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Comment by mbgerring | Hacker News Reader

Every one of these obnoxious mud huts I’ve ever seen are single story, on like 10 acres of land, in a car-dependent rural area. More people living like this would worsen every current issue we face with environmental sustainability.

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Good luck trying to get permits to build anything the slightest bit unconventional in any populated area. I looked at building a geodesic dome, and was going to end up in the boonies and likely still paying off the inspector to pull permits. You could get it done in town and it would have to be over-built, completely ruining the whole efficiency angle of the dome to begin with, and taking months or years to work through the process.

Yeah basically this. Trying to build an eco-structure or even a mostly earthen home in the US you are basically relegated to a sparsely populated counties or taking your chances squatting on Federal land.

This was quite eye-opening to me once I had to actually attempt to find some land to build on.

For good reason - most of these things don't have good engineering behind them. Standard stick frame construction has good insulation values (dirt/clay/mud/cement does not), holds up to weather, earthquakes, and has reasonable fire protection (it burns but in known amounts). This is all backed up by a lot of engineering data that doesn't exist for most alternatives, they might be better, but nobody has actually run all the angles to be sure.

I don't disagree with you actually. I believe that building codes generally keep us safer and create a better standard of house. Most people don't want to become test subjects for an experimental technology.

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.

> Trying to build an eco-structure

This doesn't even qualify as "eco-structure". R-value is pretty terrible.

Dammit. I just started looking into building a dome house.

Did you call it off completely?

Yes. I talked to a builder, he thought he was going to have to do R22 insulation across the entire thing because it’s not clear whether it is a wall or ceiling. Ridiculous because the engineering for domes has been around for 70 years. Most lenders won’t help you. Appraisal for resale is problematic.

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:

http://www.domehome.com/scrapbook.html

I think the lender thing makes sense. Lenders are all about risk mitigation, and unfortunately at this time there are just too many risks around a geodesic dome as a house. Lots of folks think that building a house is a potential approach to finding a place to live, but the reality is that doing so is playing house finding on extra hard mode.

It's hard enough to get a loan to build a house, let alone an unconventional one.

Have you tried? I'm pretty sure if you get it engineered w/structural calcuations and it passes residential building code, I see no reason why they'd reject it.

So you're complaining that these first demonstrations of a novel technology are not comparable to technologies developed over decades or even centuries? There is an expression for this: "the last of the old outperforms the first of the new". Most of us don't seem to have too much trouble applying that concept to programming and hardware related developments, so why is this different?

In what sense is a mud hut a novel technology?

Your argument is the equivalent of asking in what sense a wheel is novel technology while comparing a car to a horse drawn carriage.

It's not about the mud hut. It's about how the mud hut was made.

I am aware that novel techniques for building mud huts are created all the time, and none of those new techniques address the fundamental issue with all of them — this building technique is only suited to single-story buildings on large tracts of land. 3D printing the mud hut doesn’t meaningfully alter that constraint.

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 live in a rural area where the population is declining rapidly. There's plenty of land available for cheap, but actually building a house still very expensive. I think a cheaply built, single story structure on a large tract of land could work very well here, and could possibly help to sustain the local population and quality of life.

I agree we should be building denser to meet demand for housing in cities. But not everyone needs to live in a city.

If I literally say "the mud huts aren't the point" and you reply by talking about "novel techniques for building mud huts", then I don't think you're honestly engaging with my argument.

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.

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