Building a hut with a tiled roof, underfloor heating and mud and stone walls
primitivetechnology.wordpress.com
primitivetechnology.wordpress.com
For example, if he designed things a little differently, this would pretty much be what the average Korean, now one of the most technologically sophisticated civilizations in the world, lived in up until the late 20th century [1]: tiled roofs, wooden framed houses (they interlocked with notches instead of twine), raised floors with underfloor heating (still copied in modern apartments), earth packed exterior walls. If he had time to pulp wood and make paper he could do interior finishing, and the addition of maybe 1 or 2 precision metal tools he could square off wood work even better and maybe even produce nicer floors.
In many civilizations, metal cookware was simply seen as more durable alternatives to ceramic cookware and even followed similar design motifs [2], it can sometimes be difficult to tell from far away if something is a bronze or ceramic pot they often look so similar [3]
Pre-industrial revolution, human-scale technology can get pretty impressive, humans managed to settle an entire planet and all of its climates with not much more than the product of their hands, some ideas and a little patience -- basically what this guy has done. If aliens were to kidnap a thousand pre-Industrial Revolution random humans from around Earth and dump them off on a suitable, but empty world. They'd have it all colonized and populated in probably 10,000-20,000 years. That's not even geologic timescale.
Terrifying.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanok
2 - https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=ancient%20chinese%2...
3 - http://www.users.qwest.net/~rjbphx/BigPicture/PotteryGild.JP...
What we have to consider when comparing this work to pre-industrial societies, is that he had not to concern himself with getting enough food for the next day.
The tremendous powers of the brain can only be unlocked once the body gets sufficient nutrition.
Get enough humans together and you develop enough spare capacity to dedicate a few percent of your population to mine for ore and now you get metals, which give you even more spare capacity over short-lived stone and wood tools and the technological ball rolls on and on picking up more and more speed.
Until England worked this all out by creating the age of imperial commerce where the peasants became wage laborers who got paid before the harvest was taken. This is the creation story of the British Empire. The U.S. adopted it after Shays Rebellion.
The last unanswered question here: if all you have to participate in a market is to sell your body (brains and all), are you really free?
You can even argue that the market is liberating, as it allows you to feed yourself with skilled trades.
That is what always bugs me with equating the need to work with slavery. Man has always needed to work, unless of course he lived off the backs of other working men, because shelter food and water have always taken work.
100 years ago, it would have been an acceptable dwelling, or even desirable. Thanks to the pace of progress, in just 50 years, houses built to today's standards might be considered too primitive for human habitation.
And you have to wonder what is going to be invented before then that will make us look at the homes we are living in right now and think, "How did I ever live in such a backwards, primitive building?"
We might not even realize the importance of it right away. If you think about an indoor flushing toilet, it doesn't seem all that remarkable, but now every residence needs to have at least one. Grid power wiring isn't all that glamorous, but every home has it. The thing that changes everything might be boring at first glance.
And that's terrifying. A human can see a device with the power to change the entire world and still say, "meh."
And also aliens would probably need to kidnap at least 10000 in order to maintain a stable breeding population. Otherwise, the humans would have to establish some pretty strict rules against monogamy and inbreeding, and the aliens would have to carefully select a very diverse group to begin with.
What qualifies as progress is a matter of opinion, but generally speaking, denser cities produce more rapid technological innovation.
I have no way of knowing whether the new mystery tech would make dwellings taller, or cheaper, or more environmentally friendly, or more mobile, or more self-sufficient, or better workspaces. It's the sort of thing that is only obvious in hindsight. It may already be invented, but does not yet have a practical and economical application.
Whatever it is, it might require a cartel enforcer to mandate it in order to yield greater benefit for the society as a whole. You're not being oppressed when the city forces you to give up your well and septic system and connect to the municipal water and sewer. In theory, you're achieving greater gains through (enforced) cooperation with your neighbors. In practice, you may be oppressed by official corruption in such a way that it wipes that common benefit out.
And luxury is relative. The poorest person in the U.S. can have a better defecation experience in a public park toilet than the richest king in the world could have had on his private, hand-carved night-stool 500 years ago. One day soon, it might be considered luxury to crap in a hole in the dirt... on Mars--as the alternative would be to do it in a pressurized closet, into a machine that recycles the water out of it and turns the rest into agricultural compost.
I didn't intend to make a point about building codes, but rather about how quickly humanity changes its standards for technological advancement. For tens of thousands of years, a mud hut with tile roof and underfloor heating would have been a luxury accommodation. Now, for a lot of people, it's rustic and primitive, fit only for camping trips rather than permanent habitation.
Humanity is scary not only for its ability to construct shelters like this without any specialty-evolved biology, like a woodpecker's beak, a beaver's teeth, or mole claws, but because it can extrapolate the idea of shelter so far beyond our current survival needs that even a thing that well exceeds the minimum requirements is still considered obsolete.
I agree that we take learn to things for granted quickly. I think that's unfortunate and leads to a lot of unhappiness. Forcing our addiction to needless luxuries on others is a significant way that it leads to unhappiness, but far from the only one. You also see people dying of lack of physical activity, for example.
I don't think it makes sense to talk about "the intent of a building code". Since we have not yet produced artificial general intelligence, building codes are not yet sentient entities with intent. Different people who supported the enaction of the building code had a wide variety of intents; the different people who convert it from a piece of paper into a pattern of human behavior, by enforcing it, also have a wide variety of intents. Most of these are unknowable.
For the most part, it is very easy to determine the original intent of a building code, especially relative to some other varieties of laws.
The enforcers of the building code sometimes betray that intent. This is unfortunate, but there is little that a legislator can do to control a cop or county inspector that may be separated from the consideration of the bill by time, distance, wisdom, and attitude.
Building codes do little good if they are not updated frequently, and appropriate for economic conditions. Earthquake-safe architecture in all residential buildings is not appropriate for Haiti, but it may be for vital infrastructure, such as water treatment plants, ports, power plants, and hospitals.
Thanks to changes in U.S. economic conditions, it may be necessary to revise building codes to make it easier for people to buy new homes costing $40k or less, rather than go deep into debt for an existing home with median price $230k. It does no good to mandate by law that the worst possible home that can be built is still too expensive for anyone to buy.
It should be obvious that one guy building shelters from scratch in the outback is not going to significantly affect the housing market. But there's always that one guy, that power-tripping bureaucrat out to make an example of someone, who ruins it. The problem is not the building codes. It's that guy, who uses them as a club to enforce conformity, rather than as a standard which may accommodate reasonable variances.
It's because of that guy that building codes should not have the force of law. You just can't put the power to knock someone else's house down in the hands of a jerk or an idiot.
First, it treats people as individuals unaffected by social forces, whose power is treated as unrelated to how they choose to use it. In reality, the dynamics of power in a social organization is an arbitrarily complicated topic, and deeply constrains how people who have power can use it; and people's opinions mostly arise from the conventional wisdom of their social groups, which is subject not only to the limits of bounded rationality, but also to memetic selection pressure.
Second, the legislative and regulatory process is far from the disinterested consideration of the common good you ascribe to it; it's a conflict-filled social process involving constant negotiation among regulators, legislators, and their constituents. It is a mistake to try to understand it as if it were a sentient entity attempting to achieve certain goals by choosing means that its beliefs predict will promote those goals. To a significant extent, the individual people acting inside of it are such entities; but their goals and beliefs are at odds with one another, and as a result, the overall system does not behave in such a fashion. Sometimes it may happen to do so, which is often because the relevant part of the system is dominated by one or another powerful elite that is sufficiently unified to behave that way — although often the interests it promotes are not the common good, but a narrower set of interests. More often, due to collective action problems, it thrashes around in ways that appear irrational and random if you attempt to understand them using the metaphor of a sentient entity.
Your puzzlement about how we could have ended up with such perverse regulations as those that gave rise to low-flow toilets is a good example, but in fact public choice theory abounds with examples.
I say these are contradictory opposites because the first amounts to treating human beings as isolated contemplators, sort of floating in a void, while the second amounts to treating them as mere cells in a superorganism, devoid of individual beliefs or interests, their individuality entirely subjugated to the goals of the collective — a sort of Hegelian apotheosis through what seems to me to be the ultimate degradation. (Perhaps with the occasional exception of that guy.)
I think that with a somewhat more nuanced theory of human collective action, we can understand what does and doesn't work about existing forms of social organization, and then collaborate to improve them, providing us with alternatives that allow everyone to flourish in ways out of the reach of hunter-gatherers building seismically-unsafe huts, out of reach of proletarians toiling in misery in Foxconn factories, and even out of the reach of Captains of Industry hoping fondly to turn our nation into a new Somalia or Honduras.
You also want to control air currents so that mold doesn't go to other rooms, but few designs account for this.
Many materials off-gas harmful chemicals. Formaldehyde, often in some glues, is one example. I see a lot of room for measuring and ensuring homes are healthy. Perhaps a big task for IoT.
Spider Robinson had a character in the Callahan's Saloon series that went into some detail on this.
If this guy built his house in an Australian suburb, yes, he would be required to tear it down and probably face a fine for failing to get planning permission. Since he's in a remote area, he can build the house if he wants to.
Australian residents agree, by their locally elected councils, that houses in suburban areas must have flush toilets. They believe that it's an improvement over dumping household waste in the street.
I don't think a mud hut was ever considered acceptable in any moderately advanced country back in 1915.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_(material)#Modern_cob_buil...
http://www.sotaconstruction.com/project_details.asp?id=42
Even mud hut technology has advanced well beyond huts. The "greenest building in Pennsylvania" is a glorified mud hut with underfloor heating. It contains more than just one century of advancements over the most basic earthen construction.
And perhaps you haven't seen the sort of houses that people lived in, even as late as the 1930s, in some parts of the country. Let's just say there is a good reason why pre-manufactured homes are popular in certain places. Upstate New York may not exactly be a representative sample for the housing conditions in 1915.
It probably took generations to arrive at the optimum wall thickness.
If you didn't see it, you might appreciate this article from a bit ago about preserving some of the last remaining turf farm houses in Iceland:
Until a century ago, and even into the 1940s, the nation’s
skyline was dominated by squat, clustered turf houses. Yet
despite turf’s vital role in Iceland’s history, you won’t
see much of it today. Over a few brief generations,
Icelanders have grown ashamed of and buried this
architectural tradition, which has taken on the connotation
of backwardness.
(Separately, I'll mention that I really appreciate the level of effort you put into your comments here. They are great!)
As for people not spotting the value of something, that's ok - the market sorts it out. Not many people would have thought that the most urgent thing African farmers needed was mobile phones. But there was profit in it, so some entrepreneurs did it, and it all works out.
Bootstrapping from very modest means, but in a very rich land (climate, soil, water, forest etc). It took a while to reach equivalent standard of living compared to the Southern Sweden they left.
My grandparents grew up without running water, as did everyone before them.
It might make you wonder why people have historically been so poor. So here are a few points to think about:
1. This hut took a highly skilled polymath 102 workdays to build, using a little capital he'd previously built up (the celt.). The opportunity cost in the modern economy is about US$60 000. How long does it take you to save up US$60 000? Now, consider what kind of house you could build with US$60 000 by means of the economy, or with 102 days building with robots.
2. The vast majority of people in human history have been systematically excluded from access to both the knowledge and the material resources needed to carry out this project. If you had the knowledge, you could always build a hut like this — but the neighbors, who are organized into an effective violent force with a hierarchy of coercion, would be likely to raid you and take it away, even though most of them are low in the hierarchy and are therefore not allowed to live in a luxury house like this themselves. Most people still live like that. Now we call the people who do most of the raiding "police", and they have bulldozers.
3. And yeah, food is expensive when you have to plant it, and historically speaking, groups that have planted food can support denser populations with greater productive capital (mills, houses, tools) and more stratified social orders, all three of which make them militarily stronger, so they gradually pushed the groups that just gather it into the poorest and least fertile territories.
This seems like a terrible situation. How can we fix it?
And if you read the article itself, a third of the time is spent waiting for unseasonal rain to stop.
What? No, there is no need to posit systematic exclusion - keep Hanlon's Razor closer to heart. Deliberate destruction of value does happen but it's rare. At any point in history most people have to work hard to get a nice house not because that's objective fact, but because "nice" is defined by what people can afford.
> 3. And yeah, food is expensive when you have to plant it, and historically speaking, groups that have planted food can support denser populations with greater productive capital (mills, houses, tools) and more stratified social orders, all three of which make them militarily stronger, so they gradually pushed the groups that just gather it into the poorest and least fertile territories.
The most valuable resources go to those who make most efficient use of them (military strength has very little to do with it - in the long run it's all about productivity). Isn't that exactly what we want?
As one example, a case I know about because I’ve talked to people who were there: in rural southern Mexico, which was mainly a plantation economy up through the 70s, the casual theft/rape/murder of indigenous peasants by landowners was common even 50 years ago. But the same was/is common in rural peasant societies everywhere in the world, say, all over Europe 200 years ago (more recently in some parts), or the American South up through at least 1900.
I built a 2 story building with 4 rooms and even a cantilevered walkway for about $3500 and about 120 man hours (combined time of myself and 1 other person working on it). Probably would have been closer to 80 if I had a nail gun but I was poor at the time and didn't want to spend the money so I just used a hammer. Of course it wasn't legal but it worked well and was super sturdy. If I had to built it to code and follow all the regulations I wouldn't have even bothered and it would probably have cost me over $100,000 and taken over a year to build.
I bought a book from Home Depot on framing for about $20. It wasn't hard nor expensive to acquire the knowledge.
Buckminster Fuller proposed that homes should be built from pre-made components that can be assembled. I believe he (or maybe someone else referencing him) used the analogy if we built cars the same way we built homes, you would have to order all the parts from separate suppliers. You would have to hire an engineer to come up with the plans. Then you would have to hire workers to build it. And at several stages throughout the process you would have to pay the local government money to approve your plan and get permission to build it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnIXcIQtHvc
Technology has made things incredibly cheap, it's a lot of the building codes and regulations that are making it more expensive.
My point wasn't that today access to knowledge is restricted or that houses today are expensive to build — quite the opposite! My point was that building a house with Stone Age tools and materials is very expensive, and that this is indicative of the causes of the general problem of pre-industrial poverty. I agree with you on that!
I'm curious how much you could ease the process by using more modern knowledge, but starting without modern tools or materials. (You'll note that the OP used modern thermodynamics to design his kiln.) For example, could you smelt iron from sand? http://youtu.be/RuCnZClWwpQ outlines an approach that's definitely workable, but it's using a bloomery furnace — could you, for example, bootstrap a micro-Bessemer furnace? How about a lathe that you can cut threaded screw fasteners on? (Or even just wooden dowels.)
FWIW Bucky's mass-produced-house dream has come to fruition, which is how I was able to live in a trailer park as a child.
It seems to me mostly fixed. Places like China and Vietnam where they used to be really poor are now pretty prosperous. Africa where it remains primitive in parts will shortly have smart phones and be able to surf Hacker News and watch Youtube how to videos themselves.
We then expanded this one room, adding three more. We built a wood burning stove in one of them using clay bricks and another stove outside. Once you can stay at a place like this work goes much faster. There is a huge advantage to using clay as the main material too: it keeps the inside very cool, and it is very cheap and easy to work with.
Then we got even crazier and bought a bunch of bricks. We laid the foundation of a brick house around the mud hut, then built up walls around the mud hut. Once the walls and the roof was up, the sledge hammer took care of the mud hut and the materials were carried out the front door.
Edit: oh, and we had no power at this location, so we did all of this using only hammers, manual saws, screw drivers, and a manual drill. Almost all the nails and screws were salvaged.
The reason we built this was because we got a plot of land to farm, but it was a ways away from where we lived, so we needed some shelter to stay there during the summers. Another requirement was that it had to be resistant to people trying to break in to steal stuff (it was).
I've been looking for more content on that topic, anyone have any good links?
Then I remember I'm on my phone and I'm actually far happier not having to hunt for dinner every night and constantly maintain my leaky hut.
Temporary structures do have practical value. That's why we have scaffolding. Architectural soundness may take some additional time, and you may not want to sleep in the mud surrounded by bugs for the entire duration.
It would probably be worthwhile for him to watch his materials over time and adjust as needed in terms of prep but I expect his 'hut' would certainly last the season and maybe two or three.
Given that he has his kiln set up, he is now in a position to actually build bricks for a more permanent structure, presumably that is his next video if he is working through the Big Bad Wolf hand book (hut made of sticks, hut made of mud, hut made of bricks :-)