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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.
“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".
It just means all the carbon parts are painted beige.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
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
Wouldn't a good option be to simply get a couple old shipping containers and do a little cutting and welding? You could use spray-on insulation and cover it in drywall. Would also be heavier and structurally much more sound than plywood. The stackable nature of containers means you could easily build a 2 story house, by building stairs and using 1 container for a hallway and 1 room and an adjoining container divided into 2-3 rooms. 4 old 40ft containers would get you 1200 sq ft and would cost 10-12k total. Bonus points for being green by using "reclaimed" items like the old shipping containers, reclaimed lumber for flooring/cabinets/furniture, etc.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.
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
Anywhere it freezes in the winter (which covers a rather large swath of the world, but certainly not all of it), you need to establish the foundation below the soil frost depth or face your foundation heaving each winter and slowly but surely twisting your building into collapse. This building seems to have been designed for zones where the ground does not freeze.
Also, what happens when the nice solar panels get covered in six feet of snow? Oh, right, not made for that application. And when the wind blows hard and tears off the nice deck / car park? Right, again, not made for that application, either.
So, OK, they designed a house for temperate climates with moderate weather in a way that does not require nails or screws. An interesting design challenge, somewhat like, "let's see how fast the two of us can run in a three-legged race!" It's fun, you might learn something about design, but isn't really all that practical. Moreover, I see a lot of very expensive finish ply in those photos, so this design isn't intended for low-income housing.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
No, so you can repair/update the electrical or plumbing by popping off a panel, doing the work, then snapping it back on again instead of having to demolish and re-finish the drywall.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
No, your house plans uses nails. Nails disqualify you. Try using something simpler like a CNC next time.
Sheesh, get with the times bud.
I think I said that advances occur very slowly in the construction industry. Mortise and tenon has been abandoned. Why? Because something came along that was cheaper/faster with all other things being equal. Eventually something will come along that will replace nails and glue. I don't know what it is.
I won't use a technology/system that hasn't already been vetted through the insurance and rating agencies (UL, et al). If you come to me trying to get me to schedule/specify a product that hasn't made it past the rating agencies I'll throw you out with the bath water. I don't have time for untested and unrated equipment.
There are plenty of competing technologies that are tested and rated (have the UL mark) and are still trying to break into competitive construction in a big manner:
Precut lumber (mostly in use in custom home construction but not much elsewhere)
Engineered lumber products (it shows up when space is the constraint)
Automated concrete laying (Not matter what people say, this is still experimental)
Pro-Press fittings for refrigerant piping (just came on the market, the contractor is willing to give it a go with our blessing)
Integrated duct/insulation systems (This keeps coming up as an alternative to galvanized and keeps getting shot down)
Alternative grease duct systems (Fire rated systems that take less space)
3D printing (This is a novelty right now, but one that works. A couple of architects have specified it for difficult metal fittings in unusual buildings).
I could name a half dozen other technologies that are coming into maturity and their adoption is based upon preference or "We did it this way when I was a whipper snapper and you will to".
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
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.
And 50% of building is in site prep, foundation and utilities, so someone attempting to build this will end up with nothing more than a shed if you don't have utilities.
Bullshit. Cooling requires a complicated air conditioning system with a condenser, evaporator, heat sink, cooling fans, and refrigerant lines running about. Heating requires fire or a hot piece of metal. It costs a heck of a lot less in natural gas to heat a house 40 degrees above ambient than it does to cool a house using the AC using electricity 40 degrees below ambient.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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.