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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.”
“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.”
Geez, don't know what it's going to be made of yet they still claim it's "carbon neutral".
Standard blueprints can already be e-mailed.
I would say the majority of existing homeowners did not use a single power tool to build their house either.
Will this meet building codes.
I see dimensional lumber in some of those photos.
Surely every potential homeowner / builder will have a cnc machine.
My mail client does not have the receive plywood feature. Can i upgrade?
There's no reason that you couldn't have a masonry wall system and this kind of roof.
Of course, they're using plywood, which is about 3x as expensive as structural lumber (on a boardfoot basis), and CNC milling - which is not really "developing country" stuff. This is new age construction for hipsters. You make your couple million then go "roughing it" in a 900SF house for a few years and blog about it until the money runs out and you get tired of no Starbucks. Then you go back with your "world experience" to get another job and a $1.5M condo in the city.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Paper plans are there for a different reason: Paper plans are stamped and signed by the architect/engineer and are the record/permit/contract set of construction drawings. I can't see any contractor worth his salt saying "I'll build that building based on a computer file that can be updated by remote push down"; there are to many chances of undocumented changes, issues on change orders and lawsuits over undocumented changes. And its not like engineering, architecture and contracting don't have enough of those problems.
I see is that there is plenty of dimensional lumber being used in that structural system. Different areas of the world use different dimensional lumber sizes than the US. Some areas of the world don't have dimensional lumber. Some areas of the world don't have the infrastructure required (dimensional lumber, CNC machines, trucks to ship the lumber).
I have concerns with the long term stability, durability of the structure. Nails and glue have been in use for a while (hundreds, if not thousands of years) because they work.
As a construction experiment in using new technology to find new ways to design and build buildings it is an interesting experiment. I applaud them for trying this. Its like looking at the concept cars that Ford, Nissan, Subaru, etc release every year and are loaded up with all sorts of outlandish features, some of which will obviously never get to production, some need some refinement and some are pretty good. I have no problem with someone deciding to build the equivalent of a concept car. Don't be surprised if your concept takes a long time to be adopted by the building industry. It will take that long to be vetted by architects, engineers, suppliers and contractors. Hell - it took almost twenty years for contractors to adopt Pro-Press pipe fittings as the preferred option over copper sweated fittings (and that is just copper pipe).
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
I don't know why, but outrageously stupid statements are becoming more and more common. No, this house doesn't "exist largely as a set of digital files". It exists largely as tons of wood. The *instructions* are digital files.
Look at those long wood beams... perfect, very pretty, and also expensive! Is there a house behind it? Very little on the porch is covered on their website, and it doesn't show up on any of their "sustainability" materials. Meanwhile, it features in half of the pictures on the competition website.
If they want to point out how they're using local materials and these new techniques, maybe get rid of that massive redwood "porch" that is neither local, inexpensive, nor innovative.
The basic problem in developing nations, especially in rural areas, is the lack of capital. Let me give a simple example: India has the largest cattle population in the world. Rural Indian villages, and many parts of its cities too are deluged with cow waste. Imagine how much the life will be better if we could contain the cow waste to remove the odor, separate the combustible gases for fuel, and the remaining bio matter to be used as fertilizer! Fuel and fertilizer alone would justify themselves based on cash flow and the odor elimination is a pure bonus!
How much would it cost? What kind of high tech process you need to do this? You need to dig a pit about 25 feet deep, 10 feet in diameter, fill it with cow waste, cover it with some kind of plastic sheet or a metal lid or even a brick dome. You need a central pivot and some paddles to stir it once or twice a day. A smaller diameter tube to extract stuff from the bottom without disturbing the layers on top. Takes about two weeks for the anaerobic bacteria to start working. You can collect odorless natural gas from the top, pull buckets of organic fertilizer from the bottom. Once it gets going this can handle a herd of about 20 cows. The farmer has excess natural gas to cook, to make added products like par-boiled rice, or distillation or popped grains or make country sugar... all of them need lots of fuel. Fertilizer is valuable. Costs less than 250$ to build this. Still not much of market penetration. I remember making presentations to villagers back in 1980s. They simply don't have 250$ to invest.
Shipped prefabricated homes are developed nation solution. The lack of capital for to do even mind bogglingly simple things is just staggering.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact