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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."
No, just forced to invite every potential house builder in for a cuppa so they can see what modifications you made...
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.
No, just forced to invite every potential house builder in for a cuppa so they can see what modifications you made...
"The bathroom's at the top of the round tower, where you have a good view. But there aren't any stairs yet."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
there's lotsa sites where you can get wood. Just do a google search with safe settings off.
rewriting history since 2109
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.
Designed by the gmail UI team?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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,
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.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
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).
bloody hope so, i don;t want metro tiles everywhere and a start button extension
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
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.
Does it hurt to add a link to the project's website?
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.
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.
Not that much different than current housing developments where everything is custom made small runs from someone's nephew and replacing a piece of trim even just couple of years later is impossible.
We replaced our front door and had to get one custom made because the door was roughly a quarter-inch narrower than the front doors you can just walk into home depot and buy, and I've learned a lot about how to use a completely different kind of router just to make trim that looks somewhat like what's on the rest of the house.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Huh? Why would you need to make a custom door just because of a quarter-inch difference. I've replaced a bunch of doors on a couple of rental houses, and having to trim the doors to fit was normal: even the super-cheap hollow interior doors have a certain amount of wood at the edges which can be cut away to make them narrower. I think I had to trim a full inch off one door (top to bottom) once. A quarter-inch is nothing.
Of course, if you're talking about a steel entry door, those have to be made to the right size, but you can always buy solid-wood entry doors and just cut them to fit. However, for steel entry doors like that, you don't normally replace the door, you replace the door and frame together; the two are made for each other.
As for trim, most houses these days use quarter-round at the most, because it's cheap. If you have something fancier on there, you probably have a higher-end house. But even then you can usually find something at home depot that's pretty close, unless you had some totally custom house made. Tract house builders don't get specially-made trim; they buy cheap off-the-shelf stuff from the local hardware store.