineers look "clunky", and while they may be built correctly from a structural point of view, they ocasionally suffer from design flaws such as having bedrooms too close to the kitchen (which means the odor of food being cooked invades other parts of the house). Put simply, the engineer knows about functionality. They
don't know about "aesthetic design". And this is something a computer will never be able to learn either.
There's this joke:
- What's an architect?
- An architect is someone that isn't man enough to be an engineer, but not gay anough to be an interior decorator.
I think the joke sums it up nicely.
Build a House Out of Recycled Cardboard
He has some great ideas (shown here ) that would really be great looking with this kind of thing. No more ugly boxes!
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Must...protect...children...
no offense but essentially every home is built onsite in a custom manner.
Huge portions of home building could be done in large factories, and equally huge strides could be made standarizing the hookups to electricity, communications and plumbing.
i'm not talking about crappy mobiles...i'm talking about the absurdity of custom electrical, plumbing and framing on hundreds of millions of homes.
the endless permits etc...people complain about software but if software were as absurd as home building you would have to get several CDs from various licensed contractors, get a permit from the state to install a computer, have the computer inspected as it is installed and each CD of components is inserted, etc...
Freeman Dyson gave a talk in Portland last year. He presented several case studies on how technology planning went right and wrong.
One of the anecdotes was about a research team he was invited to join during the Carter administration. A multidiciplinary team of eggheads got together to come up with ways to make housing cheaper.
They analyzed the factors that made housing expensive, and came up with a list of proposals to make homes cheaper. Factory building components, standardization . . . it all came together nicely.
Before they delivered their findings, they decided to look them over . . . and realized that they'd reinvented the Mobile Home.
I believe that I read about this something like two years ago. It amounts to a 3D printer, but it's using concrete instead of the liquid polymers that stereolith machines do.
This has the potential to drastically cut construction costs, since you can basically eliminate the labor cost of framing the structure. You can even have the robot leave channels in the walls for plumbing, electrical conduit, etc.
Once someone gets around to building an excavation robot to dig foundations and footings, building a house could become a two-man, three-day job (or less).
I hope they get this tech on the market soon. A lot of people could use it yesterday.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
From the article:
I have an old book around here that talks about 1890s Japanese housing, and how certain walls would be removed or replaced in the homes according to need:
What would be a parlour in the day would be divided into sleeping rooms at night.
There is the obvious problem with this: In Western architecture, rooms tend to hold big, bulky objects called furniture. Western culture doesn't tend to sit on tatami mats and sleep on shikibutons.
In our culture, changes to living space tend not to be frequent: We don't convert bedrooms to living rooms daily. When we do want to remodel our homes, we tend to hire builders and remodelers. I suspect that this will be significantly cheaper for quite awhile.
It sounds like he's trying to be innovative for the sake of being innovative.
What a sad, pessimistic world you live in.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
A: machine automated construction.
I can't get over the way so many allegedly intelligent people cream themselves over these cute 3D animations of a huge behemoth lateral crane picking up building materials and laying them into place and voila, instant house. It must be the Lego lover's mindset, but it's not remotely as practical as it's proponents suggest. (And I still have no evidence that it is "already being done", all I see are drawings. But as Colin Powell proved, artistic drawings are proof of reality. But I digress.)
1. You have to lie these perfectly straight 200-foot rails down at either ends of the lot, perfectly parallel and at a perfect distance. And make sure they don't move.
2. You have to lug this huge behemoth crane on huge supports to the site and *onto the rails*.
3. You have to place all the building materials in perfectly lined up position. Who is going to do this? Construction workers? Another expensive piece of heavy machinery?
4. Who is going to climb up the damn thing when it gets jammed while carrying a 50-foot 10x10 support beam?
B: these wonderful, mod-hippie earthen building materials like cob and superadobe -- all of which are top secret and require you buying book X and going to seminar Q for a hundred here and a hundred there. Nope, that ain't the way to promote an off-the-grid natural building style, that's the way to be a beemer-driving neoliberal. Instead of these wonderfully "grassroots" building techniques going on to revolutionize building and make it accessible to the common man, cob et al become the trademark of upper-middle class SUV drivers who need a way to prove to everyone that they truly are earthy and granola.
(Let's not mention the inconvenient fact that the underprivileged and otherwise construction-disenfranchised that these cheap natural building techniques will supposedly help don't actually *own any land* to BUILD anything on!)
I'd be curious about cob... if it wasn't that every link about it I can find actually tells you *nothing* about how to do it, but instead urges you to attend a fucking paid training session. (And oh yeah, if I were in the landed class.)
I can process rich text, calculate spreadsheets, and read email for free, but I can't build with fucking mud and straw without going to some new age seminar. Funk dat.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I can summarize a working minimum of what you need to know about building in cob in one post. That's ridiculously easy compared to brick-and-wood housing!
FYI, here goes:
- Clay, sand, staw. Clay binds, sand prevents shrinking, staw acts as rebar. Use subsoil from the site, tread in the straw. Measure your subsoil by shaking it in water and letting it settle in layers, to see if you need to add clay or sand. Make up test bricks to see if you got the mix right for shrinkage, cracking, and strength. You'll need a higher percentage of sand than you expect. Sieve out rocks and gravel to avoid introducing weak spots.
- Apply it wet enough to squish, neither runny nor hard. Build upwards iteratively, stopping each course just before it starts to sag under its own weight. Measure the plumb with a spirit level and cut off soft cob to keep it from bulging or sagging. Walls can be straight or tapered, which is stronger and saves time/effort building the upper parts. Test taper by gluing a precisely angled bit of wood onto a spirit level. Tapered outside and plumb inside makes furniture an easier fit.
- Overengineer the thickness of the walls. Theoretically, precisely mixed cob applied with skill can be used in walls a foot thick, but build them two feet thick (or more) at the base.
- You need a stem wall, which is a short (waist height) hard and nonporous wall upon which to sit the cob. Stone, concrete or brick are good. This keeps the dried mud above damp ground and rain-runoff splatter. Make the top jagged so the cob sticks. You can skip this, but your house will have a limited "shelf life". Also, the roof needs to overhang enough to throw rain clear of the walls, and you need good drainage and a site which won't flood. In general, water flowing over cob will erode it, but rain won't.
- Cob functions as "thermal mass", bringing inside temperature towards the daily mean temperature (ie: it smooths out cold and heat into continuing warmth). It doesn't insulate much. Avoid using it where you get no sun (north slope) or where the climate is cold all day. Plan the house as a passive solar collector, with windows sited to admit and trap morning and evening sun.
- Joint the cob to woodwork, especially upstairs-floor beams and roof rafters, by burying anchor points of jaggedy wood into the cob wall. Logs stripped of bark with branch-stubs sticking out are good. Don't bury rafters and beams directly into the cob, because they can shift and tear loose due to settlement and heat-expansion. Non-opening window panes can simply be buried straight into walls, with expansion foam around the edges to prevent them being crushed.
- You can build furniture straight from the cob by cantilevering outwards (go slowly) or by carving in. Tamped cob can also be used to make floors - seal the final layer with boiled linseed oil.
- Never put nonporous materials over cob, especially outside. That includes oil based paints, cement based interior and exterior plasters. Cement exterior plaster is a major cause of cob wall collapse. Water runs in through cracks, down the inside and liquefies the wall base. Instead, use mud-straw plaster or lime-sand plaster. Whitewash and casein paints can be used inside and out.
There you go, that's pretty much the beginner's course and adequate if you ignore amenities.