Not to mention that polystyrene is very widely used as an insulation material for regular box-shaped houses today. Sure, not load bearing, but I would trust a wooden or concrete structure for load bearing much more than a polystyrene one, anyway.
(Not to mention that polystyrene does not have any of the sustainability – which is all the rage nowadays – benefits either)
It is actually used in load bearing applications as well, EPS parts can be made with up to 60 psi load carrying capacity (which borders on magic to me).
We were looking into concrete domes for building a home in Florida. We got cold feet when we couldn't find a contractor who would work in our area that had any experience with this procedure.
But I understand that, like A-frames, adapting vertical furniture, cabinets, etc. to walls that are not 90-degree vertical can be problematic. So you add vertical walls inside ... and then you're losing space.
Domes see expensive to build and expensive to maintain. Makes me wonder why we always assumed the moon colonies of the future would be exotic looking architecture rather than boring and easy to upkeep.
Probably same reason why pipes are round, and propane tanks are hemispherical on the ends. Under pressure / vacuum, corners are stress risers, and flat sheets have to be supported.
They have great properties around wind flow and structural support of the roof system. In a concrete dome house, the roof and the vertical supports are one continuous structure - so no more hurricane blowing off your roof. The building technique is exotic but not hard - one approach is to inflate a plastic sheet into a dome shape and the. spray concrete on the inside to build up the outer shell. Check out this example, which keeps the open garage on the ground floor so that there’s less load from wind on the structure and so the living quarters won’t get flooded:
https://youtu.be/n7CjYhKBjtU
In the specific case of Millenium Park it makes some intuitive sense since there's a parking garage beneath it that can only bear so much weight. For individual homes, I'm not convinced. I'm probably just ignorant of polystyrene's properties and the tradeoffs relative to other materials, but I'm worried about it just kind of hanging around in the environment as buildings degrade. Concrete, steel, and glass do that, I suppose, but in a less displeasing way...
You can do that too to reduce the density of the concrete and to increase the insulation value but what you're more likely to encounter is to have the foundation layered in foam slabs and then concrete poured over the top for a good mixture of strength and insulation. The styrofoam insulates and because the concrete and the foam are in contact it also helps to diffuse loads.
The main reason is to fully insulate the thermal mass of the house from the surroundings. I see this happen around here all the time and even though I understand the basics I'm still not sure that I would like the house that I own and have a good chunk of my saving in built like that because of the long term compression of the foam. I'd be worry about uneven compression and cracks or other foundation issues. But it's really very common.
You can use concrete loaded with an x percentage of styrofoam as a filler to get something approaching dial-a-density. As you add more foam the insulating properties get better but it gets structurally weaker. Ideally you'd layer your densities, more solid on the outside, more foam on the inside. That would also make affixing things and joining the panels easier.
These have been built since the 70's, the quickest constructions were essentially inflated balloons that concrete loaded with Styrofoam was spread over, after curing the balloons were deflated and used for the next unit.
Pretty similar construction here, tons of other examples (really, too many to even list) in various publications:
I'm pretty sure if I dig back enough I'll be able to find stuff from the 60's with rapid dome construction based on styrofoam and concrete in it. It is definitely an interesting way to construct things, I know of a company that uses styrofoam loaded concrete for the fabrication of window frames for brick houses and there are probably a lot of other current applications for that.
Domes have - since Buckminster Fuller, really - been built from all kinds of materials, this is one of the more interesting combinations because it at least does away with all of the nasty seems at nasty angles that a 'normal' geodesic dome has. But some of the problems remain: windows and doors will always require either a special panel or be a bad match for the rest of the dome. The floorplan will pretty much ensure that there aren't any right angles anywhere, so furniture such as bookcases and such (but hey, who needs books... ok, wardrobes) will have to be custom made or placed inefficiently, or all around the center of the dome where they will have a big impact on light.
It's a super elegant concept, but it has problems. I built a small (8 meter diameter) dome in Canada as a spot to sit near the river that ran through our property, we didn't really get around to finishing it (just foil over wood & steel) but it blended in nicely, in a way that very little other buildings would and for that reason alone I'd love to build another one here in NL. But the problems with the shape have so far withheld me from doing it. It might also work well as an office.
Higher number of panels will approximate the dome shape better, will be easier to put up by a single individual, but will also cause more length of seam and hence more chance of springing a leak or rot in case of woodwork in the panels.
I like the "smart, but not wise" quote from Kahn in regards to their utility as permanent living spaces. When everything in our material culture is built around straight lines and right angles, domes just don't use space well. But for temporary structures that don't need interior walls or substantial furniture, they work great.
Also, 8m is pretty big in my eyes - I've made two geodesic domes, one 3v 24' (~7.3m) diameter and one 4v 32' (~9.7m) diameter, and even the 24' was a pretty decent bit of work to fabricate and assemble.
Hm, when you put it that way, yes, it wasn't really small but the intent was to make it a spot where you could sleep with a couple of people in some comfort if you wanted to, not something garden shed sized.
Agreed on the temporary spaces that don't need interior walls, the carrying capacity of a geodesic dome frame is incredible relative to the weight of the materials that are used to put it up. You could hang a couple of hundred kilos from the central joint in the top of the frame and the frame itself was constructed with nothing but 2x4s. I was a bit skeptical about the strength prior to that but afterwards I was totally sold on the concept strength wise. Seeing is believing I guess :)
Slight correction, I believe the inflated forms are left in place as an additional outer vapor barrier after rebar reinforced concrete is sprayed from the inside.
That's clever, this sounds like an improvement on the way they were making these in the 70's. Or maybe they coat the inflated forms with the plastic that will become the vapor barrier later? Anyway, there are so many variations on this theme I'm pretty sure that you'll be able to find examples of all of those in practice.
What I find a bit annoying about dome construction in general is that people are always incredibly busy showing what things look like as they go up, but not so much when they are in actual use, what kind of maintenance they end up with and how they look after 5, 10, 15 and 30 years. Because the interesting part of a building is how well it holds up over the longer term.
Although it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, I wonder how the efficiency of these domes compare to Earthship designs[1], where the intake of solar energy is prioritized over leakage prevention.
Not good, they are hard to affix solar panels to and the amount of light that makes it into the interior where it can be trapped as heat is minimal. Insulation properties can be pretty good though and you could make it into a selective surface with the South side black and the North side white if you wanted. That should help to trap and retain at least some heat.
I've visited an Earthship somewhere in Iowa and it was incredible how efficient it was, midwinter and absolutely comfortable inside with barely any extra heating. Passive solar is a very powerful concept, but you will need a massive thermal sink if you don't get enough sunlight during the winter to tide you over the bad days. Probably easier to add a small amount of auxiliary heating to take the edge off if you ever need it.
The further north you get, the less efficient earthships become. When you have close to no sunlight during the coldest time of the year you want more insulation. Passive house designs work better.
That makes good sense, also, the further North you get the longer the path sunlight has through the atmosphere which can significantly diminish the amount of power per unit area by the time you try to capture it.
I don't see specs (or prices); that always makes me suspicious. It looks like they're looking for developers to pay for 100's of these at a time, so this clearly isn't an option for a typical contractor or home build.
How does it handle fire? Earthquakes? Wind? I see that the panels are joined; have there been stress or pressure tests for leaks? And how difficult/expensive are repairs? Does the surface attract mold?
It seems like a safer bet would be to use this material as a combination sheeting+insulation in traditional homes, but I'll bet it's more expensive, so they're trying to sell it as a complete solution to throw out the costs of foundation and framing.
Oh that's nice! I actually had an idea for this on the drawing board at some time, great to see that it has been done. The blocks I had in mind were more universal though, and easy to put together with just hand tools, these look like they would be nice to create using a CNC driven block factory, a bit like a roofing company makes joists using a CNC driven chopsaw.
These have been featured at least twice in the Abroad in Japan channel on YT. Chris Broad (the host) and his friends even spent the night in them. The atmosphere and scenery are quite something.
No, the concrete it appears to be embedded in should stop that from happening, it is essentially a hollow panel at this stage with a dense concrete surface layer. That's also why then can have those tensional elements in it, if you tried that with 100% styrofoam it wouldn't do anything other than rip the elements apart.
I doubt it. Neither plaster nor cement are ideal thermal insulators, and 100° Celsius is not much in the context of a raging fire. I don't think a fire will need much time to deform the EPS panels in these buildings.
I've worked a bit with woodpanels insulated with styrofoam embedded within concrete. They weren't nearly as fireproof as brick or full reinforced concrete but compared reasonably well with just woodframe or steel (which was the worst of the lot).
As you already observed, it's all about the insulation, and even though the foam itself may melt the concrete will survive the initial roasting and that just leaves you with a bunch of gaps in the concrete which makes it insulate much better than solid concrete would.
You'd have to set up a proper test to determine the amount of insulation you'd have to add (I'd absolutely hate to have to drywall a surface like this). One way to do it would be to stucco the inside. But depending on the thickness of the walls you might not need much to achieve the amount of structural integrity required by the fire code, these are not going to be multi level buildings anyway.
Edit: I did some more digging and found this image on their website:
So it appears that the foam core is just foam, nothing else, so there is no interior structure other than the styrofoam. This won't pass building code or fire code for structural integrity anywhere that I've ever built something. I can see them using these for emergency shelters but not for permanent occupation without more internal structure. They do show a resort built with these, I wonder where it is and what kind of building code they operate under. The cement backing is just a thin layer applied to the outside of the panels, so indeed, when they get too hot the interior will melt and then you're just looking at two thin bits of cement without any kind of reinforcement. It would likely collapse immediately if they did not take any precautions.
Fire safety is not something I could find any information on in their pages, they do mention excellent earthquake resistance, which I totally believe.
I once worked in an office building that was a two story geodesic dome. It was mostly OK, except that the curved walls could be annoying especially on the second floor.
I had a second floor office and it was hard to find good use for the space against the outside wall. Anything tall, like a bookshelf or lamp, had to be quite a ways out from the base of the wall to get enough vertical room.
A desk would have fit in that space, but who wants a desk facing the wall away from the door so you are working with you back to anyone who enters your office?
I ended up putting a couch there. Unless you were quite tall there was little chance of accidentally bopping your head when trying to sit down or get up, and it only took the tall people a couple of hits to learn to be careful. :-)
Domes are cool looking on the outside, but require care to make work on the inside.
They probably work better as houses than office buildings, because the designer of a house can better anticipate what each room will be used for and arrange it so that things you'd naturally want against outside walls are things that would be OK with the curves.
An office building has a lot more variability from tenant to tenant, making it more likely that the tenant's things won't work well against the curved walls.
My main concern if I was considering a dome for a house would be maintenance and repairs. For example if it has a shingled roof and developed a leak could any average roofing company deal with it, or would I be looking at calling in specialists? Probably best for a dome to get one that is not essentially a conventional building in dome shape, like the office building we were in, but rather something like the domes in the article.
Here's the one we had offices in [1]. The same builder built a couple more in the same town at around the same time (late '80s) [2].
Here's a link to the first building at the county parcel search site, showing a photo and drawing with floor dimensions and area [3], and with links to all kinds of other details. Looks like it was last sold a few months ago for $365k in case anyone is curious about how much such a building is worth. That's not bad for an almost 4000 sq ft building.
Here's the parcel search link for the smaller one at the second location [4], and here is the link for the larger one at the second location [5].
We see new ideas for home building all the time, dome shaped, 3D printed, using shipping containers, etc... and yet, everyone in the world still builds vaguely box shaped buildings with wood, bricks or concrete.
All these new things tend to have issues with at least one of condensation, insulation, overall cost, convenience, weatherproofing, local availability of materials, durability, safety, etc...
Dome houses are far from a new idea, neither are plastic houses, I have never seen them except as a novelty or experiment. I don't know what's wrong with them, but if there were good, we would probably see more of them.
Modern construction techniques are well optimized and adapted to the local environment, using several layers, with materials serving a specific function like structural integrity, insulation or weatherproofing, with good value. If you want to sound fancy, you can call it composite materials.
The catch is that curved edges are a pain in the ass to fit furniture in, and varying sizes of dome homes have different curve angles, so you can't just make standard "curved" furniture. An box is a box regardless of size, and any couch fits against any flat wall. Sectional couches now let you customize the size to fit bigger or smaller boxes.
Unless you get a lot of custom pieces, you can lose a lot of space or end up with awkward and ugly situations, so it really only works for people who have the time and resources to spend on custom interior design.
Because of all this, resale of the home can be difficult, because your market is limited to the small community of people
Perhaps as 3d and custom manufacturing becomes more commonplace and price competitive with assembly line products, there will be more of an appetite for the amount of customization that these kinds of homes require.
I bet some people are genuinely living your comment out, just with VR goggles. We are in that weird bit between "normal" and cyber dystopia/utopia that doesn't get much explanation in fiction.
Makes me think of Akane's apartment in Psycho Pass. Who needs decorations when you have holograms/VR. Although personally I won't those darn monkeys looking at me.
If you make a bookcase, the vertical members will have to vary quite drastically in width along their length. And the shelves would be significantly deeper on the bottom than they would be 5 feet up. And wood comes in rectangular pieces, so besides all the custom cuts, you also will have a huge amount of wasted material.
You just have to partition the interior with vertical walls that extend up 6+ feet. The void behind can be used for storage just like with second story kneewalls.
> You just have to partition the interior with vertical walls that extend up 6+ feet.
Any section cut through a dome will be a half circle, so you're still going to be wasting a lot of material when you cut that wall. And at 6' high, it's going to encroach significantly on the floor space of the dome.
> The void behind can be used for storage just like with second story kneewalls.
This would require access from the (approximate) middle of the knee wall, reducing the usefulness of said kneewall. And leaving a storage space on either side of this access shaped roughly like half a wedge of apple (though a bit larger).
It's either that or the knee wall itself would have to curve to stay a consistent distance from the bottom edge of the dome, which would be a whole different nightmare to build.
If your house is made of polystyrene, your furniture can be too. After going to team lab in Japan and experiencing a room that was all beanbag, we built a room in our house that is all beanbag.
My own kids do a lot of crazy, sometimes destructive, things which make think "how the hell do you even come up with that and not realize it's a bad idea? It's as bad as when I was a kid and... Oh."
If you don't have TV what is your couch pointed at!?!?
Lots of people put their couches etc straight against a wall pointing to the opposite wall where their tv and credenza is rested against.
But when one looks at published interior design or people's pinterest dream boards you'll see floating couches, arrangements around the center of a space, etc.
Though I'm sure that pedestrian layout is partly a cost thing if you have very limited space. Or hell even a bunch of cheap furniture doesn't even have backs or it looks like cheap particle board only crap.
That New Yorker cartoon saying something about you have to be really rich to afford this much nothingness.
The acoustics only have the slightest weirdness, there's a spot in the 3rd floor Master Bedroom where I can talk to someone in a specific spot in the 2nd floor kitchen (on the other side of the dome) as though I were standing next to them, but otherwise my dome is good at keeping noises isolated.
> The catch is that curved edges are a pain in the ass to fit furniture
This isn't true.
Can you seriously link to a domed house that went for even equal to a similar house?
A domed house we looked at went for at least double similar market value.
If this was remotely true as the limiting factor we'd have domed sheds which are a mess anyway and they look very cool (because no one has them)
I put heaps of money into making my house interesting. Every kid who visits the family friend with the dome house will remember that forever.
Domed houses/buildings cost a lot to build currently after 50+ year of schemes to make them cheap. Inflatable balloons with concrete pumped on top is another example.
A couple of catches: building codes, fire safety, no straight walls, hard to affix windows, solar panels etc, plenty of ways to bump your head on the inside. Some of these can be fixed by first having a 1 m or even higher circular 'riser' on which you place the dome.
The name I usually see for such materials is 'engineered', as in someone purposefully mixed and matched different materials to get to a degree of reliability and reproducibility that would not be the case with natural materials. For instance, wood joists made from chips are going to be quite strong for their weight and very straight and a number of them will be within very small tolerances identical. Whereas if you made them from 2x4's they would have to be overdimensioned in order to achieve the same degree of strength due to variation in the materials they are made out of.
Since we're all living on a sphere, at some point the difference is moot. I've been in a couple of dome houses and we had a museum here in NL that was built inside a geodesic dome (Aviodome, near Schiphol, since dismantled and moved to Amsterdam:
That’s not a half sphere. Pure half sphere structures are extremely rare as they waste a lot of space and building materials. Your better off using more than half a sphere so the walls curve in slightly at the base. You get more useable internal volume from a slightly smaller exterior footprint and use less building materials. The next obvious improvement is to use a dome on top of a cylinder which again improves useable space over a half sphere and is a fairly common design as seen with silos and observatories etc.
The only way a half sphere works out well is if your dealing with some form of pressure dome. Either using internal pressure to support weight, or in the case of a building underwater/Moon/Mars dealing with very high pressure differences.
(Geodesic) domes are not usually half spheres at all. They can be but they really don't have to be. You can do more than half a sphere, half a sphere, less than half a sphere and all of them would be called domes.
Geodesics usually have flat panels as well - flat panels of limited size meeting at odd angles, yes, but flat panels nonetheless - that allow you to use conventional furnishings against or nearby to walls without unusual visual gaps in at least a few places. "Real" domes, on the other hand, not so much.
Don't overlook storing and moving prebuilt components. Complex shapes don't stack well, requiring added trips for distribution and delivery, and warehousing these shapes would be terribly inefficient.
Space efficiency is one of the things that keeps prefab stick-built walls from being cost competitive with site built. Several times as many unassembled walls will fit on a truck than assembled.
The catch is getting a mortgage. It does cost less to build, unless it's not in the standard building codes. It's not. So to legally build it and live in it, you need a structural engineer to draw up the plans and get a county building department to OK the engineer's plans. Also, all the regular trades aren't familiar with it, and give higher "nervous" quotes, if they give any at all. It's just faster and cheaper to build something the building trades call a "shit box". Everyone is familiar with it. Building departments and contractors are ok with it, and most importantly, you can get a mortgage on it.
My dome home was financed FHA, regular down, 2.25% interest rate not even a year ago. The only hang up was that I paid about $200 more than usual for the property evaluation as they had to locate someone who could accurately evaluate a geodesic.
These sorts of projects hide where the real cost of construction is. Land, foundations, electrical, council permits, drainage, plumbing, telco, it all adds up. Building the walls is a minor cost in comparison, and if you're going to make a house you might as well spend a bit more, and get more house per dollar.
it claims it's sustainable, but i don't see these houses lasting more than 50 years. at least with a normal house you can repair it without having to demolish it.
I don't have any good sources to back this up, but I thought it was typical for homes in Japan to only have a 30-40 year lifespan anyway. This [0] cites average age of wood-framed homes between 27-30 years, with concrete more like 37 years, and contrasts with US wood frame building lifespan roughly 2x that.
Would enjoy reading comments from someone who really knows about this.
Market value is going to zero by getting 30 years old (probably more earlier), but it not mean that current residents don't live there. They would just live until die. 35yr loan is pretty common so the house must have 35yr life at least.
One of the most important regulation about houses is earthquake resistance standard. "New earthquake resistance standard" was made in 1985 so now is just after 36 year old. So maybe the market is going to change, along with the fact Japanese salary won't up much.
Also, we already have a cheap prefab solution which is optimized for house construction: modular homes aka trailers. They don't have the best reputation.
Home built with portable modular 8'x40' boxes made of wood: trashy.
Home built with portable modular 8'x40' boxes made of corrugated steel: trendy.
We definitely don't talk about this enough. Trailer homes can be half the cost of a tiny home, but nobody wants them because of their reputation or appearance.
I would also note that domes are solving a problem most people don't have with their houses.
Domes are a great way to maximize the volume enclosed by a surface, which is almost a thing for heat loss, but you can do almost as well with a box and adding unusable volume is a false economy.
Domes are great for creating a massive, self-supporting enclosed space ... but again, why do you need that in your house? Conventional building techniques can make you a pretty large space pretty easily, and you don't typically need to support unusual loads on top of your house.
You don't even need to make your home in a dome shape to make it out of insulated concrete; insulated concrete forms are and easy way too throw together a box with the same basic benefits.
For sake of argument I'm building a 160m2 house (on the larger size for my part of Europe) and the materials and labour costs for all the exterior walls came to €15,000. Admittedly that's not a finished wall as we'll need plaster on the inside and insulation on the outside (we used clay air bricks, so in milder climates the insulation could be skipped). The same volume would need 15 shipping containers - I doubt you could even get the raw containers for that price.
Considering we'll probably be spending close to €300k in total, that's not a very big expense. It's also quite quick, it took a team of 2 people less than 2 weeks to build. So far we've been waiting 3 months for windows to be made.
One problem I see is the same problem I see when considering a greenhouse with vertical walls or a hoophouse with curved walls. Vertical walls don’t waste space. In a hoop house or these dome houses there will be weird parts all around the edge that aren’t very tall that could be considered wasted space.
Strengely enough, traditional building techniques depend on the local availability of materials, you will find stone buildings where stone is available, wood buildings where wood is avaialble and brick buildings where clay is available.
No surprise that igloos are popular where the only available material is ice (and you need arches/cupolas as there is nothing to make beams with).
Looked into building a house out of EPS panels, since it (at first look) looks like a splendid material with built in insulation.
However:
1: it loses its integrity around 80-100c causing catastrophic failure on bearing capability
2: it burns literally like any other hydrocarbon, and its foamed construction makes it highly flammable
3: to reduce flammability and adhere to code you need to use EPS with flame retardants - which fuck you up, you're basically building a house out of Frozen gasoline and flame retardants.
so if you want to go this route, take a look at Corkwood instead - comes in large industrial panels and can be used to build houses - been used for 100s of years, doesn't burn - at-all - and contains no nasty shit.
reasons:
Easy to build, integrated insulation and loadcarrying in same simple structure, and (this is the mayn reason why instead of foamed concrete) it is permeable, meaning that you do NOT need active ventilation system (Causing dryair in winter etc.) and air moisture is constant year round.
you coat it with a silicate based coating on both sides (also permeable), and nothing else. The result is a breathing house, that is net-zero, you can even build your bathroom from that stuff and it will just wick moisture from the air and slowly release it again.
It's disappointing that it hasn't caught on, but there are practical reasons that make the design difficult despite it's greater efficiencies and resilience.
These are using dense concrete though, the ones from the article use a 100% foam core with thin layers of concrete on the outside and zero reinforcement or other structural components that I can detect.
I really like the Monolithic domes, they seem like the most practical way of constructing such a structure. No seams just what you need, no more and no less and a very mature process, far ahead of the company in the article in terms of applicability, all you need to ship from the factory is the inflatables, concrete you can make on-site.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 210 ms ] thread..and stone, and brick, and glass, and adobe, and straw, and fabric..
(Not to mention that polystyrene does not have any of the sustainability – which is all the rage nowadays – benefits either)
We were looking into concrete domes for building a home in Florida. We got cold feet when we couldn't find a contractor who would work in our area that had any experience with this procedure.
I still would love to live in a "dome home".
But I understand that, like A-frames, adapting vertical furniture, cabinets, etc. to walls that are not 90-degree vertical can be problematic. So you add vertical walls inside ... and then you're losing space.
Knowing American labor costs, it'll cost an arm and a leg.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-Dome
That's why the ISS is shaped the way it is, cylinders joined with circular joints.
In particular the use of geofoam at Chicago's Millenium park: https://www.insulfoam.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/april-1...
In the specific case of Millenium Park it makes some intuitive sense since there's a parking garage beneath it that can only bear so much weight. For individual homes, I'm not convinced. I'm probably just ignorant of polystyrene's properties and the tradeoffs relative to other materials, but I'm worried about it just kind of hanging around in the environment as buildings degrade. Concrete, steel, and glass do that, I suppose, but in a less displeasing way...
Some pictures:
https://fpmccann.co.uk/portfolio-items/thermabeam/
Insulated foundations set on foam:
https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/placing-a-concr...
The main reason is to fully insulate the thermal mass of the house from the surroundings. I see this happen around here all the time and even though I understand the basics I'm still not sure that I would like the house that I own and have a good chunk of my saving in built like that because of the long term compression of the foam. I'd be worry about uneven compression and cracks or other foundation issues. But it's really very common.
Was going to comment a link to his video as well.
Pretty similar construction here, tons of other examples (really, too many to even list) in various publications:
https://www.motherearthnews.com/green-homes/foam-dome-zmaz80...
I really do not see the novelty.
https://live.staticflickr.com/1787/42134502335_045815b1ee_b....
Domes have - since Buckminster Fuller, really - been built from all kinds of materials, this is one of the more interesting combinations because it at least does away with all of the nasty seems at nasty angles that a 'normal' geodesic dome has. But some of the problems remain: windows and doors will always require either a special panel or be a bad match for the rest of the dome. The floorplan will pretty much ensure that there aren't any right angles anywhere, so furniture such as bookcases and such (but hey, who needs books... ok, wardrobes) will have to be custom made or placed inefficiently, or all around the center of the dome where they will have a big impact on light.
It's a super elegant concept, but it has problems. I built a small (8 meter diameter) dome in Canada as a spot to sit near the river that ran through our property, we didn't really get around to finishing it (just foil over wood & steel) but it blended in nicely, in a way that very little other buildings would and for that reason alone I'd love to build another one here in NL. But the problems with the shape have so far withheld me from doing it. It might also work well as an office.
https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/the-restoration...
Higher number of panels will approximate the dome shape better, will be easier to put up by a single individual, but will also cause more length of seam and hence more chance of springing a leak or rot in case of woodwork in the panels.
Also, 8m is pretty big in my eyes - I've made two geodesic domes, one 3v 24' (~7.3m) diameter and one 4v 32' (~9.7m) diameter, and even the 24' was a pretty decent bit of work to fabricate and assemble.
Agreed on the temporary spaces that don't need interior walls, the carrying capacity of a geodesic dome frame is incredible relative to the weight of the materials that are used to put it up. You could hang a couple of hundred kilos from the central joint in the top of the frame and the frame itself was constructed with nothing but 2x4s. I was a bit skeptical about the strength prior to that but afterwards I was totally sold on the concept strength wise. Seeing is believing I guess :)
Perhaps there are different techniques.
What I find a bit annoying about dome construction in general is that people are always incredibly busy showing what things look like as they go up, but not so much when they are in actual use, what kind of maintenance they end up with and how they look after 5, 10, 15 and 30 years. Because the interesting part of a building is how well it holds up over the longer term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
I've visited an Earthship somewhere in Iowa and it was incredible how efficient it was, midwinter and absolutely comfortable inside with barely any extra heating. Passive solar is a very powerful concept, but you will need a massive thermal sink if you don't get enough sunlight during the winter to tide you over the bad days. Probably easier to add a small amount of auxiliary heating to take the edge off if you ever need it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29216984
How does it handle fire? Earthquakes? Wind? I see that the panels are joined; have there been stress or pressure tests for leaks? And how difficult/expensive are repairs? Does the surface attract mold?
It seems like a safer bet would be to use this material as a combination sheeting+insulation in traditional homes, but I'll bet it's more expensive, so they're trying to sell it as a complete solution to throw out the costs of foundation and framing.
https://gablok.com/en/
Here's one of the videos showcasing the Igloo house during one of his Journey Across Japan series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqX_2Wmj7xE
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318854130_An_overvi...
As you already observed, it's all about the insulation, and even though the foam itself may melt the concrete will survive the initial roasting and that just leaves you with a bunch of gaps in the concrete which makes it insulate much better than solid concrete would.
You'd have to set up a proper test to determine the amount of insulation you'd have to add (I'd absolutely hate to have to drywall a surface like this). One way to do it would be to stucco the inside. But depending on the thickness of the walls you might not need much to achieve the amount of structural integrity required by the fire code, these are not going to be multi level buildings anyway.
Edit: I did some more digging and found this image on their website:
http://www.i-domehouse.com/product_type/img/01-04_2.jpg
So it appears that the foam core is just foam, nothing else, so there is no interior structure other than the styrofoam. This won't pass building code or fire code for structural integrity anywhere that I've ever built something. I can see them using these for emergency shelters but not for permanent occupation without more internal structure. They do show a resort built with these, I wonder where it is and what kind of building code they operate under. The cement backing is just a thin layer applied to the outside of the panels, so indeed, when they get too hot the interior will melt and then you're just looking at two thin bits of cement without any kind of reinforcement. It would likely collapse immediately if they did not take any precautions.
Fire safety is not something I could find any information on in their pages, they do mention excellent earthquake resistance, which I totally believe.
I had a second floor office and it was hard to find good use for the space against the outside wall. Anything tall, like a bookshelf or lamp, had to be quite a ways out from the base of the wall to get enough vertical room.
A desk would have fit in that space, but who wants a desk facing the wall away from the door so you are working with you back to anyone who enters your office?
I ended up putting a couch there. Unless you were quite tall there was little chance of accidentally bopping your head when trying to sit down or get up, and it only took the tall people a couple of hits to learn to be careful. :-)
Domes are cool looking on the outside, but require care to make work on the inside.
They probably work better as houses than office buildings, because the designer of a house can better anticipate what each room will be used for and arrange it so that things you'd naturally want against outside walls are things that would be OK with the curves.
An office building has a lot more variability from tenant to tenant, making it more likely that the tenant's things won't work well against the curved walls.
My main concern if I was considering a dome for a house would be maintenance and repairs. For example if it has a shingled roof and developed a leak could any average roofing company deal with it, or would I be looking at calling in specialists? Probably best for a dome to get one that is not essentially a conventional building in dome shape, like the office building we were in, but rather something like the domes in the article.
Here's a link to the first building at the county parcel search site, showing a photo and drawing with floor dimensions and area [3], and with links to all kinds of other details. Looks like it was last sold a few months ago for $365k in case anyone is curious about how much such a building is worth. That's not bad for an almost 4000 sq ft building.
Here's the parcel search link for the smaller one at the second location [4], and here is the link for the larger one at the second location [5].
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7538416,-122.665396,3a,60y,1...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7433177,-122.6567975,3a,60y,...
[3] https://psearch.kitsapgov.com/pdetails/Details?page=photossk...
[4] https://psearch.kitsapgov.com/pdetails/Details?page=photossk...
[5] https://psearch.kitsapgov.com/pdetails/Details?page=photossk...
Thank you for digging those up!
We see new ideas for home building all the time, dome shaped, 3D printed, using shipping containers, etc... and yet, everyone in the world still builds vaguely box shaped buildings with wood, bricks or concrete.
All these new things tend to have issues with at least one of condensation, insulation, overall cost, convenience, weatherproofing, local availability of materials, durability, safety, etc...
Dome houses are far from a new idea, neither are plastic houses, I have never seen them except as a novelty or experiment. I don't know what's wrong with them, but if there were good, we would probably see more of them.
Modern construction techniques are well optimized and adapted to the local environment, using several layers, with materials serving a specific function like structural integrity, insulation or weatherproofing, with good value. If you want to sound fancy, you can call it composite materials.
Unless you get a lot of custom pieces, you can lose a lot of space or end up with awkward and ugly situations, so it really only works for people who have the time and resources to spend on custom interior design.
Because of all this, resale of the home can be difficult, because your market is limited to the small community of people
Perhaps as 3d and custom manufacturing becomes more commonplace and price competitive with assembly line products, there will be more of an appetite for the amount of customization that these kinds of homes require.
Any section cut through a dome will be a half circle, so you're still going to be wasting a lot of material when you cut that wall. And at 6' high, it's going to encroach significantly on the floor space of the dome.
> The void behind can be used for storage just like with second story kneewalls.
This would require access from the (approximate) middle of the knee wall, reducing the usefulness of said kneewall. And leaving a storage space on either side of this access shaped roughly like half a wedge of apple (though a bit larger).
It's either that or the knee wall itself would have to curve to stay a consistent distance from the bottom edge of the dome, which would be a whole different nightmare to build.
A few years ago, the neighbor kid from where my parents live made a hole in a wall of his room leading to outside.
Polystyrene sticks to everything, by the way. https://i.postimg.cc/sgb5n2bf/20200114-134910.jpg
Lots of people put their couches etc straight against a wall pointing to the opposite wall where their tv and credenza is rested against.
But when one looks at published interior design or people's pinterest dream boards you'll see floating couches, arrangements around the center of a space, etc.
Though I'm sure that pedestrian layout is partly a cost thing if you have very limited space. Or hell even a bunch of cheap furniture doesn't even have backs or it looks like cheap particle board only crap.
That New Yorker cartoon saying something about you have to be really rich to afford this much nothingness.
The acoustics only have the slightest weirdness, there's a spot in the 3rd floor Master Bedroom where I can talk to someone in a specific spot in the 2nd floor kitchen (on the other side of the dome) as though I were standing next to them, but otherwise my dome is good at keeping noises isolated.
This isn't true.
Can you seriously link to a domed house that went for even equal to a similar house?
A domed house we looked at went for at least double similar market value.
If this was remotely true as the limiting factor we'd have domed sheds which are a mess anyway and they look very cool (because no one has them)
I put heaps of money into making my house interesting. Every kid who visits the family friend with the dome house will remember that forever.
Domed houses/buildings cost a lot to build currently after 50+ year of schemes to make them cheap. Inflatable balloons with concrete pumped on top is another example.
The name I usually see for such materials is 'engineered', as in someone purposefully mixed and matched different materials to get to a degree of reliability and reproducibility that would not be the case with natural materials. For instance, wood joists made from chips are going to be quite strong for their weight and very straight and a number of them will be within very small tolerances identical. Whereas if you made them from 2x4's they would have to be overdimensioned in order to achieve the same degree of strength due to variation in the materials they are made out of.
(not saying that dome houses are any good tho)
Since we're all living on a sphere, at some point the difference is moot. I've been in a couple of dome houses and we had a museum here in NL that was built inside a geodesic dome (Aviodome, near Schiphol, since dismantled and moved to Amsterdam:
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviodome
and
https://amsterdome.nl/
What I love about the story is that the building was simply dismantled and put up again in a new location.
The only way a half sphere works out well is if your dealing with some form of pressure dome. Either using internal pressure to support weight, or in the case of a building underwater/Moon/Mars dealing with very high pressure differences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_dome
Some good sample images there.
And a geodesic dome does not require any internal supports, so it doesn't matter whether a pressure differential is involved.
Essentially any slice of a sphere can be made into a geodesic dome.
The dome provides a greenhouse enviro and then, inside that, they build regular old rectangular houses: https://www.loveproperty.com/gallerylist/66379/this-family-l...
I think depending on where you are and the construction, these may or may not be in the scope of building codes.
Space efficiency is one of the things that keeps prefab stick-built walls from being cost competitive with site built. Several times as many unassembled walls will fit on a truck than assembled.
My dome home was financed FHA, regular down, 2.25% interest rate not even a year ago. The only hang up was that I paid about $200 more than usual for the property evaluation as they had to locate someone who could accurately evaluate a geodesic.
These sorts of projects hide where the real cost of construction is. Land, foundations, electrical, council permits, drainage, plumbing, telco, it all adds up. Building the walls is a minor cost in comparison, and if you're going to make a house you might as well spend a bit more, and get more house per dollar.
it claims it's sustainable, but i don't see these houses lasting more than 50 years. at least with a normal house you can repair it without having to demolish it.
Would enjoy reading comments from someone who really knows about this.
[0] https://japanpropertycentral.com/2014/02/understanding-the-l...
One of the most important regulation about houses is earthquake resistance standard. "New earthquake resistance standard" was made in 1985 so now is just after 36 year old. So maybe the market is going to change, along with the fact Japanese salary won't up much.
Basically what you said, these things all focus on the cheapest and least important part of construction while solving it in a pretty bad way.
Home built with portable modular 8'x40' boxes made of wood: trashy.
Home built with portable modular 8'x40' boxes made of corrugated steel: trendy.
- Low quality materials (thinner walls, shittier insulation, etc.)
- Off-standard measurements make replacements difficult (everything from doorways to vent sizes are unique to mobiles)
- Both of these problems conspire to make inevitable repairs more expensive than they otherwise would be
- With the result that finding handymen to do work for you is challenging. A number of people simply refuse to work on them.
- Financing options suck (banks often won't finance them, leaving you to specialty lenders with downright extortionate terms)
- Trailer parks suck. (And also have a reputation that is not entirely undeserved)
They're cheap alright, but the truism "you get what you pay for" applies. I'd never buy a mobile home again, not even brand new.
Domes are a great way to maximize the volume enclosed by a surface, which is almost a thing for heat loss, but you can do almost as well with a box and adding unusable volume is a false economy.
Domes are great for creating a massive, self-supporting enclosed space ... but again, why do you need that in your house? Conventional building techniques can make you a pretty large space pretty easily, and you don't typically need to support unusual loads on top of your house.
You don't even need to make your home in a dome shape to make it out of insulated concrete; insulated concrete forms are and easy way too throw together a box with the same basic benefits.
Considering we'll probably be spending close to €300k in total, that's not a very big expense. It's also quite quick, it took a team of 2 people less than 2 weeks to build. So far we've been waiting 3 months for windows to be made.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27644334
Igloos are popular in certain parts of the world.
No surprise that igloos are popular where the only available material is ice (and you need arches/cupolas as there is nothing to make beams with).
They claim its pure polystyrene with no additives, which means no resistance to fire whatsoever.
It could be mitigated if its encased in plaster properly (I have EPS external wall insulation, but its encased in cement and silicone render.)
1: it loses its integrity around 80-100c causing catastrophic failure on bearing capability
2: it burns literally like any other hydrocarbon, and its foamed construction makes it highly flammable
3: to reduce flammability and adhere to code you need to use EPS with flame retardants - which fuck you up, you're basically building a house out of Frozen gasoline and flame retardants.
so if you want to go this route, take a look at Corkwood instead - comes in large industrial panels and can be used to build houses - been used for 100s of years, doesn't burn - at-all - and contains no nasty shit.
https://eumeps.construction/content/8-downloads/4-documents/...
source of initial inspiration: https://vimeo.com/81180775
cork source: http://www.edisughero.com/en/#prodotti
blocks: https://www.gencork.com/2020/about-us/
so next house is going to be made from Poroton instead: https://archello.com/product/s9-p-climate-neutral-poroton-br...
reasons: Easy to build, integrated insulation and loadcarrying in same simple structure, and (this is the mayn reason why instead of foamed concrete) it is permeable, meaning that you do NOT need active ventilation system (Causing dryair in winter etc.) and air moisture is constant year round.
you coat it with a silicate based coating on both sides (also permeable), and nothing else. The result is a breathing house, that is net-zero, you can even build your bathroom from that stuff and it will just wick moisture from the air and slowly release it again.
wonderous stuff.
It's disappointing that it hasn't caught on, but there are practical reasons that make the design difficult despite it's greater efficiencies and resilience.
I really like the Monolithic domes, they seem like the most practical way of constructing such a structure. No seams just what you need, no more and no less and a very mature process, far ahead of the company in the article in terms of applicability, all you need to ship from the factory is the inflatables, concrete you can make on-site.
https://www.laconservancy.org/locations/airform-bubble-house https://www.mortarsprayer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Wal...
I know that someone built one, somewhere, last century.
It involved, basically, a heavy-duty “chicken wire” frame, with sprayed-on concrete.