A house 3D printed from raw earth
itsnicethat.com
itsnicethat.com
What HN is doing here is internalizing cliches, responding to hyperbole/tropes they (we) assume is in the article. Also, the artsy-philosphical terms used by architects pisses off nerds. "Humane Architecture" and whatnot.
This is HN being silly, not HN being smart. We do both here.
Meanwhile, how is transporting materials vs equipment a Hard Problem?
This isn’t clever. It is a string of tech buzzwords washed with green buzzwords. Or to put it another way nobody really cares how their house is built. The PHP of construction materials and methods is just as good for just about everyone because what mostly matters is location.
The advantage of materials is the ability to stockpile. Their higher degree of asynchronisity. It is possible to maintain an inventory of prefabricated components.
An on-site machine has vast temporal dependencies. And the most common word in construction might be “delayed”...at least it can feel that way at times.
And no place is more full of surprises than what is underground.
Oh well, it is entertaining!
The part that bothers me is crapping on other fields for things we would tolerate, even respect in our own. If a tech company was messing with 3d printing experimentally, released some esoteric and impractical new database alternative or somesuch... We might criticise, but this reaction to experimental architecture is extreme.
I think a lot of it is the artsy language used by architects. It triggers HNers. Meanwhile, we appreciate abstract takes by pg, Stallman, or whatnot.
Consider: "Free software is software that respects your freedom and the social solidarity of your community" - Stallman. This is OK to us, even though it probably sounds like meaningless ideological rambling to the uninitiated.
Meanwhile: "The aesthetics of this house are the result of a technical and material effort, it was not an aesthetic approach only. It is an honest form, a sincere form.” is intolerable to many the HN community. The base assumption is that the emperor has no clothes and regicide is the only solution.
OTOH, I think architect-speak is the actual glue between art philosophy and wider movements. Why is "postmodernism" (or modernism, etc.) an epistemology, political ideology, artistic sense and architectural school? They don't seem obviously related Why did Ayn Rand write about an architect to demonstrate her thoughts?
Logical or not, these "movements" are connected somehow and they to ebb and flow together.
There are a lot of lessons here for tech nerds. You could easily describe "agile vs waterfall" in modernist vs postmodernist terms. Apple & Google's product aesthetic does reflect typically modernist ideas... form from function or whatnot.
A couple of years ago I went deep into talking to literal flat earthers (friends, whom I love). I learned (and still processing) a lot. Anti-intellectualism plays a fundamental role, but the key parts are a level or two deeper to that. You need to realize that psychologists, political "think tankers," dieticians or economists actually do present themselves as equally authoritative to physicists. They're wrong all the time, and many of their loudest talking points turn out to be fads in retrospect. EG Monetarism seems to be dying ATM, despite having been unchallengeable for 40 years. That happens in physics too, but relativity didn't make Newtonian mechanics seem like pseudoscience in retrospect. To a MOP though, there isn't an obviously discernible difference between Newtonian mechanics and the food pyramid. Both are intellectualism, claiming the authority of science. All they see is suits, academic titles, and positions of authority who get to be the authority.
Anyway... because architect/artists speak can be bullshit, is often very clumsy, and we can't discern BS from insight, we assume it's all bullshit or a way to get away with bullshit. Often, its our own ignorance.
I credit PG with bridging these worlds for me.
You make a factory that builds prefabricated panels then deliver them onsite. With prefab, you don’t need to transport an expensive piece of equipment to remote parts of the world and have onsite experts there to supervise and repair it. You don’t have to deal with tear down and setup of the equipment at every site and installers have predictable channels to install any power/ water infrastructure.
I suspect the reason this is popular is more because they are aesthetically pleasing and use new/ special technology than anything else.
The goal here is obviously to build an experimental building, and isn't even explicitly related to affordable housing. Meanwhile, this building method produces a different building to the one you suggest. It's an irrelevant comparison for that reason alone, but there are lots. What if the factory is far away? The fact that transport needs are totally different is actually useful.
Also, what's with this static mindset? Don't you think there are no new building methods to be had?
Personally, I'm quite interested in these printed structures. They're not ready for major use yet, maybe they won't ever be. Practicability will (or won't) be proven when large projects are attempted. You need small projects first.
TLDR, of course they could have just parked an RV there. That's not the point.
It’s not something you could measure on a spreadsheet but it’d be immensely cool to be a part of that, maybe even somewhere remote where you don’t really want to bring much more than absolutely necessary.
This is a proof of concept and surely it will be refined to make more efficient construction processes.
So, in how many decades do you project that a house will cost $300, and will provide shelter for half-a-million people?
Why compare to computing, which is a discipline that's less to a century old, when you can compare to any other millenia-old-industry, some of which have seen revolutionary improvements, some of which have seen minor incremental improvements, and some of which have seen serious cost and/or quality regressions over that period of time?
A buddhist monastery in my area managed to build beautiful structures using bricks made from local raw earth. No fancy giant 3D printers necessary.
3d printing a building might be a cursed problem. If it doesn't scale past single-family dwellings, it's useless. Mo sprawl, mo problems. How could this tech scale up to the size of an apartment building? If you have a big crane, prefab panels are certainly cheaper and faster. Maybe if you built in the style of Agadez Mosque, with the scaffold incorporated into the structure, the robots could climb as they build. That seems to rule out toothpaste extrusion as a technique since the cure time would be a bottleneck. (Let's rule out energy intense curing agents.)
A bricklaying robot... supplied with bricks via the scaffold in the structure.... could the engineering to do that possibly be cost effective against skilled humans? Or the big crane? We haven't even considered aesthetics.
Cursed. Problem.
Who'd think that a proof-of-concept doesn't yet compete with existing solutions?
>I suspect the reason this is popular is more because they are aesthetically pleasing
We are talking about places people can live in. Aesthetics matter.
The ability to produce something aesthetically pleasing on the cheap and at scale matters.
There is a reason Soviet architecture is the butt of so many jokes. They were rapidly building post-war, with the idea that those buildings will be replaced in two decades.
Many of those buildings are still there.
Same holds for US housing projects. People came from cold water tenaments, share cropper shacks with an outhouse out back, and migrant farm labor camps.
They represent a huge improvement in shelter despite their lack of appeal to people of means
So there's value in affordable housing with long-term aesthetics. It affects generations of people beyond those whose lives are immediately improved.
In HN terms, this is a “rewritten in Haskell.” It demonstrates someone understands a bit about 3D printing. It demonstrates some ideological purity. It doesn’t demonstrate a better solution to existing problems.
The complexity of the logistical chain precludes wide spread application where housing is a basic need. You don’t just need the printer machine. You need a fleet of other machines to keep it full of ink. Shovels won’t do.
In the 1950’s, my mentor the late David Crane, FAIA was a young man. He enthusiastically designed precast concrete shelters for post disaster housing. Running the economics at the end of it, its viability was mostly limited to lower Manhattan.
People have been solving housing for millennia. Stick lumber and reinforced concrete are real breakthroughs by virtue of their commoditization.
This is wrapped up in secret sauce. Beautiful as with the myriad other beautiful ways to build.
Most choices are not between bread and cake. They are bread or nothing.
* People have been solving transportation for millenia
* Horses and trains are real breakthroughs
* The complexity of logistical chain (gas, mechanics, paved roads) precludes widespread application where transportation is a basic need
* You need a fleet of other machines to keep it full of fuel. Oats won't do.
* It does not demonstrate a better solution to existing problems
Here's the first hit for "early criticism of automobiles":
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...
I am leaving it as an exercise to the reader to verify the extent to which your concerns mirror those of people 100 years ago.
Nearly 30 years passed from the introduction of Benz's Motorcar (first automobile) to conveyor-belt assembled Ford's Model T (first mass-produced automobile).
It took about the same time from The Mother Of All Demos till the Internet became widespread.
So, let's check back in 30 years
"It doesn’t demonstrate a better solution to existing problems."
"They are bread or nothing."
And this guy starts off his reply with "The negativity is no more unwarranted than positivity."
Why do I always see these kind of comments on the top?
Does HN scrutinize everything based on the "practicality of things"? This article is multiple galaxy away from making such a claim. Why do people respond like the next million dollar housing solution is being advertised here?
And that’s perfectly valid insofar as nutritional content is not a consideration. Insofar as a person has plenty of access to fresh fruit and vegetables.
Not everyone is so far up Madlow’s pyramid. Their needs are also legitimate. My comment is a response to the scolding of people who consider them in their judgment of the project’s merit.
Hey, that's me! I want one! I'm here to know if plumbing is included and if the exterior can look better, but I love this style on the inside. Its a mixture of Pierre Cardin's bubble palace and another aesthetic I've seen where the rockface of a mountain makes up the backwall of a contemporary home! I love it!
This seems like a cheaper way to do that, and I love the hue lights.
Its obvious that there is some metal and other materials that did not come from the earth at that site, and that therefore it cannot have zero waste as the company claims
but who cares, this guy (me) that can easily exchange earned resources for shelter does not care! I like the pictures and read it can be done in 200 hours. Uh, hello!
Framing the superstructure of a building is always the fastest part. Site preparation beforehand and installing services and finishes afterwards are what takes most of the time.
Keep in mind that 200 hours is the time on site. It doesn't include lead time. If there are ten projects ahead of yours, you're 2000 hours out and because there is a dependency on a particular machine, you just have to wait. While you are waiting for your 200 hours, there will be weather delays on the other projects. Other owners will be like you and decide to add an extra room while the machine is there. Framing crews are largely fungible. Proprietary machines and materials are not.
So now it is finally your turn. Any other trades that need to be onsite haven't been sitting around waiting. They are off on other projects with their own schedules, delays, change orders and problems. Sure you scheduled them for 2200 hours out, but that turned out to be 3200 hours and the plumber will be free at the 3700 hour mark and the electrician at t=4000 hours. Because that's the way construction actually works.
It's why everyone has heard horror stories. It's why 200 hours sounds too good to be true. I mean how long will it take you to find a piece of land with suitable soil? How much time will it take to figure out where to put your strip mine on the property?
Also keep in mind that 200 hours is five forty hour work weeks (and 2000 hours a work year). That 3d printer has to be fed by someone and that someone won’t be working round the clock.
The HN community is more likely to provide a check on these claims - I think that's valuable. You'll find the acerbity is triggered by exaggerated claims, humanitarian claims, and lack-of-discussion of downsides. The TECLA page is filled with lines like this: "TECLA, a 3D printed global habitat for sustainable living". It sounds manipulative, makes me not trust them, and based on past experience, pattern-matches to most of their claims being false or exaggerated.
"Hey you are into 3d printing, right? Have you heard about the new technology that allows us to print houses?!?"
Yes I have ... no it won't change the world ... yes this has been done for years now.
What I am more interested in is that robot arm on a truck that "automatically" lays bricks with mortar (substitute) inbetween.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
If you go onto the various engineering and construction subreddits, along with subscribe to various construction trade magazines, these "experiments" pop up all the time. "New" methods. "New" materials. They're "new" if you've never seen them before. However, there's a good chance a real scientific approach to this was done half to a full decade earlier and abandoned for a good reason, which is never mentioned. Unrealistic, fanciful designs are great ways to hide the flaws and look cool because of uniqueness. Too many of these projects detract from more practical methods all in the name of, "We're out to save the world, throw money at us and question nothing!" Basically, think Theranos. Detracting from real, practical, truly well-meaning but unsexy projects is where I get angry.
There are 3D concrete printers out there. There's an Aussie one that escapes me that's just about commercially viable if it isn't already. There are plenty others, but the Aussie one was in the lead last I knew. Another company does an arm that can pick/place brick/blocks. While a bit slow, in like a 36 some odd hour non-stop cycle, it can build a regular, practical, normal, everyday, conventional 2 bed-room house. There are other solutions that are proven. Past experimentation. Past testing. Past prototyping. In production. Ready to go... except attention and investment is given to art projects. Which then hurts the image further for REAL projects because investors will immediately categorize them with these doomed to fail art projects. Remember, construction folks don't really care about form, it's all about function. Cost-effective, practical construction methodology for cost-effective, practical buildings that meet up to local building codes and requirements. Not art projects.
As a separate example of the silliness I'm describing: There's a really fun "innovative material" made from mycelium (fungus) that pops up as "brand new" every quarter. The main substrate does change every now and then, but generally it's a sawdust brick with a fungus allowed to spread into it and form chitin. This new magical brick is biodegradable and uses waste material... except no one likes to mention that they can only maintain ~40 PSI of compression while a standard cement block is rated for a minimum of 3,000 PSI. That's why it's always used in very artsy-fartsy designs to hide the limitations. Oh, and the one thing a building shouldn't be is "biodegradable". Also known as engineered-failure in about a 2 year timespan. We haven't even gotten to viability in windy, swampy, monsoon, seismic, freezing, high freeze/thaw cycles or any other special building conditions.
I so incredibly hate these art projects with a fiery passion because normies imagine, "This will help the poors". No, it won't.
So yes, in the end, negativity is warranted. It's a nice line of logic and experimentation... but earthen homes are a niche and 200 hours isn't that impressive (8+ days). A handful of people can build an impact earth home of the same size in a week by hand with no machinery. Just hand tools. This is on the scope of a cannon against a mosquito level of practicality.
The difference is that Alexander’s method was rooted in self-sufficiency. Do-it-yourself without an architect or contractor.
https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/finally-credible-p...
You generally use the old tried and true methods to handle moisture, water and rain. "Good hat. Good boots." Well coordinating landscaping. And appropriate interior ventilation in critical areas.
However, that their "water-repellent" provides "waterproofing" does not clear things up.
Mapesoil 10.[1] "High-performance, fibre-reinforced powdered stabilising agent for sports sub-base contruction surfaces".The amount of Mapesoil 10 required is 3%-5% of the dirt weight. Comes in 500kg bags, on pallets.
Dynamon SR4 [2] "Superplasticizer based on acrylic polymer for concrete with long slump retention". About 1%-2% of the mix. That gets the material through the 3D printer without clogging.
Planicrete [3] "Synthetic-rubber latex to improve the adhesion of cement mixes". About 2% of the mix. That helps each layer adhere to the previous layers, the usual problem with 3D printing.
These are all standard additives for concrete.
There's also a waterproofing agent sprayed on afterwards.
The same materials would probably work with concrete forms. Plus, then you could do tamping. The trouble with most of these 3D building systems is that there's no tamping or ramming to solidify the material. It's just squirted on like toothpaste. So problems with voids and leakage are to be expected.
All this requires the right dirt. Probably something with a high clay content. Too much sand or too much topsoil and it probably won't become hard enough.
As with rammed earth construction [4] this may not hold up in wet climates.
[1] https://cdnmedia.mapei.com/docs/librariesprovider2/products-...
[2] https://cdnmedia.mapei.com/docs/librariesprovider2/products-...
[3] https://cdnmedia.mapei.com/docs/librariesprovider2/products-...
[4] https://www.firstinarchitecture.co.uk/rammed-earth-construct...
An extreme case is western Ireland. Tiny plots surrounded by far too many stone walls. Pretty, but too rocky for sustenance farming. Cromwell ordered the Catholics to go "to hell or to Connacht".
[1] https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/history-science-and-po...
In adobe construction, too-high clay content can be as big a problem as too low. All clays are somewhat expansive, and the most plastic clays like bentonite are also the most expansive. If your adobe is too expansive it cracks when it dries and contracts. Including enough sand makes it less expansive and less plastic when it gets moist, and including enough straw† allows it to resist cracking.
When you need to build in adobe, you analyze the local soil first. If there's topsoil, you dig through it to get to the clay, sand, and silt that you need. If there's too much clay or silt, you can defecate some sand in a settling tank and pour the mud off the top. If there's not enough clay, you do the same thing but it's the mud you use instead of the sand at the bottom. If your clays are too expansive, or you have way too much silt, you may need to dig somewhere else, or grout your adobe with lime or ashes like they're doing, which shades into building with cement, as you say.
We have thousands of years of craft lore about how to get this to work, plus modern science. It's true that, like rammed earth, adobe works best in dry climates, but its range extends into wetter climates than you might think, especially in the wattle-and-daub form where you supplement the straw with wood.
The big problem with adobe nowadays is not that it doesn't hold up or that you can't make the soils work; it's that it's a hell of a lot of work because your walls are two meters thick, and they're nearly as dense as concrete, and it's slow, because you need to cure the bricks for months before you start construction. A double-wide trailer is just a lot more house for the money.
The potential advantage to 3-D printing your adobe or concrete instead of tamping it into forms, plastering it on layer by layer, or stacking it up in bricks is that you can deploy the material where you think it'll be the most advantageous. The ruffled outside surface will channel rainfall into the grooves where more of it can flow down the wall before it soaks in. Those big spaces you see inside the walls might help with insulation, they will slow leaching of water that can produce moisture or efflorescence indoors, they might let you cure the adobe in place in the wall instead of in a pile of bricks beforehand, and they remove most of the weight of the wall without reducing its buckling resistance. The dome-vault shape allows you to reduce your roof expenses greatly. And maybe squeezing toothpaste out of a CNC crane will be less work than a team of sweaty guys tossing 20-kg bricks up ladders all day.
Still, though, those gorgeous soaring vaults make me very nervous. An adobe wall collapsing on top of your kids would not be very fucking funny at all.
______
† I guess straw is a "high-performance fibre-reinforced stabilizing agent". The amount used is typically around 1%, so maybe straw is higher-performance than Mapesoil, or maybe they're just arching the walls more than you would normally dare to do with adobe.
I suspect that's a pure compression structure. It's a dome with an oculus, like the Pantheon. It probably took finite element analysis to design an asymmetrical dome. The asymmetry is just showing off.
It's common to analyze masonry structures as "pure compression structures", but that's a useful simplification permitted by considering the bricks to be atomic units. The tensile stress trying to peel the bottom surface off a brick arch is small, but it's real, and if not resisted by the tensile strength of the brick, the arch collapses from the inside out, like the sand arches that sometimes form above an aperture in a moving-sand-picture desk toy. Fired-clay bricks have enough tensile strength that we don't have to think about this, but adobe is just at the limit where safe and reliable building is possible with enough care. For this reason, traditional adobe walls are very strictly vertical, but their surfaces are not; they are significantly thinner at the top than at the base.
(I'm not an architect or structural engineer, but I spent much of my childhood in adobe structures, I've taken a few adobe-construction classes, and in the process I've built a few adobe structures that are still standing.)
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† Nonuniformly-drying adobe is not a particular type of adobe. It's the nature of the drying process that, during drying, the surface of the brick or wall is dryer than the core—it's precisely that moisture gradient that causes moisture to diffuse out of the core, thus allowing the core to dry. But that same moisture gradient sets up a tensile stress in the surface, which you can diminish but not eliminate by adjusting the adobe mix. Even portland-cement concrete does this, though to a smaller extent.
‡ Straw or other high-performance, fibre-reinforced stabilising agents, of course.
I would call that a feature. Building forms is basically building the entire building out of wood (or metal), then building it again out of concrete. Single family homes or multi-unit low rises don't require low void high compressive strength. They need speed. Residential prefab never caught on in North America. Maybe this will. If it is cheap.
That all said, it is somewhat more expensive than traditional construction. Better insulated, more energy efficient, and more resilient to fire and flood.
True. Neither did concrete construction for residences. Edison tried it. He had a set of concrete forms that latched together. Then you poured concrete, waited, and remove the forms. It was never popular, but there are still a few left in use.
I live in a cinderblock house reinforced with concrete and rebar. It was built around 1950 by a commercial building contractor, as his personal residence. The interior is quite nice, but the exterior looks industrial.
It's always "here's a shell we made". I'd like to see the finished house, with fixtures in place and working.
How well it going to work in practice is another matter (and here's where am skeptical).
Are you sure you aren’t thinking of sink drains?
Using current pre-fab techniques a half dozen builders can raise the core structure of a single family house in a few days. A friend of mine is in the process of building a house and raising the core structure was the fastest and easiest part of the whole process. I don't see this being either cheaper or faster.
The bulk of the cost in many cases is things independent of the actual house, like purchasing the land, doing the ground work and the foundations and pulling in water and sewage.
There's a typical expectation of manufactured parts or prepared wood for a wood frame building. (It's not instantaneous to season wood for house building, and it's longer than this structure drying)
I have looked into building a house a few month ago, the wait time for the structural lumber components to be manufactured to the spec - 3 months. "Raising the barn" part is hardly the long part.
That's blatantly false, the structure is the easy part.
really, though, you can finish them like any other house; there's nothing special about the kitchen, bathroom, or walls that precludes it.
aside from the striping, i imagine there's not that much different about building internal structures into a house like this than there is into more traditional rammed earth housing.
It reminds me a little of an old Grand Designs episode. [0] Different, in that (AFAICT) the 3D-printed house isn't designed to have high thermal mass (the 'earthship' concept) but it gives an idea how a fully-functional house can be crafted from a lot of earth and work quite well.
[0] https://www.granddesignsmagazine.com/grand-designs-houses/97...
After that, the only challenge is making sure you have plumbing connections at the bathroom and kitchen sites. But modern pex plumbing makes that pretty easy. You're just running flexible rubber tubes from the multiplexer. In this sort of design, I'd imagine you can just pre-print the holes for the tubes, or punch through where needed.
This illustrates the bath and kitchen areas. Looks as if there's a cooktop but no oven. The bath includes a sink, shower, and WC.
https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2021/02/a-3d-...
Imagine homes that are printed with a 20 year life expectancy. Especially in America where I don't know many families that remain in the same house for 20 years. We could start going to the Japanese model of razing the house as an expected part of the land purchase. This has the added benefit of making it significantly easier to keep houses up to modern code.
I'd rather see that we built really solid houses that are fundamentally designed for ease of renovation, rather than routinely raze and rebuild from scratch. Code improves over time but not on a timescale that makes 20-year rebuilds sensible.
If a Toll Brothers/(any builder) has generic plan house blueprints that need to be updated to include the new code changes, they pay an architect to change the drawings to include the new code requirements, and then continue building that design of house.
We used to make homes out of bricks, and we could do that again, now that lumber is expensive.
Not in areas with earthquake building codes.
2. Earthquake prone areas are a minority of the surface area of the earth. Suppose just the non-earthquake prone areas shifted significantly toward local masonry as a building material, that should still greatly reduce supply pressure for lumber.
The raw earth used for traditional building techniques like rammed earth, can be re-used just by adding some water after razing the earth walls, as long as no cement/lime additive was initially used. This is also the Achilles heel of these traditional techniques: moisture will destroy the structure of a rammed earth wall when not appropriately protected with a large roof + above the ground foundation to avoid capillary rise.
My 3D printer is compatible with ~5 very specific types of plastic. Traditional construction can be done with plastics, metals, masonry, wood, composites, and many others.
Consider as one example low income areas that are filled with housing built in the 40's and 50's which can now be razed and replaced without inadvertently causing gentrification.
Agree that some areas like Detroit that have houses that have been abandonded, scavanged, vandalized, and left open to the elements for years are in most cases not salvagable.
This is also a complex cultural problem here as well because even though there are obvious ways of making even comparisons such as time and money spent before receiving a use permit the culture of construction likes to focus on a single innovation while leaving the rest out. There is a modular apartment building near me that took only hours to assemble from the component modules. However, doing that took many months of site preparation and module delivery and after the several hours construction it has still been months to get finishing done, construct sidewalks, and the rest. Without some general agreement about how to measure construction costs and time it is easy to present innovations that are either minor improvements or actually steps backward.
I think the bigger advantage to 3D printed architecture, though, is that you can make drastic changes to the design of a building without having to consider whether a contractor with the necessary skills is available to do the work or spend any effort trying to communicate the design to another human. For example, if I'm an architect and my client wants their living room to look like a gothic cathedral, I could design their living room to look like a gothic cathedral without having to worry about whether I can find a builder who knows how to construct a vaulted arch ceiling. I'd just have to make sure it's within the capabilities of the construction machine and conforms to structural requirements. That opens up a lot of possibilities, especially when it comes to organic shapes, curves, and non-right-angles.
I'm not aware this method has any real cost savings though compared to wood frame construction.
My impression is that ICF tends to cost about the same as stick frame construction, but I'm not an expert in these things.
If you were an architect with those kinds of clients you would have a list of potential builders with track records of successfully completing similar work. It’s among the kinds of expertise architects have.
And you would look at this with the jaded cynicism that an architect’s experience inevitably produces...for you will have seen simple concrete pumps break down...seen concrete mixed with extra slump to make it easier to work...and endless product presentations that sounded too good to be true.
And most importantly you would know that right angles are almost always the right answer...
My point is that you don't have to have this knowledge, and you don't have to hire expert craftspeople and pay them expert wages if you can have a machine do the difficult work.
> And most importantly you would know that right angles are almost always the right answer...
Not necessarily. Box-shaped rooms work nicely, but the most important thing is to not have acute angles between walls. (IIRC Christopher Alexander goes into this in A Pattern Language in defense of right-angle walls, but for some reason neglects to consider rooms with more than 4 sides as an option.) Greater than 90 degrees is fine as long as it doesn't present a problem for the intended use (i.e. client expects furniture to fit at right angles). Also, if you're printing a whole house you can design benches, shelves, desks, and so forth into the design. Or maybe contract out to some service that will make the furniture based on a 3D model.
A big part of why walls are straight and meet at right angles is that building materials are generally straight and expect to be joined at right angles. Anything else turns into a complicated geometry problem that takes a lot longer to build. With a 3D printer, though, that's not a limitation. It doesn't matter how simple or complicated a design is, it takes about the same amount of time to print and uses about the same amount of material. The main constraints then just become what's strongest, nicest-looking, and most functional. Most people will probably prefer box-shaped rooms, but the point is that they'll have options if a box-shaped room isn't optimal.
One could imagine if house-design software becomes sufficiently advanced, you could dispense with the architect as well. Someone who wants a house could just log onto a website, identify the site where the house is to be built, and specify a bunch of constraints and preferences, and then the backend software generates a bunch of house plans. The customer choses the one they like and pay the money, then a building permit is applied for and a printing machine and work crew show up on site and assemble a house that's unique and exactly suited to its site.
The advantage of an architect is that you won’t get what you think you want.
Allowing people to directly design their own house using CAD software is also an option. I think on average it would turn out okay most of the time. People have a pretty good incentive to design the spaces they live in well for they way they intend to use them.
You can not automate problem solving until someone creates GAI. Thinking that all a programmer does is write code or all an architect does is draw walls is an insult to each profession. The primary attribution of both is to decipher what the client actually wants from limited descriptions and to problem solve.
Maybe centering such infrastructure around self containment would prevent some of that but in itself seems wasteful (everyone needs their own water pump, sewage system and electrical generation management equipment?)
This wasn't a bad series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA5fh29rhLs
Put me in the 'shipping containers make shitty houses' camp.
Could have just built a wood frame house. Quicker, faster and more roomy.
Cut out a whole side wall? That's a very different story.
Maybe?
(Shipping container housing sometimes invokes the same enthusiams which could seen at times in the 1950s for nuclear.)
I suspect the real issue at hand is that you're usually not allowed to build such a house, which is where the "tiny home on wheels" trend came about. Ignoring the part where an entire group of people seem to have forgotten that caravans exist, the "on wheels" part lets you build out-of-code homes and put them places you wouldn't be allowed to otherwise.
It really depends on a lot of factors though. What draws someone to a container home, is it the re-use and recycling? Is it the do-it-yourself nature of the project? If so, that's wicked, but I think we can probably work out ways to achieve those two things while also getting better and cheaper houses as the end result, if regulations would let you actually deploy such a house.
I don't think they forgot that they exist, just that they serve a significantly different niche.
A caravan (or travel trailer) is designed to be moved easily and regularly. Ideally with the smallest vehicle possible. This means they are built incredibly lightly, with at least a passing concern for aerodynamics.
Tiny houses aren't really designed to be moved often. They have generally have much more sturdily built and larger internal fixtures. They aren't particularly great on the road, often people hire a company to move them when they need to. But they are designed to be lived in full time.
But, if you build a house and it collapses on top of you, who's responsible? Who pays for your medical expenses?
Even worse, if the house collapses and it falls on top of your guests, who's responsible? Who pays for everyone's medical expenses?
That's just one random example, there are many ways a house can fail.
The material used probably involves some form of binder, rammed earth is also an option but it doesn't look like rammed earth from the photos.
https://www.3dwasp.com/en/3d-printed-house-tecla/
I think its safe to assume that the raw clay has been processed into a material more suitable for masonry.
30 story building build in 15 days - prefabricated skyscraper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajlUVSiUvWg
Up until last 40 years ago people didn't want to live on the ocean. Now they can't get enough. US has a huge swaths of land empty, especially in the Pacific Northwest.
Can you expand on this please? What do you mean by 'people didn't want to live on the ocean' and also, what do you mean by 'vast swaths of empty land in the PNW'. Are you talking east of the cascades? I don't think there is a whole lot of land there with an oceanic climate?
I remember Arnold Schwarzenegger being confused why "nobody" wanted to live in Santa Monica or Venice Beach to a point that the government was subsidizing it to attract people.
For instance north of San Diego there are old apartment buildings on the water that have only window facing the ocean in their bathroom.
Historically ocean was considered as a hassle. You have to deal with the salty air that breaks down many material quite swiftly.
In Turkey, fathers would give the prime land to their sons (pastures) and the crap land to their daughters (ocean fronts). How the world changed.
> what do you mean by 'vast swaths of empty land in the PNW' If you go anywhere outside of the majors settlements there are major swaths of empty land which is fairly cheap, but there is no infrastructure there and people don't want to be the city founders anymore.
Not only that, but you don't have to go very far from the ocean for the saltiness of the air to diminish, so there's not much sacrifice if you value being at the ocean.
There's also a social element to it. Historically, most of the people living by an ocean were those traditionally employed in traditionally ocean-related industries, like fishing, canning, and shipping.
These are traditionally associated with a grimier and more impoverished state of existence, because in most industrial cities, that's how oceanfronts were (or still are).
Second thought is that the interior looks very Star Trek / Star Wars like.
Some confirmation of the non-leakiness of the walls would be good, but otherwise looks extremely promising as a concept.
[...] the value of the average Japanese house depreciates to zero in 22 years. (It is calculated separately from the land, which is more likely to hold its value.) Most are knocked down and rebuilt. Sales of new homes far outstrip those of used ones, which usually change hands in the expectation that they will be demolished and replaced. In America and Europe second-hand houses accounted for 90% of sales and new-builds for 10% in 2017. In Japan the proportions are the other way around. — The Economist
Sound yes, heat not so much. While it can store heat due to it's thermal mass, it will release it quickly due to a low R-value, depending on moisture content the R-value could be below 1 per inch. Cellulose has around 3.5 per inch.
Without adding additional insulation to restrict thermal transfer, you need to build very thick walls. In sunny desert climates where days are hot and nights are cold, you can build your wall in a way that allows it to go through the heat exchange synced with the 24hr sun cycle, and then it's very efficient. Thinner cob walls need to be wrapped with insulation to slow down heat transfer.
There are old Wattle and Daub[1] houses near me that haven't been washed away by the UK weather.
You could say the same thing for houses now, which are built out of wood...
Both houses look very cool to me!
I always feel like this sentiment sounds like nostalgia some express about the "sturdy" cars of the 60's. Sure, you can hit them with a hammer without a dent, but the engineering is crap.
As a rule of thumb, I will only buy pre-2008 vehicles, things only went from bad to worst after that era.
Yeah, last I heard ceramic brick is a super artificial material that doesn't degrade at all over time. It's also very toxic :-p
'That's nice but I was thinking of something... square. I'm into right angles'
I see that is has low carbon footprint, is made of local materials. But is that what they are defining as "humane" architecture?
Very cool looking structure.
That looks like good substrate for some kind of fat polymer coating.
Needs windows.
How does it stand up to the wet?
Domes look cool, so of course fiction is full of them. They are not impossible to build so a few people have built them. They are not a good shape though, so they won't catch on.
I imagine, this could be done by a robot for this 3D structure.
Of course, this depends on house not collapsing under heavy rain.
But raw earth is porous and will store moisture, hence behaves like a two-phase material. Water in the earth may vaporize or condensate in the pores, which helps in regulating indoor moisture levels, and explains the high thermal storage capacity of the material. Since earth is cheap, it's also possible to build thick walls and get a high thermal storage capacity in the building envelope. Sun heat will be re-radiated a few hours later at night during winter, and some the cool of the evening nights will be available indoor during summer days. Because of this high thermal capacity, raw earth buildings are good at this so-called thermal phase shift. But raw earth is still a poor insulating material.
Out of curiosity, could you suggest what material would be best for storing heat from the sun? I am going to build a greenhouse that will face the south and have a wall on the north side to absorb heat. I have seen some people use clay with a black metal wall and some use black barrels of water. I want to be able to extract some heat from it using pipes. Any thoughts on what might be even better?
I also toy with the idea of building a greenhouse myself, that's why I have done some research. If you want to harness the thermal capacity of earth for a greenhouse, I know of two tricks:
- Excavate one or two meters of soil to build a “pit” greenhouse. You will get earth walls connected to an immense thermal storage capacity. This is the so called Walipini greenhouse concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walipini
- The diurnal and seasonal temperature oscillations dampen quickly with depth in the ground. Below some meters of soil, the temperature will be stable at the average annual temperature at your location (Ta). If you can dig a trench to lay underground pipes to create a ground/air heat exchange connected to your greenhouse, you will get a free source of air heated at (Ta) in winter or cooled down to the same (Ta) in summer. Fans to force air circulation will help.
Thanks for the tips on the water. That has the benefit of having emergency access to water if I need it. Also much easier to build than a clay wall.
So I guess the lime prevents erosion.
This was quite eye-opening to me once I had to actually attempt to find some land to build on.
My point is just that the current building codes necessitate experimenting away from more developed areas in order to innovate and that this should not be held against examples of construction innovation.
After having had to search for land I would say that I feel that building codes are perhaps not overly restrictive, but too ubiquitous. Most experimentation and innovation can only happen on small patches of remote scrubland with poor soil, deep ground water, and limited access to the internet.
It would be nice if some of these projects could take place 15 minutes out of a mid-sized town rather than 40 minutes to an hour. I can see the value in enforcement within a city's limits, but we could get faster building innovation if counties and states were laxer with building codes on their unincorporated land.
This doesn't even qualify as "eco-structure". R-value is pretty terrible.
Did you call it off completely?
I concluded it is best done as a DIY project in a location where you know the inspector, or know he won’t care, with cash. Here are some of the stories I was going from:
It's hard enough to get a loan to build a house, let alone an unconventional one.
It's not about the mud hut. It's about how the mud hut was made.
The “environmental sustainability” gains you get from using on-site materials would be totally erased by the fact that if you actually built houses like this at scale and expected people to live in them, we would have to massively increase the land area occupied by humans, which is the exact opposite direction we need to go in.
Show me where this technology can knock down the cost of adding infill housing or building vertically in locations where land and construction are expensive (that is, where people actually want to live), and it’ll be worth paying attention to. Otherwise it’s just a dumb, expensive distraction.
I agree we should be building denser to meet demand for housing in cities. But not everyone needs to live in a city.
The technique is limited to mud huts for now. It's a demonstration of what it is capable of for now. With more research it could become more useful later on. Seeing that is not rocket science.
An underappreciated thing is how easy having straight walls makes construction. Having lived in a boat with curved walls, I would never consider a land home with curved walls. The beauty of the curve does NOT make it worth it, unless you plan to hire someone at great expense to do all the work for you. Yes, it's that bad, your 4 day cabinet project will become 4 weeks in no time. Instead of being able to simply plop in premade components (windows, benches, cabinets, beds, etc etc) you'll now need to custom build absolutely everything. Even the parts that seem simple are not. Laying flooring in a square room is simple enough. In a small curved room, you'll have to cut a ton of pieces with a strange curve. Then you have to lay them to meet up with the curved walls. It's a nightmare. You're also negating part of the eco-friendly aspect, by the way, when you have to discard huge amounts of curvy pieces of material (trust me, you'll cut large pieces wrong more than a few times.) That's one reason why I find this 3D printing clay project quite cool - you can simply 3D print benches, cabinets, walls etc to nestle right up to the curve.
I'd be very curious to hear from anyone here who tried to save money while building a home, but I would suspect that the answer is to go small and minimize labor. Even minimizing labor, you're going to need permits, a foundation, electrical, HVAC, a roof, etc, so it's not going to be nearly as cheap as you think.
If anyone is interested in a good cost breakdown of house construction costs, I like this one: https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?sectionID=734&gener...
You'll notice that the sum total of framing + exterior finishes (framing, exterior wall finishes, roof, windows and doors, etc) come out to around 30% of the construction cost of a new home, or around 18.5% of the total cost of a new home. So this machine can save you at maximum 30% of the construction cost. The rest is pretty much fixed: landscaping+deck+driveway = 6.8%, interior finishing = 25.4%, plumbing/electrical/HVAC = 15%, foundation = 12%, permits/sewer/fees = 6%.
Which gets to my last point: the issue with technologies like these is that people compare their best-case projections for one part of the system to the total costs of the existing solution (traditional stick built construction) in the same way people make arguments for Gadgetbahn type projects. You see that the average new single family home costs $485k and suddenly a $50k shipping container home looks really appealing. But that's ignoring two things - one, the costs that are not included in that $50k, and two, that you're comparing a projection to reality. Compare apples to apples, and you'll realize that a stick-built kit for several hundred square feet can be had for $29k: https://allwoodoutlet.com/LARGE-CABIN-KITS/Allwood-Avalon-54...
To be sure, this is really cool—breakthrough even. But the headlines are just factually inaccurate.
This almost reads as an onion article with the headline “brilliant scientists figure out how to overcomplicate the construction of mud huts similar to our earliest human ancestors”.
It's pretty hard to beat traditional methods and anything new typically has to be measurably quite a lot better.
If a person wanted to drive down costs, I'd probably tend more towards larger prefab components.
Maybe it's not so different from software in these areas.
If any engineers out there have links to tests or studies please do post them.
In any case, it's an interesting experiment that should provide good data and observations toward a more "complete" house prototype.
[1] https://www.lemoniteur.fr/photo/le-pise-ressort-de-terre-a-l...
But this approach for building a house on Earth to house humans seems way off the bell curve of potential to scale.
And if you consider that brick houses have bricks made of clay, that's even more...
You realize there are lots of brick houses out there and those things aren't run through the brick walls either right?
2x4 dimensional lumber framing is used inside and those are run through the studs.
Stop with this arrogance, because I can bet that your POC are nowhere near as good looking.
I just cut the wall, run my wires inside and cover with plaster.
Continuing to develop this tech could make it useful for setting up buildings in hostile environments. Initially deserts and the arctic/antarctic.
But eventually using unattended robots to construct structures on the Moon and Mars.
I think the relevant Onion article is this classic from 1998: "New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System Downloads Real-Time TV Programs, Displays Them On Monitor" https://www.theonion.com/new-5-000-multimedia-computer-syste...
20 years later analog TV is long dead. TVs are now computers.
This probably won't add up to much in the next 20 years. But it's early tech and there are exciting long term possibilities.
To add to this: If you've ever been to these embedments after the fact, they can leave behind a lot of waste/trash. Namely, concrete (pads, walls, etc). Much of which cannot be easily re-used and breaking it down is expensive/hard.
You use 80% locally sourced materials, if the base just gets left, and starts to breaks down, all you wind up with is mostly original dirt from the area instead of toxic concrete dust.
PS - Although Hesco barrier[0] has also made very positive inroads here, replacing concrete with mostly local dirt, chicken wire, and fabric. But it cannot be used for dwellings, only perimeter wall.
As far as practicality, I'd be more interested in the long term stability of the material. But you likely can do the same thing we did with my friends earth ship style domes, which was to coat them in fabric and then spray a few mm thick layer of cement all over it.
Here's the result. As you can see this is something that would appeal to quite a few people. Pre COVID he had no problem booking airbnb guests for this every night for months out.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCWtTEQDJ1_/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCJnAB7DUfK/ (click through to second pic)
I wouldn't be so quick to be dismissive of this general concept. Particularly in Mediterranean areas where wood framing materials are more expensive, this may a perfectly reasonable approach.
Have you seen architecture in like, any warm part of the world, especially Italy? Masonry/concrete techniques dominate.
If anything, this is far easier to integrate with utilities, since it can be incorporated into the 3D design.
It also seems easier to drill through than traditional masonry/concrete.
This technique is even more labor-saving than filling formwork with local materials, because formwork is very labor intensive, and you can't readily incorporate unusual utilities, windows, shapes, etc.