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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."
So, once I get my mother-in-law to go into the building, how do I get the whole thing back into the bag?
cat life | grep joy >> memory
Finally, I can move out of my parents' basement!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Instant asshole, just add alcohol
Insert witty comment here
An inflatable building to house my inflatable...er...friend.
While the product is innovative and interesting, the comparison (cost-wise) with other "portable" structures is not correct. This looks to be (from the article) a non-portable semi-permanent structure.
BP http://www.card-central.com
Why not dispense with the concrete and just make it inflatable? I doubt the concrete will make it all that much more permanent of a shelter than it would otherwise be. Besides, if it's good enough for space, it's good enough as a temporary shelter. Check out the inflatable space habitats
Thousands of refugees adding water and ingesting their "building in a bags" thinking they were MRE's.
That's an easy fix - put the buildings in round packages and the MREs in square ones. What could possibly go wrong.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Would make a good mother-in-law house, though - what better way to "cement" a relationship than with a load of flammable epoxy ...
Sorry, but I can't help myself...
The English language has some rules about the correct placement of commas in a sentence. It's not a case of "Instant grammar just, add commas!!!1"
May I take this opportunity to recommend Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" to the author of the above summary?
Oh, and the word you were looking for was F-A-B-R-I-C, fabric; not fabic. Fabic sounds like an eastern-european football player.
</rant>
I guess today is a passable day to die.
Hard-shelled structures created from inflatable templates are actually quite common. Usually, they are made by spraying concrete or polymer onto the inflatable shell. Alternatively, you first pour on the concrete, then inflate (it takes fairly little pressure to do so). The lining is some combination of fabric and water/air-proof plastic. Some of the templates are reusable, others become part of the structure.
Have a look at Domtec and Binishells.
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).
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.
It's a shell that's strong in compression. Pile earth on it, and you've got your sound and thermal insulation. The one issue I can see is the small size; 172 square feet isn't much. You'd need a lot of them for any kind of refugee situation, and at $2100 each (about $12/square foot) it's probably as expensive as local housing in most of the world if not more so.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Concrete just happens to be very effective at handling compressive loads, and when reinforced with steel rebar or the like, can handle tensile loads in a reasonable manner as well. This is probably the reason that cement is used in lieu of epoxies and other plastics - it has better load-bearing characteristics under compression.
Software piracy is victimless theft.
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.
I know parent is modded funny, but I wondered the same thing. From the British Cement Association site:
First prize of £3,000 went to Il Hoon Roh for his reinforced concrete organic modular system that impressed the judges for its visually exciting construction potential. The second prize of £2,000 was awarded to Peter Brewin and Will Crawford for their joint entry of portable emergency concrete tents. The humanitarian potential of this entry was very evident. Phoebe Cummings and Stine Vesperson were awarded the third prize of £1,000 for their delicate pieces that combined lace with concrete. The effect gave concrete, usually seen to be a robust material, a more soft and fragile character.
The problems with prefab housing are twofold, first and most importantly is that anything which is light enough to allow for economical transport of economically buildable subsections is going to be chinsy compared to a real timber and 3/4" plywood plus 3/4" hardwood floors. The second problem is that preparing the site and combining the pieces takes almost as much labor as rough framing an equivilant structure, and all of the labor besides the site prep and rough framing is done by skilled laborers that will charge about the same for their work whether it is done onsite or as part of assembling prefab blocks.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.