Well concrete is not waterproof (generally) so they are technically also using the form as waterproofing. It's pretty clever IMO but you'd need rebar at the very least for any structure worth building...
Earthquake resistance is increased by strengthening the concrete, but it mainly depends on how the structure is built, not just the shape but additoinal measures used to strengthen the structure. We've been stuck on rebar for so long that research on alternatives has stalled, but there are interesting opportunities and developments in that area. For example, basalt fiber and bamboo have potential.
Sustainable, innovative building structures that don't require energy-intensive and corrosive steel will depend on a convergence of strengthening technologies and archtectural techniques, maybe even including ones like described in the original article.
Considering all the environmental and social problems we have with modern housing and construction, this is a prime area for innovation!
Modern uses of Roman concrete go beyond what the Romans did. We can create completely different types of structures using the same principles. Here's an example of recent developments in research:
Concrete without rebar lacks tensile strength, and Roman concrete is no different. When using materials with insufficient tensile strength, you're severely restricted in the kinds of structures you can build. That's why Roman buildings used so many domes and arches, and why they were massive.
Now, I'm from a place where HVAC is rare, and thus this sounds like a mold disaster waiting to happen. But is that actually best practice where HVAC is common?
Ventilation is not HVAC. Ventilation can be as simple as having openable vents at proper locations in a structure which could be manually operated to provide air exchange on demand.
A modern, energy efficient house is intentionally very air tight, and ventilation is achieved using mechanical ventilation with heat recovery. That basically gives you the best of both worlds - a highly ventilated house (so low humidity levels) coupled with very little heat loss - MVHR systems can often recovery 90% of the heat in the ventilated air.
Look at Passivhaus for the most extreme version of this. But even regular new build houses in the UK now have to meet air tightness regulations.
The big problem with the oft repeated "Let the house breath!" is that if you don't bother to control air leakage you're letting that unfiltered, unconditioned air percolate through the insulation which can be a good media for mold and mildew to grow in. Not to mention the fact that you're throwing away energy, even ignoring air conditioning surely you're still heating during the winter.
Ideally you'd have an airtight house and bring in fresh air through an ERV or HRV to save energy and filter it but even if it's just fresh untreated outside air brought in straight from a vent you'd still eliminate the moist air moving through fiberglass batt insulation and the occasional condensation on the paper backing of the drywall. One thing I really like about spray foam insulation is that your insulation is your air barrier and thermal barrier and you don't have to deal with air passing through your thermal barrier and potentially causing condensation. In southern climates the air barrier is always on the outside of the insulation and in northern climates from what I understand they put the air barrier on the inside. Spray foam effectively puts it on both sides so you're not compromising based on what location is more often going to prevent condensation.
Think about what an air filter looks like after a few months. That's what happens inside wall cavities in leaky homes only there's no way to change them and it builds up slowly over decades. There's a lot more surface area, but that only delays the problem, if you look at any renovation photos when a wall is opened up after a few decades they're typically filled with dust and grime. Even if you just had a 6 inch duct with nothing but some louvres separating inside from outside you've still eliminated most of the potential buildup.
I agree that a tight house is desirable for many reasons, but proper ventilation and indoor air quality are areas of building design and construction that are often severely neglected, even in new construction.
And with the amount of ventilation needed to make a PVC lined box into a healthy living environment, your kids will be conducting airfoil research at the dining room table.
Until they figure out how to get reinforcement into it, it would not be able to produce any parts of the structure that are in tension, such as non-vaulted ceilings.
Is concrete actually a good building material for homes? It doesn't seem like it'd be insulating, and you're definitely not getting internal plumbing/wiring. And concrete is actively bad for the environment. It all feels like the shipping container home -- seems great at a glance, but doesn't really pan out to be lived in.
Ikea style flatpacked prefabs still seems like a vastly better option to me.
Cement production is one of the biggest carbon emitters. There's also the issue of using PVC for the form. None of this seems eco-friendly.
Why not 3d print homes at that point? At least you can get the rebar and other forms in place ahead of the print, and you get more flexibility in the final design of the structure.
It can be. Concrete isn't a great insulator, but it can moderate temperature changes, so if you have big swings between the day and night, it will keep things cooler in the day and warmer at night, which can be helpful. But if you get a heat wave where it stays hot at night, you're going to be real warm inside the next day too.
This article mentions 100 and 200 square feet buildings, so I don't think there's gonna be much in the way of internal structure. I could see an inflatable structure with 'tubes' at certain places for wiring and plumbing to pass through, which would save cutting holes later.
But like everyone else says, there's easier ways to get the frame up faster. What makes construction slow is coordination between the many different trades that need to work in the same area. With many parts in sequence, and each trade having high utilization, scheduling is difficult --- either you plan with large gaps between trades, or you blow up everyone's schedule when one trade falls behind for whatever reason.
Individual homes in Europe are typically built from bricks, with concrete used for foundations/floors/ceilings.
The work around internal plumbing and wiring is messy, though. A lot of abrasive brick dust is generated. I wouldn't want to be the guy doing this stuff. In a 3D printed home, nice empty spaces could be left in the wall while printing for all the necessary networks.
In modern european homes, plumbing and wiring is done via "octopuses".
Most of the time, every connection coming from the exterior are coming through the floor in a little room that we can use for storage and from there, everything is dispatched through inner walls which are basically empty (except around bedrooms if you want acoustic isolation). This allows to maintain everything from the inside.
I wouldn't call it a mess but I'll acknowledge I'm talking about modern constructions.
It looks like 'placo' is what USians call drywall or sheetrock. (pressed gypsum with a paper backing). We'd call those rails studs; low density residential construction is usually wood studs, but I've got a project going with metal studs because with current pricing trends it makes more sense; metal studs also require armoring electrical though, and there's some other issues depending on use case.
There have been many variations on building houses with prefab forms, going all the way back to Edison. Works fine, but the result is a concrete box. The shell is not the big cost item in homes.
If you want a small, low-cost box structure, there are companies that will sell you one. Concrete.[1] Metal.[2] Steel frame with wood siding.[3]
I remember coming across a video of a product from Europe where the entire wall assembly is sold as one piece (outer wall, insulation, inner wall). I'm not sure if this type of product is common in Europe.
If you then have wire conduits and junction boxes built-in, you are a lot closer to a livable home. Perhaps floor assemblies with hookups for plumbing.
I'm not sure why these things aren't standardized to be the point of plug-n-play. A lot less work for the tradespeople maybe.
Very popular here in Austria. And they are mostly very good quality. I have friends who built one of these "Fertighäuser" (prefab houses) and even though cheaper than a custom build they are really impressive. The walls are delivered just as you describe.
Good quality prefab panels from eastern Europe installed by incompetent foreign companies with no incentive to stand behind their work result in occasional sob stories here in Switzerland.
Here in Switzerland, you are likely to pay through the nose for a mediocre product / service. Caveat emptor, particularly since consumer laws are weak.
There's a rather huge prefab industry here in Estonia. Starting from small pre-fab components (such as a single small wall section) to some houses that are essentially 90% completed in the factory.
If you have the foundation already done, then the assembly of the rest of the house takes around 3-5 days
This is extremely common in the Netherlands. Also very well sorted out these days. My parents' company used to assemble these. A specialised contractor digs and pours a concrete foundation for the walls and once those would be cured a crane, a loader truck and a crew of maybe 3-6 people would on average have a new house ready every 3 days (walls, floors, roofs, wiring, piping), 'ready' being very close to how they're sold to individual owners.
A prefab house design will typically be replicated in several projects / cities, usually with a few customisation options. Different prefab factories have different levels of standardisation and automation. The prefab production lines I designed long ago for example used fully parametric designs to offer standard concepts sized to fit. At the time (~10-15 years ago) a novelty, by now must be pretty standard.
Not in the Netherlands but in Sweden one of the biggest house makers is Älvsbyhus, you can select a base model (begin by selecting number of floors/layout, then size) and customize colors and some details online.
I built a house like this in US. The company is called Bensonwood / Unity up here in NH. It is not cheaper but it is faster and higher quality. From slab to dried in house in 4 days. Passive house level airtightness and insulation.
Wall assembly is zip->10 inch blown in insulation around 10inch I-Joist -> OSB -> 2x3 interior wall studs to hang your sheetrock off of and run utilities. (All pre-drilled for faster running of pex and conduit.)
You do have to do all the interior work after, though.
I still dont understand why people keep talking about "House". When 90% of area that needs urgent "housing" are in needs of Tower Blocks / High Rise Residential Buildings. We Need to find a way to quickly and cost effectively build a lot of mid to high quality apartments. Better heat isolation. Network Pipes ready rather than relying on WiFi.
Note: Yes, I know zoning and planning etc are still the biggest hurdle.
Because house is cool and has integrated comfort. No neighbors, no useless administration.
Building tall buildings is not a rocket science. Look at Burj Khalifa‘s construction: clever designed crane, lots of rebar and extremely powerful concrete pumps. And it’s really fast. One year to build enough space for thousands of people.
>And it’s really fast. One year to build enough space for thousands of people.
Building Tall building isn't Rocket Science, but building them fast, high quality ( comparatively speaking ) and cheap has not been done yet. And one year to build space enough for thousands of people is not my definition of fast. At least building "On Site".
Mmmm, there are a few examples of prefab high-rises that have gone up in weeks or months. I guess high-quality is something of a shifting bar, but if you prefab all the pieces, build them at volume, and have enough demand to justify that volume, it's been done before. That's how all the plattenbau (ugly commie concrete towerblocks went up in eastern europe) got done.
I figure the problem is basically politics. Liberal democracies typically do planning by asking 'stakeholders' (e.g. business owners, home owners, etc) what they think about proposals. Since you're asking the stakeholders in an asset class whether or not you should build more of their asset, usually nearby, the answer is usually a lawsuit.
From what I gather, a industrial-scale air-conditioning unit company basically broke the space open, since they were essentially doing large scale prefab construction already.
Just think about it from first principles. You can build large structures out of prefabricated parts, and if you design the parts sufficiently well, it's possible to fit them together fast. The problems are stuff like weight (transport costs start to dominate), volume (if there's not enough demand for skyscrapers, you don't want to be sitting on a skyscraper factory), etc.
In East China, they have a lot of structural advantages: a huge, hugely dense population, a government that loves big construction projects, a massive housing market, a great deal of experience in doing civic infrastructure fast, etc.
I do think there is something different that leads Americans to desire homes and consider apartment living a failure.
Some of it is the rhetoric about owning a home being part of the American Dream. Some of it is about the nature of the US housing market being a such an avenue to wealth (Americans have a disproportionate amount of their wealth wrapped up in their home). Some of it may be the individualistic mindset.
American apartments in general are shoddily constructed and thus are a lower quality of living. There's no getting around that. Walls that are paper thin with no insulation so you can listen in on your neighbor's phone calls. Poorly done ceilings/floors so the upstairs neighbors' kids running around wakes you up in the morning. Single pane glass so heating/cooling bill is expensive, and the sounds of the street are audible throughout the day (you never want to live above a bus stop). Neighbors from all walks of life, which can be a nightmare if those walks of life include drug dealers and addicts and domestic violence, with norecourse from the police. No elevators up to the fifth floor. No trash pickup for large items. Shite public transportation and no good parking options. Horrible corporate landlord management company to contend with.
I would love to live in an apartment complex in,
say, Sweden, but there's a huge cultural component to apartment living in America that would have to change before it matches apartment living elsewhere. Even if building codes changed tonight it would still wouldn't address the issues of city design/public transportation that hurt the very notion of living that tightly together to begin with. It's just not at all convenient to live in an apartment complex that's miles away from the nearest public transportation hub or even a strip mall.
"Many builders are insulating these walls fully for sound proofing purposes per the International Building Code (IBC), Section 1207, Sound Transmission walls, partitions, and floor/ceiling assemblies separating dwelling units from each other must have a sound transmission class (STC) of not less than 50 for airborne noise when tested in accordance with ASTM E 90."
Also the comment I replied to said 'americans' not 'in america'
Home ownership rate in the US had been over 60% for a long time. Because of that there is a high chance that your apartment neighbors grew up in a detached home and have no habits that apartment dwellers teach their children. Combined with the fact that apartments are usually temporary accommodations this can produce very disruptive neighbors.
This is not unique to America, all the countries that went through rapid urbanization that moved millions of former farmers from detached homes into city apartments have an archetype of a rural rube unable to accommodate to communal living with strangers.
Apartments do not have to be noisy. A well built apartment with concrete floors and concrete interior walls greatly reduces noise. There are many other things that can be done to reduce noise, double pane (or triple) windows, carpeted floors, apartment noise policy.
Quite the broad generalization! What say you about American cities? The Americans living there are viewed as failures by other 5, as well as themselves?
How would I let my pets run around in the garden? Where do I put my wood fired pizza oven? How do I teach my kids how to grow potatoes and build things? Where do I put the koi pond?
There is perhaps some platonic ideal of an apartment where you can live a similar quality of life to a house. But in the reality that we actually live in currently, living in a house usually has a much better quality of life so it's natural that people would prefer it.
It depends what you want from a home. I'd prefer a house than my current apartment, but a different set of preferences makes apartments perfect (and more people in apartments necessarily make it easier to supply houses for those of us who prefer houses).
There are places that do many of those things, but in a community format.
My SO and still think back to how great it was to have an apartment with a park next door where we could let our dogs run. They had more space there than our current home.
I've never seen a public wood fired pizza oven but community bbq's were pretty standard at our apartments in the past.
We have a community projects place that gives us the opportunity to do all kinds of woodworking (my personal hobby) without spending tons on equipment. Plus there's always people there more competent that I can learn from. We have a seed-sharing repository in our local library and the ag school has plenty of gardening resources.
I think what you're talking about is certainly possible, but it takes a concerted approach to meet the needs of a community. I tend to think people in the US prefer housing because there is a much more individualistic mindset combined with relative affluence that gives people the option to eschew many community approaches.
So I'm actually British, not American, but I think we largely have similar attitudes towards desiring a house here. I think most European countries do too, really, once you get past a certain age. I'm not sure about how Asians are on average, but most Asians I know would certainly prefer to live in a house if they're past their mid 30s.
There are a few European countries where >50% of people live in flats: Spain for example. In Spain, however, the reason most people say they live in a flat isn't out of preference, it's because houses are too expensive. The other thing to note is that the European countries where flat habitation is popular tend to have interesting reasons behind it. In many cases, it's because they were built during the Soviet era.
I do think those community amenities are valuable, whether people live in houses or flats. I live in London, in an area with quite a good sense of community. I have an allotment, help at the community garden, live next to a very well maintained park, etc. but it really isn't the same as having your own private space. For example with the building stuff, I used to go to a Hackerspace, but I'm getting a lot more done now that I have a bunch of equipment at home. Simply getting things to and from my old Hackerspace was a nightmare without a car. Shared spaces also have rules which may not be compatible with what you're trying to do. My allotment doesn't allow irrigation systems, for example, so my little automated irrigation project in my garden wouldn't go down too well there!
Plus there are all these small things like talking to my neighbours over the wall, being able to easily get my bicycle in and out, not having to walk up 12 flights of stairs because someone is moving in and has the lift blocked, etc. One of my favourite things to do in this past warm summer was to just work outside in my garden, in the breeze, with my laptop plugged into my outdoor sockets, fast WiFi and the ability to just pop into the kitchen for drinks.
I'm not saying flats shouldn't be made more tolerable - but aside from density meaning you can live closer to the centre, is there any case where a flat is really a better quality of life?
Also an interesting thing to consider is: how different is building vertically with elevators, versus building horizontally with trains, anyway?
There are plenty of high density apartments that have public and private gardens available. But yeah, not something that will ever be available to everyone simply because there is only one ground floor.
In general, though, density doesn't mean that you can't have yards. Do you need a front yard, back yard, and two side yards to set up a wood fired pizza oven, grow potatoes, and build things? Nope. Just a backyard could be fine. So you could share an exterior wall with your neighbors, stick your front door right up against the street, and do all the same things as a freestanding house but at lower cost and higher density. If townhouses were more of a thing, you could have everything you want, AND not have to drive. The only problem is zoning laws.
My house is actually semi-detached with a driveway and flower beds, rather than detached, but there is one huge disadvantage to town houses: it's practically impossible to get equipment into your garden, which makes a lot of landscaping really, really difficult. Even just getting forks and soil into your garden is bound to make a mess of your house. Terraces (like town houses but with front gardens or driveways) are very popular in the UK, but most people will ultimately prefer a semi-detached for that reason.
An interesting approach we used to have was where rather than adjoining gardens at the back, we'd put an path down the back of the townhouses between the gardens, with a door into each garden, so you could easily walk/cycle and, if needed, get equipment into your back garden. Apparently we stopped doing that because those alleys turned into major crime and antisocial behaviour hot spots, and people stopped buying houses with alley access due to people constantly jumping your fence and nicking anything in your garden that wasn't tied down.
Where I grew up was like a townhouse/semi-detached hybrid - the upper two floors were terraced, but at ground level there was a car garage that connected the street and back garden. A lot of people don't like that design because it's associated with council homes (mine was a council home), but I actually thought it was a best of both worlds.
This! Honestly, this is the reason that I want a house. In reality, I don't want the house, but a bit more space that isn't just in my apartment. A little space out back for if I want to dabble with grilling. A basement or garage if want to start a larger project. These are things you can't easily do in a standard apartment. That's also why I think the next stage of development will be more townhome focused. Think UK row houses, where you have a little backyard and maybe a garage, but not detached.
Your conception of quality of life is not universal.
Assume I have a detached home in the suburbs. How am I going to walk to the grocery store when it's miles away? How do I live without a car when there's no public transit? How do I get access to job opportunities, cultural experiences, dining options, and other amenities that come with close proximity to an urban core?
If your answer is "But my detached home is near the urban core!" then you're fortunate, but as large American cities have shown us that doesn't scale.
In the UK, we don't often to have miles of suburbs without a grocery store. That's a separate choice around car centricity that the US has made.
I live in London, in a suburb, but within a 10 minute walk, I have multiple pubs, doctors, dentists, restaurants, small supermarkets, library, community garden and - most importantly - a train station that takes me into central London in about 10 minutes.
The way we structure housing here tends to be arranged around lots of smaller satellite town and villages connected to a large city centre. Big cities like London will provide trains for commuters and going "out out", but in a smaller town you often live a lot of your social life more locally and might commute to work by car.
The other thing in the UK is our houses aren't particularly large. A terrace home might not be more than 50% bigger than an apartment, but you get a garden, driveway and actually own some real land.
> I live in London, in a suburb, but within a 10 minute walk
I would dispute that "in London" actually counts as a suburbs. The real suburbs (the ones we'd need to build if everyone lived in a detached house) would be way out.
Have you thought about bunk beds? I saw a documentary awhile ago where it was discovered that switching to bunk beds creates ample room for activities.
Are you saying you want access to each of those or you want your own private resource for each of those? They are very different questions with different answers.
Being that close to other people sucks, and so do housing associations.
You get neighbors screaming and fighting, playing music at 2am, apartments turned into meth labs with explosive toxic chemicals, dangerous predators can be right next door, people who don't take care of themselves and give your whole unit rats/bedbugs/insects, people who don't know you should fix water issues and cause mold, roof assessments that can be tens of thousands of dollars surprise! That you're forced to pay...
It isn't some fairy land where we all love plants and hold hands in our communal space - living close to other people IS failure.
This is all stuff that happens with houses also. I've had a house down the street blow up, dealt with shitty neighbors blasting music at all hours (or fighting/insulting each other), had my house flood due to neighbor's construction. And have to deal with property line issues on top of it all.
We live in a society, and that means dealing with people. Even if you live in a place where the nearest neighbor is half a mile away, you're going to have issues with someone. We used to have issues with people riding dirt bikes and trucks on our land, kids breaking in to have parties in our woods, people with horses who shit on the streets, and lots of illegal dumping.
One person in your apartment complex is filthy and has bugs, everyone in your building has bugs. I don't have that problem in my house.
Also a house blowing up due to cooking meth - down the street, which is not connected to your house - is a much better situation.
Dirt bikes and teenagers partying the woods is definitely the better option too, imo.
"We live in a society" - true but one of these things is clearly better than the other. It's just not very convincing to think people want to be stuffed into apartments.
Every time I’ve lived in an apartment or condo the whole building smelled like trash. They need a better solution for managing waste disposal instead of a stinky room on every floor.
I never really gave this much thought as I never lived in a building that uses a chute. But it does make sense. You can build a large building, but it usually has many firestops in it. When wiring crosses a firestop, it must be sealed up to some standards. Ventilation systems are kept isolated across firestops as well. Anything that could encourage a spread is forbidden.
In contrast, a fire chute is basically a giant convection tower that should spread smoke and heat across all the higher floors of a building immediately.
It's possible to apply the same fire solutions used for elevators and stair wells to garbage chutes. Build them separately out of cinder block towers and use UL rated doors.
In my building people kept throwing glass down the chute, which explodes at the bottom and injured some employees working around there. It was poorly designed, and after two injuries they welded the chutes shut and put in a trash can on every floor. I still think trash chutes are a good idea, but they have to be implemented properly.
Garbage chutes are a luxury I've only recently acquired, but it was done well in my opinion at my building. The room is tiny but enclosed with a garbage chute with a closing chute door that has a rubber gasket to seal it. Negatively pressurized so any remaining smells aren't pushed into the hallway. Everything goes down to a compactor in a ventilated utility room. How it's processed from there, I'm not sure but smell certainly isn't an issue.
I lived in a recently-built high-rise in the U.S. that had a trash chute. A problem is that bags tear open easily, people throw away liquids in their bags (which leak even without tears). I've seen trails of trash juice leading from people's apartments to the trash chute, and even with the ventilation, when you open the door to the trash chute, it smells and it's dirty (because of torn bags, and the fact that the chute hatch is smaller than the average full trash bag, meaning you have to squeeze it in, usually causing more tears).
Make bigger trash chute doors, better bags, and smarter people, then trash chutes work. #1 is doable, #2 is hard because it's always a race to the bottom, and #3 is impossible.
Not faced that problem here in Berlin, neither in the the place I'm renting long term now nor in the series of AirBnBs I was in back in 2017 while starting to look for a place.
That seems like a problem of going to giant scales. Here in Germany the norm for condos or apartments is 2-5 stories with 1-6 apartments per story. That gives you 2-30 units per building, and at that scale a couple of weekly emptied trash bins on the ground floor or in the parking garage do their job.
This is also a scale where construction and maintenance is straightforward, and where the building makes sense in a walkable neighborhood (as opposed to taking 5 minutes to even leave the building).
In the US even zoning to allow 5 story, 25 foot wide row homes to be built everywhere residential housing is allowed would make it easier to develop a lot of housing quickly and cheaply. It’s cheaper to build 1,000 units all at once than 2 units at a time, and if you can fit 500+ units on 500 feet of street frontage, you don’t need to buy a square mile of land in order to build a profitable development.
You say you know that zoning is the biggest hurdle but it's literally the answer to your question. Most zoning in America is for single family homes or large apartments.
I’ve had some pretty bad experiences living in mid size apartment buildings. Everything from a drugged out neighbor causing a fire, to bed bugs coming through the wall from a slob next door, to someone nearly stealing my car until I shouted at them from four floors up, to landlords who wouldn’t fix leaks for weeks/months after I left a voicemail on their high priority line, to dreadful indoor temperatures because the thermostat controls are overridden by time-of-year policies and heating/cooling is disabled.
All this in Boston, at nearly $2,000 per month for a single bedroom, in the mid 2010s.
Conceptually, I’m on board with apartment buildings. I would like to think that the future looks more like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood than the one that I lived in. But the people who evangelize high rise buildings must be either paying for a ritzy place or never actually lived in one.
That's a cool link thanks for sharing. Seems pretty thermally efficient and they mentioned being quieter than wood walls. Curious what data they're looking at for "withstanding natural disasters"
It seems like a ton of these prefab projects show up on HN, but does anyone know of any that produce houses/structures that actually… look nice? It seems like everything I’ve seen on here have all the aesthetics of a shipping container. (Or, to be more on the nose, a concrete box).
That's a good point, hopefully this inflatable form method could yield structures that "look good" (whatever that means) but seems they'd need to get good at quickly producing/customizing the inflatable forms into ones that "look good". Maybe they could steel reinforce it too?
edit: point being - it seems easy to pump concrete into a form, but the problem is making forms - at scale - that look/function a certain way, and in this case are made from an inflatable.
Many quick build and prefab projects are intended to be used to provide rapid (short/medium term) housing for people affected by natural disasters (or man made ones, for that matter).
I'm not at all impressed in this particular one, but in general it matters not what the aesthetics are when it's a survival issue.
I would advocate more research into learning how to "encourage" fungi growth to suit our needs without genetically modifying it. We just _never_ know the long term effects of our genetically modified creations (never as in "not in our lifetimes" usually).
I imagine someday there will be a combination of organic growths which will be combined in a creative way to produce something greater than the sum of parts and which also suits our needs. This might involve fast growing things, things which can be grown in a directed fashion, and combinations of organic substances which react in a beneficial way (such as improving durability or strength characteristics).
Hemp grows really fast and has really strong fibers. Bamboo does as well. Fungi grows fairly quickly and is directable. There are probably many more things out there which can be used. Then it's a matter of refining the processes to get the results we want and then testing and developing combinations.
In what way is concrete a sustainable building material? It's a huge carbon emitter, a poor insulator, concrete production is devastating to natural habitats turned into sand quarries, etc. Plant-based construction materials, e.g. hemp, seem to be vastly superior on every ecological consideration.
Plus, an unreinforced concrete dome has to be one of the inherently least population dense structures, and density potential is probably as important a consideration in sustainability as actual construction techniques.
Edit: not necessarily a dome, but also not able to safely scale the structure very high with this technique without losing the only purported advantage, the low labor cost.
Indeed, although I suspect the PVC in the inflatable form could be replaced with some other, actually sustainable material. It's therefore an even bigger indictment of this company that they didn't even bother to do this and are somehow touting their process as sustainable.
While not sustainable concrete made from fly-ash locks up ongoing and historic waste from coal fired power stations.
We're phasing out our 60 year old coal station given the sheer amount of solar power we now generate in W.Australia - but we still have 60 years of fly ash to deal with.
Yes, fly ash concrete seems more sustainable than concrete without it (provided that the fly ash already exists) in certain applications where its particular properties are beneficial. I seem to recall it having greater durability under compressive loads, so roads can be built that require less frequent repair. In the US, we have enough roads falling apart I think we could use all the fly ash concrete we could possibly make, and we wouldn't have any extra to build substandard, energy-inefficient housing.
Fly ash may be a valuable resource in future. Iirc it's a significant constituent of sulfur-resistant cement, used extensively in concrete sewer pipes.
Everything inside the concrete shell can still burn: wood flooring, carpeting, furniture. People will probably furr out the walls with wood and drywall anyway so they can hide wiring and pipes and so they don’t feel like they’re living in a prison cell.
Have you ever owned a 150+ year old house? Everyone I know that has either hates the maintenance or is wealthy enough to constantly throw money at it and not care.
Agreed about the concrete. Fortunately there are efforts to replace concrete (in general) with other materials - some organic (fungi).
> Plus, an unreinforced concrete dome
This is not a dome. It could conceivable be more population dense if/when they figure out how to magically get rebar into it :P. But that's not going to happen; and the real future benefits are likely going to be along the "working with nature" approach (where you use natural growing/expanding processes and direct them to suit your needs).
In terms of future human survival, I'm surprised there's so little shown or seen regarding underground living. While obviously more complex due to the excavation and reinforcement processes, the survival and energy benefits are much higher. And with modern light gathering/direction tech, it doesn't have to be devoid of daylight.
Thanks for the correction, I read the page without enabling JS on it, so the images didn't load, and every previous iteration of this technology I've seen has been limited to producing domes or arches. Nonetheless, even if you could, in practice, stack multiple floors using this new form, no developed country with any potential seismic activity or hurricane/typhoon threat will let you build multi-story structures like this (or perhaps even single-story ones), and I think you're right to use the word "magic" about using rebar with this, since installing rebar is a very labor intensive process, thus negating the only alleged benefit of this technique.
Hmmm, so I'm aware that a significant difficulty in normal concrete construction is ensuring that all the concrete gets everywhere it needs to go - and that's with relatively direct access a lot of the time.
I'm also not entirely clear what the saving is here - you still have to get concrete from somewhere to the construction site, to somewhere that presumably already has some local material that could be use instead?
Also if it's just making a box, that's not the problem - people have already have shelter. Where things break down are access to clean water, food, and similar. But I guess those don't sound sexy and so don't get funding.
The structural frame is easy. Stick frame, CLT, SIPs already exist and are better than this basically everything except a blockwork structure already takes less than a week. Insulation, airtightness and services integration is hard. Services takes way longer than the frame.
The most expensive bit in a building is the land it sits on. The denser the cluster of people the more expensive the land becomes. People cluster around jobs. The more the jobs get distributed geographically the less people need to cluster and the more affordable housing becomes.
Remote work is the way to solve the housing crisis. There can be smaller regional clusters of people working in shared offices or small offices but there’s no real need for cramming people in offices in densely populated cities.
Free range chicken and cattle farms have minimum space requirements, yet human farms require people to sit in overcrowded spaces at least 8 hours a day every day usually limited to the space of a seat and a desk.
> The most expensive bit in a building is the land it sits on
This isn't always the case even in smaller cities, let alone truly rural areas. I live in a suburban area of a small city and empty lots around here go for under $100k, and only the very cheapest houses built on top of them cost less than that to build.
Remote work is nice, but only a minority of jobs can be performed remotely; and there is a certain degree of economies of scale in "human farming" (nice phrase!), so I think the majority of jobs will always remain in denser areas.
Monolithic Dome has been doing this for years. Precast concrete vaults are made very efficiently and can be used for this purpose with much better quality control. Neither are popular solutions.
Housing construction is pretty cheap. The materials are mass produced on thin margins and in the US we’ve insourced the cheapest labor available on the continent to put it together. If you’re really on a budget, you can get a pre-manufactured mobile home for very little. Even living in Soviet style concrete multi-family housing, like a human factory farm, is actually an option for most of us if we’re to move. People seem to avoid these choices when they have the option though.
I find it very conspicuous that in the commentary around this issue, finance and the market distortions they create never seem to get any blame.
What good is more housing without more schools, new parks, wider roads, more public infrastructure, etc? Net net it becomes a step-backwards for the group when just adding more housing alone
Startups like this are extremely guilty of offloading massive externals costs on the communities they sell to
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[ 0.66 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadSurely it would be better to call these injection moulded homes?
It's got a nice ring to it. Don't you think?
I’ll take tyvek and wood :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
Sustainable, innovative building structures that don't require energy-intensive and corrosive steel will depend on a convergence of strengthening technologies and archtectural techniques, maybe even including ones like described in the original article.
Considering all the environmental and social problems we have with modern housing and construction, this is a prime area for innovation!
https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/two-natural-reb...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210113090920.h...
Practical Engineering has a good video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL0BB2PRY7k
That 'V' in 'HVAC' must have an industry-specific meaning beyond "Ventilation" then.
Look at Passivhaus for the most extreme version of this. But even regular new build houses in the UK now have to meet air tightness regulations.
There’s all sorts of research into how to reduce air movement while still allowing water vapor to escape.
Ideally you'd have an airtight house and bring in fresh air through an ERV or HRV to save energy and filter it but even if it's just fresh untreated outside air brought in straight from a vent you'd still eliminate the moist air moving through fiberglass batt insulation and the occasional condensation on the paper backing of the drywall. One thing I really like about spray foam insulation is that your insulation is your air barrier and thermal barrier and you don't have to deal with air passing through your thermal barrier and potentially causing condensation. In southern climates the air barrier is always on the outside of the insulation and in northern climates from what I understand they put the air barrier on the inside. Spray foam effectively puts it on both sides so you're not compromising based on what location is more often going to prevent condensation.
Think about what an air filter looks like after a few months. That's what happens inside wall cavities in leaky homes only there's no way to change them and it builds up slowly over decades. There's a lot more surface area, but that only delays the problem, if you look at any renovation photos when a wall is opened up after a few decades they're typically filled with dust and grime. Even if you just had a 6 inch duct with nothing but some louvres separating inside from outside you've still eliminated most of the potential buildup.
And with the amount of ventilation needed to make a PVC lined box into a healthy living environment, your kids will be conducting airfoil research at the dining room table.
Ikea style flatpacked prefabs still seems like a vastly better option to me.
Why not 3d print homes at that point? At least you can get the rebar and other forms in place ahead of the print, and you get more flexibility in the final design of the structure.
This article mentions 100 and 200 square feet buildings, so I don't think there's gonna be much in the way of internal structure. I could see an inflatable structure with 'tubes' at certain places for wiring and plumbing to pass through, which would save cutting holes later.
But like everyone else says, there's easier ways to get the frame up faster. What makes construction slow is coordination between the many different trades that need to work in the same area. With many parts in sequence, and each trade having high utilization, scheduling is difficult --- either you plan with large gaps between trades, or you blow up everyone's schedule when one trade falls behind for whatever reason.
The work around internal plumbing and wiring is messy, though. A lot of abrasive brick dust is generated. I wouldn't want to be the guy doing this stuff. In a 3D printed home, nice empty spaces could be left in the wall while printing for all the necessary networks.
Most of the time, every connection coming from the exterior are coming through the floor in a little room that we can use for storage and from there, everything is dispatched through inner walls which are basically empty (except around bedrooms if you want acoustic isolation). This allows to maintain everything from the inside.
I wouldn't call it a mess but I'll acknowledge I'm talking about modern constructions.
None of the walls were empty, all were solid brick with no empty space.
It was quite a mess, though the guys doing the job were very professional and handled the dust disposal very well.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/A3i1ANg
I've never seen something like this in France.
Granted, it is a small set, N < 10.
This might be one of the reasons why Czech construction costs are so high. Expensive material everywhere.
If you want a small, low-cost box structure, there are companies that will sell you one. Concrete.[1] Metal.[2] Steel frame with wood siding.[3]
[1] https://precastbuildings.com
[2] https://www.butlermfg.com/
[3] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Rose-Cottage-2-Beds-443-3-sq-ft-...
If you then have wire conduits and junction boxes built-in, you are a lot closer to a livable home. Perhaps floor assemblies with hookups for plumbing.
I'm not sure why these things aren't standardized to be the point of plug-n-play. A lot less work for the tradespeople maybe.
https://www.liebfertighaus.at/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Ado...
https://www.google.com/search?q=fertighaus+teile&tbm=isch
There are some efforts now being made to reduce the amount of concrete and build with more sustainable wood.
You get what you pay for.
If you have the foundation already done, then the assembly of the rest of the house takes around 3-5 days
Random promo video of one company: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqAxoBAE2pc.
A prefab house design will typically be replicated in several projects / cities, usually with a few customisation options. Different prefab factories have different levels of standardisation and automation. The prefab production lines I designed long ago for example used fully parametric designs to offer standard concepts sized to fit. At the time (~10-15 years ago) a novelty, by now must be pretty standard.
Do you have any links to learn more about your prefab designs and a company that assembles these designs?
https://www.alvsbyhus.se/vara-hus/
Wall assembly is zip->10 inch blown in insulation around 10inch I-Joist -> OSB -> 2x3 interior wall studs to hang your sheetrock off of and run utilities. (All pre-drilled for faster running of pex and conduit.)
You do have to do all the interior work after, though.
Note: Yes, I know zoning and planning etc are still the biggest hurdle.
Building tall buildings is not a rocket science. Look at Burj Khalifa‘s construction: clever designed crane, lots of rebar and extremely powerful concrete pumps. And it’s really fast. One year to build enough space for thousands of people.
Building Tall building isn't Rocket Science, but building them fast, high quality ( comparatively speaking ) and cheap has not been done yet. And one year to build space enough for thousands of people is not my definition of fast. At least building "On Site".
Burj Khalifa does not have a severage system. Trucks are used to take the human waste away every single day from burj khalifa.
I figure the problem is basically politics. Liberal democracies typically do planning by asking 'stakeholders' (e.g. business owners, home owners, etc) what they think about proposals. Since you're asking the stakeholders in an asset class whether or not you should build more of their asset, usually nearby, the answer is usually a lawsuit.
From what I gather, a industrial-scale air-conditioning unit company basically broke the space open, since they were essentially doing large scale prefab construction already.
Just think about it from first principles. You can build large structures out of prefabricated parts, and if you design the parts sufficiently well, it's possible to fit them together fast. The problems are stuff like weight (transport costs start to dominate), volume (if there's not enough demand for skyscrapers, you don't want to be sitting on a skyscraper factory), etc.
In East China, they have a lot of structural advantages: a huge, hugely dense population, a government that loves big construction projects, a massive housing market, a great deal of experience in doing civic infrastructure fast, etc.
https://inhabitat.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-the-burj-k...
And the wonderful solitude and quiet of my old house in a dying town contrasts sharply with my college years living in apartments.
Some of it is the rhetoric about owning a home being part of the American Dream. Some of it is about the nature of the US housing market being a such an avenue to wealth (Americans have a disproportionate amount of their wealth wrapped up in their home). Some of it may be the individualistic mindset.
I would love to live in an apartment complex in, say, Sweden, but there's a huge cultural component to apartment living in America that would have to change before it matches apartment living elsewhere. Even if building codes changed tonight it would still wouldn't address the issues of city design/public transportation that hurt the very notion of living that tightly together to begin with. It's just not at all convenient to live in an apartment complex that's miles away from the nearest public transportation hub or even a strip mall.
These sound like wild assumptions with nothing to back them up.
https://basc.pnnl.gov/code-compliance/air-sealing-and-insula...
"Many builders are insulating these walls fully for sound proofing purposes per the International Building Code (IBC), Section 1207, Sound Transmission walls, partitions, and floor/ceiling assemblies separating dwelling units from each other must have a sound transmission class (STC) of not less than 50 for airborne noise when tested in accordance with ASTM E 90."
Also the comment I replied to said 'americans' not 'in america'
This is not unique to America, all the countries that went through rapid urbanization that moved millions of former farmers from detached homes into city apartments have an archetype of a rural rube unable to accommodate to communal living with strangers.
There is perhaps some platonic ideal of an apartment where you can live a similar quality of life to a house. But in the reality that we actually live in currently, living in a house usually has a much better quality of life so it's natural that people would prefer it.
My SO and still think back to how great it was to have an apartment with a park next door where we could let our dogs run. They had more space there than our current home.
I've never seen a public wood fired pizza oven but community bbq's were pretty standard at our apartments in the past.
We have a community projects place that gives us the opportunity to do all kinds of woodworking (my personal hobby) without spending tons on equipment. Plus there's always people there more competent that I can learn from. We have a seed-sharing repository in our local library and the ag school has plenty of gardening resources.
I think what you're talking about is certainly possible, but it takes a concerted approach to meet the needs of a community. I tend to think people in the US prefer housing because there is a much more individualistic mindset combined with relative affluence that gives people the option to eschew many community approaches.
There are a few European countries where >50% of people live in flats: Spain for example. In Spain, however, the reason most people say they live in a flat isn't out of preference, it's because houses are too expensive. The other thing to note is that the European countries where flat habitation is popular tend to have interesting reasons behind it. In many cases, it's because they were built during the Soviet era.
I do think those community amenities are valuable, whether people live in houses or flats. I live in London, in an area with quite a good sense of community. I have an allotment, help at the community garden, live next to a very well maintained park, etc. but it really isn't the same as having your own private space. For example with the building stuff, I used to go to a Hackerspace, but I'm getting a lot more done now that I have a bunch of equipment at home. Simply getting things to and from my old Hackerspace was a nightmare without a car. Shared spaces also have rules which may not be compatible with what you're trying to do. My allotment doesn't allow irrigation systems, for example, so my little automated irrigation project in my garden wouldn't go down too well there!
Plus there are all these small things like talking to my neighbours over the wall, being able to easily get my bicycle in and out, not having to walk up 12 flights of stairs because someone is moving in and has the lift blocked, etc. One of my favourite things to do in this past warm summer was to just work outside in my garden, in the breeze, with my laptop plugged into my outdoor sockets, fast WiFi and the ability to just pop into the kitchen for drinks.
I'm not saying flats shouldn't be made more tolerable - but aside from density meaning you can live closer to the centre, is there any case where a flat is really a better quality of life?
Also an interesting thing to consider is: how different is building vertically with elevators, versus building horizontally with trains, anyway?
In general, though, density doesn't mean that you can't have yards. Do you need a front yard, back yard, and two side yards to set up a wood fired pizza oven, grow potatoes, and build things? Nope. Just a backyard could be fine. So you could share an exterior wall with your neighbors, stick your front door right up against the street, and do all the same things as a freestanding house but at lower cost and higher density. If townhouses were more of a thing, you could have everything you want, AND not have to drive. The only problem is zoning laws.
An interesting approach we used to have was where rather than adjoining gardens at the back, we'd put an path down the back of the townhouses between the gardens, with a door into each garden, so you could easily walk/cycle and, if needed, get equipment into your back garden. Apparently we stopped doing that because those alleys turned into major crime and antisocial behaviour hot spots, and people stopped buying houses with alley access due to people constantly jumping your fence and nicking anything in your garden that wasn't tied down.
Where I grew up was like a townhouse/semi-detached hybrid - the upper two floors were terraced, but at ground level there was a car garage that connected the street and back garden. A lot of people don't like that design because it's associated with council homes (mine was a council home), but I actually thought it was a best of both worlds.
Assume I have a detached home in the suburbs. How am I going to walk to the grocery store when it's miles away? How do I live without a car when there's no public transit? How do I get access to job opportunities, cultural experiences, dining options, and other amenities that come with close proximity to an urban core?
If your answer is "But my detached home is near the urban core!" then you're fortunate, but as large American cities have shown us that doesn't scale.
I live in London, in a suburb, but within a 10 minute walk, I have multiple pubs, doctors, dentists, restaurants, small supermarkets, library, community garden and - most importantly - a train station that takes me into central London in about 10 minutes.
The way we structure housing here tends to be arranged around lots of smaller satellite town and villages connected to a large city centre. Big cities like London will provide trains for commuters and going "out out", but in a smaller town you often live a lot of your social life more locally and might commute to work by car.
The other thing in the UK is our houses aren't particularly large. A terrace home might not be more than 50% bigger than an apartment, but you get a garden, driveway and actually own some real land.
I would dispute that "in London" actually counts as a suburbs. The real suburbs (the ones we'd need to build if everyone lived in a detached house) would be way out.
I’d love to have my own airport and marina, but I’m not sure that’s the goals we should be using to create a society.
You get neighbors screaming and fighting, playing music at 2am, apartments turned into meth labs with explosive toxic chemicals, dangerous predators can be right next door, people who don't take care of themselves and give your whole unit rats/bedbugs/insects, people who don't know you should fix water issues and cause mold, roof assessments that can be tens of thousands of dollars surprise! That you're forced to pay...
It isn't some fairy land where we all love plants and hold hands in our communal space - living close to other people IS failure.
We live in a society, and that means dealing with people. Even if you live in a place where the nearest neighbor is half a mile away, you're going to have issues with someone. We used to have issues with people riding dirt bikes and trucks on our land, kids breaking in to have parties in our woods, people with horses who shit on the streets, and lots of illegal dumping.
The world is full of shit heads.
Also a house blowing up due to cooking meth - down the street, which is not connected to your house - is a much better situation.
Dirt bikes and teenagers partying the woods is definitely the better option too, imo.
"We live in a society" - true but one of these things is clearly better than the other. It's just not very convincing to think people want to be stuffed into apartments.
In contrast, a fire chute is basically a giant convection tower that should spread smoke and heat across all the higher floors of a building immediately.
Make bigger trash chute doors, better bags, and smarter people, then trash chutes work. #1 is doable, #2 is hard because it's always a race to the bottom, and #3 is impossible.
Whatever Germany is doing, copy it.
This is also a scale where construction and maintenance is straightforward, and where the building makes sense in a walkable neighborhood (as opposed to taking 5 minutes to even leave the building).
So people focus on building houses because that is all you can build.
All this in Boston, at nearly $2,000 per month for a single bedroom, in the mid 2010s.
Conceptually, I’m on board with apartment buildings. I would like to think that the future looks more like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood than the one that I lived in. But the people who evangelize high rise buildings must be either paying for a ritzy place or never actually lived in one.
> must be either paying for a ritzy place
Yes, a compromise for a more pleasant place to live is price. But a side-effect of more affordable housing is that nicer places also get cheaper.
Another compromise to get a nicer place to live for the same price is to move to less desirable location.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/621986.Barbapapa_s_New_H...
https://www.concretecontractornc.com/a-house-built-with-styr...
edit: point being - it seems easy to pump concrete into a form, but the problem is making forms - at scale - that look/function a certain way, and in this case are made from an inflatable.
I'm not at all impressed in this particular one, but in general it matters not what the aesthetics are when it's a survival issue.
But without reinforcement, this is only a toy. But I find it interesting nonetheless.
Difference is that they produced a canvas containing everything needed for the concrete, only requires to add water and blow it up.
[1] https://youtu.be/Vb1pdvvoVoQ
I imagine someday there will be a combination of organic growths which will be combined in a creative way to produce something greater than the sum of parts and which also suits our needs. This might involve fast growing things, things which can be grown in a directed fashion, and combinations of organic substances which react in a beneficial way (such as improving durability or strength characteristics).
Hemp grows really fast and has really strong fibers. Bamboo does as well. Fungi grows fairly quickly and is directable. There are probably many more things out there which can be used. Then it's a matter of refining the processes to get the results we want and then testing and developing combinations.
Plus, an unreinforced concrete dome has to be one of the inherently least population dense structures, and density potential is probably as important a consideration in sustainability as actual construction techniques.
Edit: not necessarily a dome, but also not able to safely scale the structure very high with this technique without losing the only purported advantage, the low labor cost.
We're phasing out our 60 year old coal station given the sheer amount of solar power we now generate in W.Australia - but we still have 60 years of fly ash to deal with.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-18/geopolymer-concrete-c...
[2] https://www.mediastatements.wa.gov.au/Pages/McGowan/2022/08/...
[3] https://colliecrete.com.au/
> Plus, an unreinforced concrete dome
This is not a dome. It could conceivable be more population dense if/when they figure out how to magically get rebar into it :P. But that's not going to happen; and the real future benefits are likely going to be along the "working with nature" approach (where you use natural growing/expanding processes and direct them to suit your needs).
In terms of future human survival, I'm surprised there's so little shown or seen regarding underground living. While obviously more complex due to the excavation and reinforcement processes, the survival and energy benefits are much higher. And with modern light gathering/direction tech, it doesn't have to be devoid of daylight.
Thanks for the correction, I read the page without enabling JS on it, so the images didn't load, and every previous iteration of this technology I've seen has been limited to producing domes or arches. Nonetheless, even if you could, in practice, stack multiple floors using this new form, no developed country with any potential seismic activity or hurricane/typhoon threat will let you build multi-story structures like this (or perhaps even single-story ones), and I think you're right to use the word "magic" about using rebar with this, since installing rebar is a very labor intensive process, thus negating the only alleged benefit of this technique.
I'm also not entirely clear what the saving is here - you still have to get concrete from somewhere to the construction site, to somewhere that presumably already has some local material that could be use instead?
Also if it's just making a box, that's not the problem - people have already have shelter. Where things break down are access to clean water, food, and similar. But I guess those don't sound sexy and so don't get funding.
Remote work is the way to solve the housing crisis. There can be smaller regional clusters of people working in shared offices or small offices but there’s no real need for cramming people in offices in densely populated cities.
Free range chicken and cattle farms have minimum space requirements, yet human farms require people to sit in overcrowded spaces at least 8 hours a day every day usually limited to the space of a seat and a desk.
This isn't always the case even in smaller cities, let alone truly rural areas. I live in a suburban area of a small city and empty lots around here go for under $100k, and only the very cheapest houses built on top of them cost less than that to build.
Remote work is nice, but only a minority of jobs can be performed remotely; and there is a certain degree of economies of scale in "human farming" (nice phrase!), so I think the majority of jobs will always remain in denser areas.
Housing got totally out of control after this started. RTO is going to bring housing back down to earth.
For anyone interested in building materials, ICF & SIP seem to be the most interesting methods to me.
Without these you have a weak shell not a liveable structure. Concrete doesn't have tensile strength for shear and compressive loads.
I watch a new building go up nearby. It was 4-5 days of welding rebar and pouring concrete took 4-5 hours.
Housing construction is pretty cheap. The materials are mass produced on thin margins and in the US we’ve insourced the cheapest labor available on the continent to put it together. If you’re really on a budget, you can get a pre-manufactured mobile home for very little. Even living in Soviet style concrete multi-family housing, like a human factory farm, is actually an option for most of us if we’re to move. People seem to avoid these choices when they have the option though.
I find it very conspicuous that in the commentary around this issue, finance and the market distortions they create never seem to get any blame.
Startups like this are extremely guilty of offloading massive externals costs on the communities they sell to