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British Architects Develop Open-Source Home Building
Iddo Genuth writes "Think of a world where you could simply download the blueprints of your future home for free just like you download any open source software today. A team of British architects developed just that and they are hoping their project called WikiHouse will radically change the way we think about building homes."
It you look at the house you will be forced to open source every house you build from then on!
There's nothing more open source than architecture, you just have to know how to read it
(pretty much like anything else)
This is nothing but another iteration of the "everybody can be a programmer, astronaut, superstar, engineer, architect, etc" fad permeating these past decades.
The website notes the project is in its early stages. So it's either in "ideas debating" mode or "vapourware" if you want to be less generous.
House building is already open source: all the information is out there in your local public library / on the internet. Nothing is closed to you in the way that you can't look inside some proprietary software to understand what's going on. If you have the time, you can read up on everything from applying for the legal permissions to put up a house, designing a building, and all the way through to finding out how to dig trenches, run electric cables and paint walls. Nothing is closed from you (certainly in the majority of countries in the world).
There are choke points: the expense of hiring architects, specialised builders, legal advisors. None of these are closed to you. What you are doing is saving the years it takes to learn these trades and paying somebody else to do these tasks because its quicker, so more efficient for you in energy terms. There is a small but consistently strong movement in many countries of people who already build their own homes, where they have made the choice to give up their jobs as computer programmers/nurses/rangers/whatever and spend several hundred hours digging trenches, laying brickwork, drawing architectural diagrams etc. It's already open source.
I think what these people might be doing is trying to shortcut the architectural expert choke point and break architects' hold on construction. But at the end of the day if you want a self build house, you're still going to have to go up a ladder and move heavy things around a lot and deal with construction elements that need careful attention, like mains electricity, water piping and gas.
Where do I download the building materials? Is there a torrent for it?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Does that mean my house won't have windows?
As ex-architect, I can point one flaw ......... building codes are different in different states/provinces/colonies.
Though, idea is very cool. Sites that sell ready architectural designs are ask a fortune for the cooky-cutter designs.
regulated open source even.
if they really wanted to help, they would lobby for double windows and insulation regulations.. I hear UK is rubbish for that.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I agree. The knowledge is nearly all open (although a few mandatory standards are probably not in the library). The problem is that architecting (and implementing) a house wrongly has an extreme expensive long-term effect. Please use experts (which have all this open knowledge)
a) Violate a mandatory building standard and you may end up with very high change costs ("Oh, what you mean i cant build x meters high in distance of y meters to z").
b) If you do something wrong, the effects will not be visible in a shot time, If your walls start to rot in 10 years or your house has a crack of 2cm in 20 years because you did not take care about humidity or the ground below, it your problem
c) Unless stamped out of the ground by the dozend in a new area which is planned at a single time (in which case the cost of the "manual" expert planning may be even less relevant), every house is special (surrounding, use, standars at the time), and mostly for a reason. If you dont want to spend your time tracking standards, laws, building techniques, and financing and apply an up-to date technique to you specific situation at a specific time
Somehow this thing remind me of all the "3d-printer"-fans around here, who are obviously unaware of what you can do with a decent set of manual tools, and think just because you can "download" somthing you can understand or control it.
Disclaimer: I'm the founder of the Hexayurt Project, another Free Hardware building system (http://hexayurt.com)
Wikihouse is exciting technically, but it's *incredibly* expensive to build - something like 7000 EUR of CNC cutting time for a single room. The parametric design aspects of the project are great, however, and I can see a future in which the components are mass produced at reasonable price and then assembled according to plans generated from the parametric design software. But without some kind of standardization, this kind of production is going to remain incurably expensive and therefore just another architectural demo. It's not a technology until costs are estimated. This has happened before: the Open Architecture Network (http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/) rapidly filled with impractical technology demonstrators and student projects - 10000+ designs, but how many practically buildable?
Actually getting buildings that people can build is hard. Architects are trained to think about custom work, one-offs and impressing other architects. Mass producing housing at a price people can afford (hello, Mortage Crisis, goodbye Mortgage Crisis) requires a radical rethink of how we do construction: modularity, prefabrication, standardization - all the same things we did for every other technology we wanted to be cheap, easy and reliable.
Home building is the last truly inefficient global industry. Whether the radical change is interchangable modular components (structural insualted panels) or something like 3D printing with insulated concrete, we can't keep buliding houses by hand in a world where everything else is efficiently mass produced with near-zero defects and not distort the shape of our societies.
Hexayurts are dirt cheap and designed for modular mass manufacture. But they look weird. Such is life :-)
I should start this with a disclaimer: I'm the founder of the Hexayurt Project, a Free Hardware building system aimed at refugees and in widespread use at Burning Man. It's those silver pod things (http://hexayurt.com)
I think Wikihouse is exciting technically, but it's *incredibly* expensive to build - something like 7000 EUR of CNC cutting time for a single room. The parametric design aspects of the project are great, however, and I can see a future in which the components are mass produced at reasonable price and then assembled according to plans generated from the parametric design software. But without some kind of standardization, this kind of production is going to remain incurably expensive and therefore just another architectural demo. It's not a technology until costs are estimated. This has happened before: Architecture For Humanity's Open Architecture Network (http://openarchitecturenetwork.org/) rapidly filled with impractical technology demonstrators and student projects - 10000+ designs, but how many practically buildable?
Actually getting buildings that people can build is hard. Architects are trained to think about custom work, one-offs and impressing other architects. Mass producing housing at a price people can afford (hello, Mortage Crisis, goodbye Mortgage Crisis) requires a radical rethink of how we do construction: modularity, prefabrication, standardization - all the same things we did for every other technology we wanted to be cheap, easy and reliable.
It's often said that home building is the last truly-madly-deeply inefficient global industry. Imagine if they built cars by having people come to your garage to hand-assemble them! Whether the radical change is mass manufacture of entire houses Buckminster Fuller style, interchangable modular components (structural insualted panels) or something like 3D printing with insulated concrete, we can't keep buliding houses by hand in a world where everything else is efficiently mass produced with near-zero defects and not distort the shape of our societies.
Hexayurts are dirt cheap and designed for modular mass manufacture. But they look weird. Such is life :-)
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
... and then there are buildings
Not all buildings are the same, and not all of them are build for the same purpose
What I mean is, modularity is already being used in the building business, and if one wants to truly spread the concept of open-source, one could tag on the open-source idea on the already available modularity concept that are so widespread all around
you heard wrong. new builds and modifications have to be quite well insulated, there are grants available to retrofit decent loft insulation and cavity wall fillings to the older housing stock. We tend to build houses from proper fired clay bricks with tiled roofs rather than bits of wood.
That's true in Britain, but not everywhere. If you have the privilege to live in Australia (happiest country on earth, folks!) you have to pay ~AU$400 to get a copy of the building code. That's for either the PDF or the printed version. And they make damn sure they update it each year so you have to go buy it again.
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Building a house isn't rocket science. A lot of the complications and costs are regulatory in nature.
You have no idea what 3D printer fans are "unaware of" and you apparently don't know what 3D printers are actually used for.
I'm curious where your experience of house building is. In Britain (where the OP's project is from), you can certainly get someone to come out and build a one-off house, but it's far from the only way its done. It's extremely common to drive through parts of towns where a developer came in, bought a huge chunk of land, subdivided it and built somewhere between 30 and 1000 houses on it. There might be slight variations in the style of door used or small variations in the brickwork, and they tend to diverge over time as owners make modifications, but when they were built they were obviously built on a huge production line.
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Someone now doing open source architecting?
In Finland there are already open source house building. You can order just how many blocks made of styrofoam you need and then just attache them together, saw them with handsaw to cut them wanted shape or size. In one day you can build a 1m height walls for 150 square meter house, whole house you can finish alone in one week.
Once you have build your house walls, you order cement truck to site and it fills the walls with cement, then you just throw rapping on walls and you only need to lay roof.
How about the codes to drive 3D printers such that the desired home could be created. Essentially one would need the plastic, use of the 3D printer, and the code to build the home. Even the pipes and conduits could be printed as part of the walls. The slab could be plastic as well as the roof and doors.
This technology could replace the construction industry for home building completely.
This is future shock on a rampage.
Scrap plastic may become quite valuable.
Given the likely size of the document and that it is probably a limited print run, I could see charging $400 for a printed version, but for a PDF? That's just evil.
Yes, when I think of UK houses the first feeling I get is cold brick houses. I'll take my warm comfortable wooden house any day (not scared of the big bad wolf).
Do you have a good reason for believing that? I've heard the same about UK housing repeatedly, and a quick search finds this as an example: http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/as/cebe/projects/towards_sustainable_housing.pdf (try page 16). I think that UK building conventions (ie, bricks and tiles) and government campaigns have convinced the UK public that the difference between a well and poorly insulated building is putting a think layer of foam between two existing brick walls, shoving a couple of feet of loft insulation in and putting in double glazing made out of bog standard glass. It's possible to do a LOT better than that.
Also, don't write off wood (though, personally, I don't like it aesthetically compared to brick/stone). You can put a LOT more insulation between two layers of wood than you'll get in a UK brick wall cavity. And I once measured the outside surface temperatures on the least well insulated and constructed part of my house (an extension which is part a thin looking wooden wall, and part apparently solid brick wall - no cavity, but thicker than the wood). The wooden part had the lower outside temperature.
Nevertheless the "regulatory" things are complicate to overview and they are expensive if you get it wrong.
And yes, i have an Idea what a 3d printer is used for. And i have an idea what it should be used for. And with all honesty, if a part is produced more than 100times, has no inner spaces, and is produced by a few cutting/polishing steps, then its unlikely that a 3d printer is the tool of choice - unless its the only thing which you know how to operate.
Slow, high per-part costs, very limited choice of materials.
Give me the choice between CNC milling and 3d printing for anything else but prototyping, and CNC milling wins (unless there are enclose spaces).
i know 5 architectural firms doing wiki house style already.
I agree that 99% of architects currenty have no idea about rapid fabrication tech.
But the studnts are all getting trained in it. And they are learning that they will not be building exotic ego trips for rich clients any more.
the architects that have perfected cnc based builds are not talking about it and are changing a fortune to use it also. They are the front runners and want to make easy money fro their expertise i think.
cnc machine that can make a house in 7 days of cutting is 80,000 euro to buy. Needs 3 phase, 50 amps connection too.
dremels shake the hell out of the cnc machine, and so the whole unit needs to be heavy and thus costly.
better to use lasers for cutting. No dust, no vibration, but slower.
so you need a cnc laser farm where you pump out everything like a load balanced server farm.
and a loading mechanism. for a 200 m2 house, your talking 15,000 eurs of 18 mm plywood.
that allot of plywood of 3,000 x 1600. thats abut 50 pallets of it.
there has to be a way to handle it. SO you need a vacuum lift system ad transport system. Basically robot platforms that have a vacuum lift integrated to automate the moving of the plywood around and finally into need already cut stacks with rfid tags inserted so you can grab the cut sheets to construct the house.
then there is all the shit that goes into a building. :) Looks ok. Can put a green roof on top of it too. .6 m3 of oil = 1 standard car gas tank.
1. gypsum. not needed. just use fibreglass joining tape on the plywood joins, and then a 4 mm skim coat of gypsum on the inside wall. Looks exactly like a gysum wall.
2. exterior. You can oil the plywood, but you need to deal with the joins. so again you do the same thing and then use putz. cheap too
3. roof. Bituminous mastic. rolls on like wall paper. No need for steel flashing. Cheap and fast. Can also be laser cut
4. Foundation. crew piles babe. Cheap, works. Also works on land where your could not build normally due to poor bearing pressure.
5. Insulation. Paper !. This is the same stuff they use for environmental blow in insulation they charge a fortune for. Its just recycled paper that is cut up and a fire retardant is sprayed on it.
6. Energy. Algae to Oil is easy to do. 5% sewerage and water and sunlight in bioreactors attached to walls and roof. Circulate the diatomic algae every 5 hours through the whole system. each panel is only 3 cm think, and can be made of plexiglas or ETFE: CHEAP and light.
then just have a room at the bottom that drip feeds the algae into a centrifuge. this separates the oil out of the algae, and then take the oil and run a load following generator on it. You can have 3 generators running in sync and get 3 phase load following elec.
you now have a battery in the form of oil. The most efficient joules battery there is, and its how nature does it - Chemically.
1 m3 of algae =
algae double every 24 hours when kept under good conditions. Doing this requires sensors and actuators.
With a roof of 10 m x 3 m. You can make enough energy to power your house (200 m2) and car.
We are helping to build Transition Towns in Germany using this technology now.
Last thing required. These buildings don't look like normal buildings. They are different. Architecture cant look like it did before if you want to solve the energy, food shelter problem.
Like most things, its simple when you de-mystify all the obfuscation that commercial / institution entities wrap all the knowledge inside.
Contact me here if you interested
http://www.biomimicrygermany.de/
On what planet did you hear that?!
I haven't seen a house built in the last 30 years here that wasn't far better insulated than a supposed 'Eco-Home' in the US.
Every window must be double glazed sealed units. Minimum 4 inch vertical and 8 inch horizontal insulation.
Lovely and cool in the summer certainly.
I find wooden US houses without AC to be ovens in the summer. Like my shed. They are built exactly the same as my shed so it's unsurprising.
Dirt cheap to heat in winter too.
I wouldn't worry about wolves in your wood house. Unless they have a plasterboard saw and a few minutes to spare. In that case you're shit out of luck.
Yeah, I built a few houses just like you describe! I didn't call them houses though as the proper term is 'shed'.
They need about 8 grand spent on them in maintenance every 10 to 15 years when used as housing so builders love those things.
Your paper insulation will need to be replaced in about 3 years though as it all settles to the base of the walls and the corners of the loft.
Or you can buy a year's subscription to their web-based access to the building code. Wanna guess how much a year's subscription is?
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If you want to talk chokepoints you should start with the doorways. Modern British houses are ridiculously small rabbit hutches, The builder have to take the doors off their show houses and fill them with mirrors just to make them look bigger.
It's so bad now that some estates and blocks have commercial storage facilities built in that residents have to pay for because their homes don't have enough space to hold the stuff they need.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I do believe in one of their photo's there was an open CNC machine, cutting plywood, itself being constructed of plywood. Search for open [source] CNC machine and there are several good sites out there.
Damn. I was looking forward to a game of huff and puff jenga, too.
I had a look at your site but couldn't see any of the elements you describe there. I'm particularly interested in the algae tank system - I didn't realise this had hit commercial production. Can you point me to a link describing it in detail?
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... when you've built your house and the building inspectors or planning enforcement come along to check and find something wrong with it?
Could the misunderstanding be that so many of us in the UK live in homes older than 30 years? My last three homes have been 200, 150 and 100 years old respectively. None of them is likely to get demolished any time soon, and they've been insulated since as best they can -- but they're bound to be inefficient compared to a well-specced new build.
In many parts of the US, newer houses are the norm, and although *some* historic homes are preserved, it's not such a big deal to knock down a wooden house and replace it with something modern.
If you want to talk chokepoints you should start with the doorways. Modern British houses are ridiculously small rabbit hutches, The builder have to take the doors off their show houses and fill them with mirrors just to make them look bigger.
I have lived in such a home - the first house I owned was a 2 bedroom new build, and yes, it was pretty cramped. But to be fair, they're like that because that's what the market wants. If you're willing to pay more (or go to a cheaper location), you can get a more spacious house.
Mass producing housing at a price people can afford (hello, Mortage Crisis, goodbye Mortgage Crisis) requires a radical rethink of how we do construction: modularity, prefabrication, standardization - all the same things we did for every other technology we wanted to be cheap, easy and reliable.
It has been done before.
A typical British housing estate is "mass produced" but it isn't built on a production line. Also they're not built with anything like the tolerances and quality control you'd get on a production line (e.g. it's a hot/cold/wet day and the bricklayer just wants to get finished as soon as they can).
The only sector in British housing building that is making serious use of production line techniques is the social housing sector, where often timber frame structures are used. These timber frame "modules" are manufactured in a factory and so can easily go through the QC processes you'd find on a production line before being shipped-out to the housing estate.
I didn't read TFA (obviously), but I read the summary as you could download the architectural plans for a house. That sounds pretty good - if it says "this bit is double-skinned brick work, with an 8" RSJ sat on top of it", then that's enough to go off and build it - even without the fabrication technology (although if someone ever makes a brickwork 3D printer, then you could use that).
You probably wouldn't want to go ahead and do it without some specialist oversight, but getting plans for someone else's house and putting something like it on your own land sounds like a great idea.
As an anecdote: my university had a class room block that was actually a copy of one of those "out of town" office blocks. They didn't create anything new in the design, they just got the builders over and said "okay, we'll have another one just like it here, please". It wasn't a particularly pleasant block to be in, but that's why they put the Faculty of the Built Environment in there (no kidding!).
Does it hurt to add a link to the project's website?
Not all buildings are the same, and not all of them are build for the same purpose.
And they're not all built in the same region, either.
It's all fine to talk of going rapidly from idea to plan to construction, but major changes might be required to meet local fire or seismic regulations in the area you intend to build. Unless you're going to build in a really laissez-faire area, the plans will require approval from the local authorities, and may require changes to come into conformance with local building regulations. Then there are the foundations to consider... Around here, that involves a hell of a lot of insulation (to avoid frost-heave) and including concrete, gravel, utilities, and drainage, the foundation can cost as much as the house itself.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I want to see a simple design, w/ a basic core which is:
- printable out of concrete using a system easily set up on site (the extruder and rails for it would be removed / re-used after the house was built --- alternately, print a form for the house out of plastic foam into which one pours concrete)
- structures the roof so that it incorporates a mix of solar panels and skylights (for lighting and hydroponic gardens)
- has a rain capture system, holding tank and water filtering system
- a gravity fed sink and a cistern for holding grey water
- has a composting toilet (as a fall-back system)
- includes an area for bicycle storage which includes a generator stand which allows one to use a bicycle to generate energy
Ideally, the basic core could be made as compact as possible and provided as a simple block which could be dropped in to disaster sites (once set up one could build a home around it).
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
These ideas are all wonderful. And the concepts have been around for a long time -- inexpensive manufactured, air-delivered housing was one of Buckie's dreams. And there are lots of 'open source' building ideas floating around -- to say nothing of the huge variation in preferred designs around the world. But the problem that Buckminster Fuller and pretty much every other dreamer ran into is that building codes tend to specify the what and how of housing at a very detailed level with little tolerance for variations and experiments. And if you don't follow these rules you can be denied a legal permit to occupy. And insurance companies tend to insure structures that are built 'to code'. And it goes without saying that the 'trades' are in favor of certain styles of construction. The problem is more one of developing regulatory frameworks that preserve the laudable life safety goals of building codes while being less of a straight jacket, more adaptable to different ideas and changing climate conditions.
Interesting, I might try building one as a shed, wish I saw that before I bought a second cheapo hardware store shed a while ago. Has the 12x8 stretch gone beyond the concept stage?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't understand their goal as house building is already open source. There are thousands of plans available freely out there and the knowlege is freely gained on how to build or even design a home.
What is needed is public domain release of designs and systems from highly skilled engineers for very very cheap to build but sturdy and code acceptable homes. release designs for $15,000 homes that can be built from recycled material and will meet the ridiculous building codes in many countries. For example here in the USA you are NOT ALLOWED to build a home that is smaller than 500 sq feet. That is utterly retarded with no basis in anything but trying to keep homes expensive.
you can raise a family comfortably in 500 sq feet, it's done all the time.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It is pretty open. The codes are available online, but they are hard to print from there (not that you would want to print all that - cheaper to buy). For example: http://publicecodes.cyberregs.com/st/index.htm
;-) Very high signal to noise, and many very knowledgeable people. If a nerd is someone who "spends inordinate amounts of time on unpopular, obscure, or non-mainstream activities, which are generally highly technical", then that site is pretty much the news for nerds for self-builders.
As for "very high change costs" for not doing it right, in most places (note, I am from US), you have to get your plans approved first, and inspected during construction which should minimize that. Some people complain about that (big government, etc. etc.), but I think it is a good thing. With approved plans and inspections, you shouldn't have much to change later.
To get your plans approved, you just have to make sure it follows the prescriptive requirements of the codes. If you want to do something other than is prescribed in the codes, then you need a PE or architect to stamp it. But for most stuff, you can design just by the codes and thus you don't have to pay the professional, and you still get a good building. Yes, there's a lots of reading to be done in the codes, but if you are going to be spending tens of thousands of dollars or more to build a house, it isn't really a lot of reading in perspective.
If you want to build your own house, I suggest hanging out and reading many of the posts over at the Country Plans Small Home Design/Build Forum. I spend as much time there as on slashdot
Many states in the US have copies of the building code on line, as they are part of the legal code. That's all you need for the hard parts of building a house. They specify what kind of lumber to use, how to install it, how many nails, where the outlets go, how big the plumbing has to be - everything except the plan of the house. You can make it look like anything you want within the definitions of the code. It's free - all the menial work is done.
It's when you diverge from the code that you need an architect and/or engineer. And then you have a custom house. It's no different than software. If you're not going to be doing something that will kill somebody if it fails, you can build anything. Most agricultural and very small structures are exempt from the codes in most US jurisdictions (any OS utility). If you want something someone else has tried and succeeded with, you can pay a small fraction of what a custom design would cost and buy a "stock plan" (a commercial application). If you have special needs and the money to fund it, you can have a pro design from scratch (a custom built application). In parallel, if the structure might kill someone if it fails (say, a house or a pacemaker), or is critical infrastructure (a hospital, or a missile control system) there are higher standards to be met. No matter what you do - unless you have experience with building/codes or are smart and willing to do a lot of reading you should probably have somebody else help you with a design. Just as if you were trying to build a custom application where you're probably best served getting some professional help, especially if you've never coded before.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The market doesn't want that, it is just forced to accept it because that is all people can afford due to massively inflated house prices.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What you're describing *is* "the market".
We'd all like a 5 bedroom mansion, but we can't all afford one.
We can't afford a reasonable size starter home because the market is broken.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I sort of assume that the companies building cookie-cutter estates in Britain know what they're doing. They seem like cut-throat capitalists who would pick the cheaper option if it would boost their profit margins.
I suspect that houses built from factory-fabbed modules are better and potentially cheaper - and definitely faster to erect. There was a "Grand Designs" show a while back in which a British couple had one shipped in and build by a German company; it was a beautiful building and took less than a week's work on site.
But the companies have probably got market research that says a shoddily built brick building has higher margins than a well build prefab building. Buyers are irrational; British buyers like brick.
Or you can simply move to some place where the regulatory costs aren't an issue and you can build your house the way you please.
Apparently not, since you only list is things it is not used for.
People who use 3D printers know what they are good for, and although you may not believe it, they actually understand their limitations too, because, gosh, they work with them.
As I'm reading other's comments I see that many have failed to look at the actual WikiHouse site.
Their goals are to create house designs and let people 'print' these designs along with the material. It's not just about the architecture, but the entire building process, including the fabrication of the material which the house will be made of.
A few tiny problems.
Legalities, insurances, etc.
All of this needs to get some seal of approval at many levels.
For example in any given town, you need permits to build houses, renovations, etc.., and they cost money and more importantly, you also have to ensure your house meets a set of criteria to ensure it passes the building inspection codes, etc, you know, things like electrical, plumbing, etc..
So, for all the knowledge and good will this WikiHouse project is, in the end, it might not mean much in the short or medium term. There is a lot of red tape to deal with in order for this knowledge to be practical and useful.
You are aware about the fact that knowing what something should not be used for may be as relevant as waht it definitly should be used for?
All right, i dont know what the deparment i am working for is doing with the protoypes they get from the (professional) "3d printing" companies. Probably my colleagues also dont know why they are doing that. Probably they are doing in wrong in just ordering one piece of the prototype and then think on how to really produce that part in small series. Please come and help them. Maybe you should suggest to them to use "3d printing" more often, even for parts which the company produces 10^7/year.
This sounds totally unworkable.
1. It requires a very expensive CNC machine capable of cutting a full sheet of plywood.
2. It requires plywood, which is unsuitable where manufactured resources is scarce.
3. It uses plywood at ~$16 per 1/2 x 4 x 8 sheet. With this you have to make structural members (2x4s, 2x8s, etc) or their equivalents that are cheaper to buy as boards.
So basically, I need a CNC machine that wasn't doing anything and a load of plywood. With that, I can build a house that is more expensive than what I could build with lumber from Home Depot.
It's not a mansion, but it's mine.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Why on earth would anyone build a house from "proper fired clay bricks"? Have you not seen pictures of the destruction in Mexico and Turkey when earthquakes hit that kind of construction? Masonry is a terrible structural material.
If you really wanted to build things to last, you'd use steel framing, like this home builder does.
We don't really get earthquakes in the UK. An earthquake that is serious enough to damage buildings is a once in a hundred years event for the UK as a whole. For a particular area, it is a once in recorded history event if you are really unlucky.
The most recent building code requires a minimum of 270mm of loft insulation, which is about 10.6 inches.
They probably thought that in some of those other areas too. Earthquakes happen everywhere, though most are very low-magnitude, but even these weaken structures over time. Not building to handle even small tremors is just idiotic.
BTW, our crappy wood houses handle most earthquakes just fine. If we built houses out of bricks like you, they'd constantly be falling down around here. So for you to criticize us for using wood is inane and stupid.
Former builder here. The idea is great, but it seems fixated on the building shell, which is by far the cheapest part of the house. The electrical, plumbing, foundation, flooring, plaster, sidewalk, fencing, driveway and roofing work, the baths and kitchens, windows, doors, siding and trim are where all the money goes.
I do like the idea of being able to print out the complex stuff, say the framing for an archway or stairway. Otherwise, no way 3D printing can compete with pre-cut 2x4s.
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Yawn. Let me know when it's out of the lab.
Well yeah, this house I'm sat in is 80 or 90 years old. Foam filled cavity walls, double glazed window units and nearly two feet of loft insulation make it equal to any new build.
This would be great for Alaska, where you can dump a pile of logs on the ground and call it a house. But it doesn't take into account things like insulating under the house so you don't melt the permafrost and watch your house sink. Or the importance of a vapor barrier to prevent the moisture from your breath passing through the walls condensing then freezing to push the siding right off the house.
Give a plumber a chainsaw and he thinks he is an architect, give an architect a pencil and he thinks he is God.
Modified for wind, earthquake, frost heave, and the like, the better, if labor intensive approach would be the suitable blend of ferro-cement and reinforced concrete. Otherwise, unless thoroughly inappropriate for local conditions, a proper stone house with thatched roof is the way to go. A good thatch roof can last easily a century and more. Otherwise, slate.
Two other approaches that look interesting to me are some of the better modular homes, and another modular line that uses shipping containers.
Admittedly, I've long had a soft spot for a good log cabin. (Disclaimer: I got a set of Lincoln logs in '51.) Saw a home done by a company out of Plymouth, Wisconsin back early '80s; I literally stopped in my tracks and ogled for a good five minutes.
Simplest, many places, one could pour a reinforced slab, steel frame and block or adobe, steel roof, insulate and utilities, and be up and living in it in short order. Here in the States, there are some excellent guides to the owner-built home from the USDA, from plans to using found materials, suitable for every region. Prices range from free to cost of printing.
I like the idea of being able to get a range of standard designs, customize a bit, order up the parts, and having a house-assembly party; to be able to bring together your personal choices of blend of techs suited for locale and budget and crank out a house is to me a big step onward from the simple pre-fab kits one could get from Sears catalog almost a century ago.
If you are looking for a two bedroom house you are not competing with other buyers like you; you are competing with people with more money than you trying to fuck everybody over, which happens to include you. THAT is the problem with the UK housing market.
If you are determined to design your own home it's your responsibility to cover all those codes and caveats. One approach I've seen work in a couple of cases is to hire an architect for his expertise to look over your design, point out gotchas and give a few pointers. You don't get an architectural sign-off, he doesn't get full fee, but you've got a workable design - if you've done your homework. It's not an easy thing to do, tho; you've got to dig into materials, loads, and codes. It's not a task for the faint of heart, the lazy, or the shallow.
Simplest, many places, one could pour a reinforced slab
You can't use slabs in most places in the US because of frost heave: you have to dig your foundation below the frost line, which usually requires around 4 feet of depth. That's why houses in the northern states usually have basements: if you're already digging 4 feet for a foundation, it's not that much extra cost to dig 8 feet and make a usable space (if for nothing else than a furnace, laundry room, and storage) out of it. You can do slabs in southern states that never get much below freezing, but that's it.
I like the idea of being able to get a range of standard designs, customize a bit, order up the parts, and having a house-assembly party; to be able to bring together your personal choices of blend of techs suited for locale and budget and crank out a house is to me a big step onward from the simple pre-fab kits one could get from Sears catalog almost a century ago.
Wood is getting expensive these days, and the quality of wood these days is crap; steel has become very cost-competitive with wood, and is a far better structural material. There's more and more companies popping up doing residential steel framing, and I think there's a lot of potential there. The steel I-beams can be prefabricated in a factory and assembled on site like an IKEA piece, with all the holes pre-drilled and everything bolting together in one day. It would be (or probably, is, as these companies are already advertising this as their current practice) just like the pre-fab Sears kits from the early 1900s.
About slabs - I should have made clear I had in mind more than US. Aware of frost heave and personally prefer basement wherever possible. A dodge is below-frost-line footings or piers, and that will depend on local conditions, budget, and need. I've seen it done, and well, but it's agin my druthers.
Being an old fart, and having worked a fair bit with it, I like and prefer wood for many things but no longer for basic structure, and that's not what I had in mind for that para. To me structure ought be strong, durable, and as maintenance-free as reasonable to do, which is why I favor steel, concrete, foam. Leave wood for parts of interior, furniture.
Pre-fab got a bad name in the middle of last century, sometimes earned. Done well it's a beautiful way to go. I've come across some modular design-and-build stuff over last twenty years that look quite appealing while keeping costs down. A few are significantly more affordable than stick-built, while keeping the main criteria I gave above for structure. Given some of the choices now available, one might consider structure as fixed cost, the variables being site prep, utilities hook-up, and permits, inspections, taxes.
I'm a nut about one thing: while I've seen some pre-fabs that do well with respect to utilities in panels, my own preference is to run all utilities inside - conduits become part of decor; main electrical, water, waste done from central core, along with stairs/elevator/lift for multi-level dwelling. Once built, I don't ever want to have to dig around in a wall, ceiling, floor to fix something. Only exception would be for concrete floors where one runs pipes for radiant heating. (A friend on mine did the latter in his hand-made* custom build, and it works quite well. Working fluid is a synthetic oil.)
*Contractor hired for basement excavation; small crane for some of the I-beams. It's a tri-level built into a hillside on a river overlook, anchored in bedrock. It's far enough from Madras fault and known subsidiaries that it may be largely unaffected by next big one.)