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"E-mailable" House Snaps Together Without Nails (clemson.edu)
MikeChino writes: Your next house could snap together like a jigsaw puzzle without the use of any power tools. Clemson University students designed and built Indigo Pine, a carbon-neutral house that exists largely as a set of digital files that can be e-mailed to a wood shop anywhere in the world, CNC cut, and then assembled on-site in a matter of days. “Indigo Pine has global application,” says the Clemson team. “Because the house exists largely as a set of digital files, the plans can be sent anywhere in the world, constructed using local materials, adapted to the site, and influenced by local culture.”
And made this house.
No bolts? Thats a huge porch roof that needs to be secured lets the next hurricane rip it off. Sure you could go old school and use post and beam style but you still have to tie it down to the foundation.
Speaking of the foundation it looks like many small concrete blocks hopefully over slab on grade. It's not big enough to use as a service crawlspace I hope there is never a plumbing or vermin issue. There will be a vermin issue as it's a magnet for rodents and such. Again how they planning on fastening it to the ground so it does not blow away without bolts. Earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods happen even in some hippy dippy microhouse.
Combo PV and hot water, it generally makes sense you're effectively cooling the PV panels and using the waste heat.
My mid 70's passive solar house did most of this and did it better, a basement floor drain doubles as outside air natural convection will cool the house and it preheats outside air in the winter. My 1954 well architected home did the math for correct overhangs and orientation to deal with solar gain without throwing ugly boxes around the windows. Correct plantings do wonders leaves for shade in summer not so much in winter.
No sir I dont like it.
Most homes in developing countries are built using bricks, clay, or concrete and cement. Wood, glass, steel and aluminum are expensive and rare in most of the world.
So why can't these digital files be adapted to clay, brick or cement construction?
Fundamentally all the materials have enormous strength in compression. We knew we could pile brick on brick, dirt on dirt and build enormous, stable enduring structures 5 to 10 thousand years ago. But all of them are brittle and they have no real strength in tension. They have very little elasticity. For a design to "snap" together, you need a little bit of elasticity and some tensile strength. You can not "bend" a concrete beam a little, snap it into place and it would not "spring" back to assume old shape with old strength. Bent concrete is dead concrete.
R & D on developing cheap housing for the developing nations is a very active area of research. Many universities around the world are working on it. But most solutions are dull, and do not lend themselves to flashy headlines. Back when I was in college, the very first rupee I earned in my life came from the Centre for Rural Development, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. We were working on natural gas from cow waste, cottage industries suitable for rural areas, efficient wood burning stoves, and cheaper construction techniques for mud huts. Internet has a role to play in rural development. But it is not going to be as simple as mailing a few files around the world.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Not as much as you might think. Until the industrial revolution, nails had to be made one at a time by a blacksmith and were thus freaking expensive.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think you could buy all materials, blueprints and instructions from Sears for like a thousand dollars, including shipping. Then add several hundred hours of sweat equity to construct it.
A pretty high quality one still around is the Nixon birthhouse at his library in Yorba Linda. I think it has a Great Room, a couple of bedrooms and bathroom. I've seen others preserved in Western mining towns. Pre-manufactured homes eventually superceded these.