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Instant Buildings - Just Add Water
lawrencekhoo writes "Wired has an article about the newly invented
Building in a Bag. The structure is made from cement impregnated fabic, that is sealed in an easily transportable plastic bag. You literally just add water, and then inflate. Twelve hours later, you have a ready to use building. Possible uses include shelter for disaster areas, and instant field hospitals."
That is my question, how do you get in?
The military will be all over this. Think about airdropping an advance team in some clearing, give them 12 hours, and they have a defendable base with concrete walls. Portable bunker. If it could be adapted to making other shapes of concrete surfaces, drop a large number of them, and make a concrete landing strip. Rapid deployment operations and base fortification would have days cut off their time.
Wood burns too, quite hot I might add, but it doesn't stop us from building houses out of it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're funny, but you're raising a valid point. They're thinking of using this for shelter for disaster areas, and instant field hospitals... Personally I think tents are better for these purposes, since you can actually dismantle them and reuse them in the future. Why would you for instance want to smack up 10,000 of these in a disaster area, just to have to tear them down a couple of months down the road?
Ever pop a hole in a ballon?
Ever pop a hole in a sidewalk?
TODO: Something witty here...
If I'm not too mistaken...I think he was trying to make a joke? Which as an aside - I found worthy of a chuckle...
Actually, being inflatable doesn't imply it needs lots of pressure. Also, the inventors of the concrete version obviously intended it to be a glorified medical tent. Tents, hospitals, and clean rooms all utilize positive internal pressure to keep microbes and dust out. On top of that, the inflatable structure I would envision, would have inflatable WALLS, not necessarily an inflatable interior, though, for medical purposes, positive pressure is a plus.
The fact that much of the US still builds by nailing drywall and siding to a bunch of wooden beams is not for a lack of new building techniques--it's simply still cheaper and easier, mostly simply because it's what everybody else does (=economies of scale).
We can take all our valuable water and use it for building little houses!
Better yet, let's just throw thousands of these bags in the ocean and create an underwater city instantaneously!
It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be 2k$ impromptu shelters, either. There are factory-development methods out there for building custom homes. You can have machines cut and assemble almost arbitrary floor plans, and ship out prebuilt sections of the house to assemble on spot.
Unfortunately, there's this stigma of "prefab housing" being small, low-quality, one-design "housing for the poor". It's kind of annoying seing such stereotypes standing in the way of progress to cheaper, higher quality housing. I mean, large buildings have been shifting a lot more to automated construction, and houses lend themselves even more readily to it because the sections are smaller and easier to transport.
"Here's a fun fact: the moon has turned to blood!" -- Newscaster, "Jesus Christ Supercop"
Well, I agree, technically, it doesn't have to be. But if you try to buy or build a new home, you will find that, in reality, in the US, most of your choices for something average-to-nice come down to traditional construction. Furthermore, you'll have problems with resale value if you buy prefab.
The Inuit people have been doing this for thousands of years. Making buildings out of water, that is.
Which isn't to say that positive internal air pressure isn't an integral part of some earth-bound structures. Several large sports domes (the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY, for example) use positive internal pressure to keep the roofs inflated. But, of course, these structures are quite a bit more permanent than the sort of "field hospital" structures being discussed in the article.
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Don't people usually have problems with water during disasters? If you place contaminated water into the structure are you going to have problems?
What about areas where the problem is they have no water? Just some thoughts..
Obama = Socialism.
Also, when wood is under compression, it's a LOT harder to ignite. Take a look at any older (+75 years) building after a fire - the wood main beams will be charred, but probably not burnt through, whereas steel beams would have buckled under the heat.
Also, when fibreglass resin burns, the resulting fumes are more toxic.
Sounds pretty useless, unless it is shipped with sterile water, and sterile air to inflate it with. Just shows that the inventors haven't fully thought through their ideas.
Shut the fuck up, hippie.
How about keeping your dullwitted politics in one of the roughly three billion other places on the internet that have been set up especially for that purpose, rather than trying to drag this thread about cool new technology off onto your anti-US/anti-Bush hobbyhorse?
You probably don't even realize how stupid and obsessive you sound.
The comparison with "portable" buildings is correct because they are the available alternative for the proposed uses.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
> what's wrong with a good old tent?? I can put one
> up in just a few minutes!
Never actually lived in a tent, have you? Do you like dry feet? Not having your home blow away?
> Are these thing sturdier?
Much, much sturdier.
> Lighter?
Much heavier. That's a _plus_.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
basically, a slum is an aggregation of cheap and above all temporary housing. at USD 2100 (about LKR 210,000 - a LOT of money where i live) per unit the housing is more expensive than most slum dwellers can afford. also i believe there is a high population turnover in slum areas. people come and people go.and the parts are scavenged to make the other slum dwellings better.
further, the land that slums are on become more desirable as the city develops. which gives the impetus for the governments to move people out of the slums and into multi story housing projects (which end up becoming vertical slums, but i digress), thereby reclaiming the land for public use. a cement based housing system would make this process more difficult
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
I agree with the spirit of what you're trying to say -- most native English speakers have never seriously tried learning another language and have no appreciation for how difficult it is.
However, as someone who speaks 4 languages, may I say that I very much appreciate grammar nazis. Of course it depends on the delivery -- if the post simply ridicules the parent's english and makes no attempt to correct or explain his mistakes, then it is worth less than the space it takes up. If, however, the delivery is abrupt (or even rude) but corrects the mistake and (perhaps more importantly) explains the rationale behind the grammatical rule in question, it is, quite simply, invaluable. Of course, if they can do all that and not be rude, that's a plus -- but this is Slashdot, let's not set our standards too high.
The truth is that Americans, Brits and Aussies are far, far too polite. The result is that people who live in one of those countries can speak broken English for their entire stay and never be told by any of the smiling natives that they're speaking like a retard. The result? Your year or two abroad doesn't help your English anywhere near as much as you hoped it would.
Now, take France. The French will happily tell you, in no uncertain terms, and to your face, that you are butchering their language. They will correct you, often impatiently, and act as if you're a retard for not speaking correctly. This is considered "rude" by many people, but you know what? I have met a few Americans/Brits that have lived in France for a few years, and they speak nearly perfect French (I am a natively bilingual in French and English). I mean they have good pronunciation, good grammar (French grammar is reasonably difficult), and are conversationally adept.
Now it may be that I just had the fortune of meeting a few people that were graced with unusual linguistic talent. It may be that the numerous people I've met that lived in the US, for example, for a few years, just couldn't learn English because they truly were retarded. But I think there's more to it than that.
Grammar nazis provide an invaluable service, especially to ESL learners. They most annoy native speakers, who feel that their English is adequate (though it most often is not) and find a GN's pedantic attention to detail obnoxious.
If you are a non-native speaker, you should thank English speakers that are direct enough to correct your English -- you should not harbour any assumption whatsoever that your English is correct or adequate, no matter how long you've been studying it, and you should take any knowledgeable correction as someone helping you take one more step towards complete, native-level fluency.
I always tell friends whose language I cannot speak too well to correct me anytime I make a mistake, and to not be concerned with my feelings -- after all, I know I'm not stupid. The favour they do me is invaluable when they tell me that I've made a mistake -- they offer me the opportunity to not make that same mistake again.
I suspect the main motivator here is housing for disaster relief that offers more protection from weather than a tent, and is a bit more long term. In this context 172 square feet, as an initial implementation, isn't too bad. Also clustering of multiple 172 square feet units could create the effect of a larger house built around a small central open area that could be covered with a tarpaulin. The cost may be the cost with a small production run rather than final costs. If the manufacture could be done locally in areas likely to suffer disasters then the cost would likely be lower. The balancing act would then be between tents (cheap, not very durable, ideal only in the short term but often refugees ending up living in them for months) versus shanty buildings (often structurally unsafe and take a while to erect), more secure dwellings built locally (take even longer to erect) and the blow up concrete units. Tent cities, if in situ for a while may spawn shanty dwellings, or may be replaced by more permanent dwellings, so the cost of this needs to be looked at versus the health and safety issues of the likely lifetime of each of these types of dwelling. The other thing to look at is what happens if quickly erectable but fairly durable buildings are used instead of tents: will refugee camps then be converted into semi-permanent cities almost immediately delaying the return of inhabitants to their homes, and what would be the implications of this?
What happens to the building after its use is over? More trash or leave it for the residents of whereever it is to clean up?
I grew up in a brick house on the US East Coast, and brick and stone were fairly popular building materials - or woodframe with brick facing. But out here in California, it's not a useful material, because it doesn't behave well in earthquakes. Too many parts of the world do use brick or stone houses in earthquake country - leading to tens of thousands of deaths when there's a big quake in places like Iran or Armenia. Cement works ok, because you can put lots of rebar in it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks