New build houses in the UK all seem to have those crazy American-style hollow walls - that's the worst thing about them.
With some modern design concepts (e.g. leaving plenty of plenum for unanticipated future cabling/plumbing needs) I think you could come up with a very pleasant place to live, just at probably quadruple the price.
Is anyone building stuff like this today? Or would this have to be some extremely custom stuff you need to research and act as a contractor managing a bunch of subcontractors?
> Is anyone building stuff like this today?
can it even be done while satisfying modern building codes and energy efficiency requirements?
They are built all of the time. Invest in good windows, metal roof, and good drainage and the house will be around 200 years from now.
The farmers I worked for as a teenager revovated their Dutch built barn (ca. 1660) into a home. The secret is keeping the water out.
Nearly every one of these criticisms is a desirable feature of traditional Japanese architecture. Houses are assembled from standardized materials produced off-site and fitted together without nails (wood joinery). Many interior walls and some exterior walls are literally made of paper, in sliding wooden frames (exterior shoji almost always have sliding wooden covers that are deployed at night). Special attention is paid to the thatched or tiled roof.
Japan is a very wet place. In summer there are typhoons at least every week and it's miserably hot and humid. Traditional houses are perfectly adapted for this: when you need to you can slide open most of the walls and take advantage of every breeze. I believe that most of the wood is cedar, which is resistant to rot, and most of the structure is left visible (i.e. no plaster) so any problems are readily apparent.
Houses seem less adapted to winter, but people adapt by using deep baths, kotatsu, and quilted clothing to heat their bodies rather than the entire inside of the house.
Earthquakes are pretty common in Japan, one of the reason lighter materials are used. Traditional buildings are typically built on stone foundations. Structural posts are fitted with stone "feet" that are free to slide around on the foundation during earthquakes.
Japanese don't value permanence in architecture the way Europeans do -- even the Ise Jungu (shrine), a national monument, is rebuilt every N years -- yet in the area I lived (Nara prefecture) there were many traditional houses over a hundred years old. There is at least one wooden building at Horyuji (temple) that is ~1200 years old.
[Thanks to Dr. Lloyd Fulton for that class in traditional Japanese architecture at Waseda U. Miss you, sensei.]
That may be a big part of the explanation. It's fairly common for Japanese people to have the existing house torn down and rebuilt when they buy a property.
More importantly, when you speak about these throwable houses, are you sure that is a "desirable feature"?
It might be that the UK has more than its fair share of cowboy builders. It is not the building technique that is at fault but the execution of it.
I'd speculate that a well-build modern wood-and-sheetrock house is probably more energy efficient and quieter than an early 20th-century double- or triple-brick house.
Also, wood-and-sheetrock is a lot easier/cheaper to replace than brick when a tornado comes along and knocks the house down, which is possible in 75% of the US.
The UK is basically tectonically stable, which means those brick houses aren't likely to collapse into a multi-ton pile of bricks when the mortar crumbles or cracks in an earthquake. The same cannot be said of many areas in the USA, and it only takes one earthquake every few decades to drive that point home.
Even until a few years back it was all clay bricks.
Agree with you. Full concrete homes are basically the furnace and freezer experience.
So in a thermal wall, you should match the rate at which heat conducts through the wall to the thickness of the wall, such that it takes about (12 + 24n) hours for heat applied to the exterior of the wall to radiate from the interior of the wall, and vice versa. You're trying to eliminate the daily temperature variation, so that the heating or cooling load will be more stable.
Adding phase-change materials to the concrete mix would help, but for the most part, the traditional building method in the region has been tuned by trial and error. If you build an adobe house in New Mexico, you make the walls from local materials, with the same thickness as the traditional homes. Or you get an engineer to do the thermal calculations.
Most houses built in the US just stick to the building code, which is generally good enough to accommodate local weather conditions without breaking out the calculators.
(the basic idea was to model the wall as extremely thin slices so the heat transfer between slices can be approximated easily. How thin? You kept making them thinner until the model stabilized).
The wall thickness we derived was very close to the wall thickness traditionally used by the indigenous people of the area. What are the odds? :-)
The outer cavity is designed to stop water from crossing from the outside to the interior.
There is a fashion for filling the cavity with insulating materials, but that leads to problems because it can draw water between the layers.
I also own a rental house that is 100 years old made of 14" thick mud adobe walls, including the interior walls! Also done for temperature control.
American construction is strong enough to last for a few hundred years if you maintain it. While it isn't passive house efficient it is efficient (and it isn't clear that a passive house is even possible in our climate - many of them make other compromises which means they rot out in a few years).
How can you know about r-values but not that every modern house built has cavity walls that can be/are insulated?[1]
Even hundred-year old houses can be insulated by DIY drylining. You'll lose about 10cm of floor space though. Sometimes there's even some government grants available for this[2]
[1]http://www.residentialenergydynamics.com/portals/0/Resources...
[2]http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02041/jeff-howel...
Note that bricks are not a strong as wood under tension. They do well under compression, but that is not all the loads to account for. Bricks are used in cities and commercial construction primarily because they do not burn and so you can use them as a safety barrier.
Seems like that would make it harder to frame a new subdivision in under a week.
At least until the next earthquake, which is a real possibility in much of the US. Light frame houses survive earthquakes pretty well. The brick chimneys on them don't.
> Houses here are routinely hundreds of years old where in the US the approach seems to be to knock down the wooden houses and build them again before they get that old.
Well, yes and no. The US isn't that old. There weren't a lot of homes here hundreds of years ago so obviously there aren't a lot of 200-year old homes now. But yes, there's also a fair bit of demolishing of 50-year old homes.
Yeah, I don't understand the comments in this thread that talk about water damage. Do people in Europe just not bother maintaining their roofs? You can get hidden water damage from a leak into a hollow wall, but it's really not that common. Typically there's visible water staining and severe damage only comes from willfully ignoring that signs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone
It's going to be an ugly, ugly thing if another major quake hits there. The last time the region was sparsely populated. Now there are cities all over the place and and the seismic codes are far more lax than they are in California (if said codes even exist).