Japanese Dome House
i-domehouse.com
i-domehouse.com
We see new ideas for home building all the time, dome shaped, 3D printed, using shipping containers, etc... and yet, everyone in the world still builds vaguely box shaped buildings with wood, bricks or concrete.
All these new things tend to have issues with at least one of condensation, insulation, overall cost, convenience, weatherproofing, local availability of materials, durability, safety, etc...
Dome houses are far from a new idea, neither are plastic houses, I have never seen them except as a novelty or experiment. I don't know what's wrong with them, but if there were good, we would probably see more of them.
Modern construction techniques are well optimized and adapted to the local environment, using several layers, with materials serving a specific function like structural integrity, insulation or weatherproofing, with good value. If you want to sound fancy, you can call it composite materials.
Unless you get a lot of custom pieces, you can lose a lot of space or end up with awkward and ugly situations, so it really only works for people who have the time and resources to spend on custom interior design.
Because of all this, resale of the home can be difficult, because your market is limited to the small community of people
Perhaps as 3d and custom manufacturing becomes more commonplace and price competitive with assembly line products, there will be more of an appetite for the amount of customization that these kinds of homes require.
Any section cut through a dome will be a half circle, so you're still going to be wasting a lot of material when you cut that wall. And at 6' high, it's going to encroach significantly on the floor space of the dome.
> The void behind can be used for storage just like with second story kneewalls.
This would require access from the (approximate) middle of the knee wall, reducing the usefulness of said kneewall. And leaving a storage space on either side of this access shaped roughly like half a wedge of apple (though a bit larger).
It's either that or the knee wall itself would have to curve to stay a consistent distance from the bottom edge of the dome, which would be a whole different nightmare to build.
A few years ago, the neighbor kid from where my parents live made a hole in a wall of his room leading to outside.
Polystyrene sticks to everything, by the way. https://i.postimg.cc/sgb5n2bf/20200114-134910.jpg
Lots of people put their couches etc straight against a wall pointing to the opposite wall where their tv and credenza is rested against.
But when one looks at published interior design or people's pinterest dream boards you'll see floating couches, arrangements around the center of a space, etc.
Though I'm sure that pedestrian layout is partly a cost thing if you have very limited space. Or hell even a bunch of cheap furniture doesn't even have backs or it looks like cheap particle board only crap.
That New Yorker cartoon saying something about you have to be really rich to afford this much nothingness.
The acoustics only have the slightest weirdness, there's a spot in the 3rd floor Master Bedroom where I can talk to someone in a specific spot in the 2nd floor kitchen (on the other side of the dome) as though I were standing next to them, but otherwise my dome is good at keeping noises isolated.
The name I usually see for such materials is 'engineered', as in someone purposefully mixed and matched different materials to get to a degree of reliability and reproducibility that would not be the case with natural materials. For instance, wood joists made from chips are going to be quite strong for their weight and very straight and a number of them will be within very small tolerances identical. Whereas if you made them from 2x4's they would have to be overdimensioned in order to achieve the same degree of strength due to variation in the materials they are made out of.
(not saying that dome houses are any good tho)
Since we're all living on a sphere, at some point the difference is moot. I've been in a couple of dome houses and we had a museum here in NL that was built inside a geodesic dome (Aviodome, near Schiphol, since dismantled and moved to Amsterdam:
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviodome
and
What I love about the story is that the building was simply dismantled and put up again in a new location.
The only way a half sphere works out well is if your dealing with some form of pressure dome. Either using internal pressure to support weight, or in the case of a building underwater/Moon/Mars dealing with very high pressure differences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_dome
Some good sample images there.
And a geodesic dome does not require any internal supports, so it doesn't matter whether a pressure differential is involved.
Essentially any slice of a sphere can be made into a geodesic dome.
The dome provides a greenhouse enviro and then, inside that, they build regular old rectangular houses: https://www.loveproperty.com/gallerylist/66379/this-family-l...
I think depending on where you are and the construction, these may or may not be in the scope of building codes.
Space efficiency is one of the things that keeps prefab stick-built walls from being cost competitive with site built. Several times as many unassembled walls will fit on a truck than assembled.
My dome home was financed FHA, regular down, 2.25% interest rate not even a year ago. The only hang up was that I paid about $200 more than usual for the property evaluation as they had to locate someone who could accurately evaluate a geodesic.
These sorts of projects hide where the real cost of construction is. Land, foundations, electrical, council permits, drainage, plumbing, telco, it all adds up. Building the walls is a minor cost in comparison, and if you're going to make a house you might as well spend a bit more, and get more house per dollar.
it claims it's sustainable, but i don't see these houses lasting more than 50 years. at least with a normal house you can repair it without having to demolish it.
Would enjoy reading comments from someone who really knows about this.
[0] https://japanpropertycentral.com/2014/02/understanding-the-l...
One of the most important regulation about houses is earthquake resistance standard. "New earthquake resistance standard" was made in 1985 so now is just after 36 year old. So maybe the market is going to change, along with the fact Japanese salary won't up much.
Basically what you said, these things all focus on the cheapest and least important part of construction while solving it in a pretty bad way.
Home built with portable modular 8'x40' boxes made of wood: trashy.
Home built with portable modular 8'x40' boxes made of corrugated steel: trendy.
- Low quality materials (thinner walls, shittier insulation, etc.)
- Off-standard measurements make replacements difficult (everything from doorways to vent sizes are unique to mobiles)
- Both of these problems conspire to make inevitable repairs more expensive than they otherwise would be
- With the result that finding handymen to do work for you is challenging. A number of people simply refuse to work on them.
- Financing options suck (banks often won't finance them, leaving you to specialty lenders with downright extortionate terms)
- Trailer parks suck. (And also have a reputation that is not entirely undeserved)
They're cheap alright, but the truism "you get what you pay for" applies. I'd never buy a mobile home again, not even brand new.
Domes are a great way to maximize the volume enclosed by a surface, which is almost a thing for heat loss, but you can do almost as well with a box and adding unusable volume is a false economy.
Domes are great for creating a massive, self-supporting enclosed space ... but again, why do you need that in your house? Conventional building techniques can make you a pretty large space pretty easily, and you don't typically need to support unusual loads on top of your house.
You don't even need to make your home in a dome shape to make it out of insulated concrete; insulated concrete forms are and easy way too throw together a box with the same basic benefits.
Considering we'll probably be spending close to €300k in total, that's not a very big expense. It's also quite quick, it took a team of 2 people less than 2 weeks to build. So far we've been waiting 3 months for windows to be made.
Igloos are popular in certain parts of the world.
No surprise that igloos are popular where the only available material is ice (and you need arches/cupolas as there is nothing to make beams with).
They claim its pure polystyrene with no additives, which means no resistance to fire whatsoever.
It could be mitigated if its encased in plaster properly (I have EPS external wall insulation, but its encased in cement and silicone render.)
1: it loses its integrity around 80-100c causing catastrophic failure on bearing capability
2: it burns literally like any other hydrocarbon, and its foamed construction makes it highly flammable
3: to reduce flammability and adhere to code you need to use EPS with flame retardants - which fuck you up, you're basically building a house out of Frozen gasoline and flame retardants.
so if you want to go this route, take a look at Corkwood instead - comes in large industrial panels and can be used to build houses - been used for 100s of years, doesn't burn - at-all - and contains no nasty shit.
https://eumeps.construction/content/8-downloads/4-documents/...
source of initial inspiration: https://vimeo.com/81180775
cork source: http://www.edisughero.com/en/#prodotti
so next house is going to be made from Poroton instead: https://archello.com/product/s9-p-climate-neutral-poroton-br...
reasons: Easy to build, integrated insulation and loadcarrying in same simple structure, and (this is the mayn reason why instead of foamed concrete) it is permeable, meaning that you do NOT need active ventilation system (Causing dryair in winter etc.) and air moisture is constant year round.
you coat it with a silicate based coating on both sides (also permeable), and nothing else. The result is a breathing house, that is net-zero, you can even build your bathroom from that stuff and it will just wick moisture from the air and slowly release it again.
wonderous stuff.
Houses should be raised from the ground and the underside ventilated, to prevent mold and indoor air quality problems.
Roofs should be strong so they can handle snow, and tilted so water and snow falls off. All seams on the roof should be made so that water doesn't go in there and freeze. Concave structures on the roof should be avoided, as they collect water that freezes.
There should be eaves and rain chutes on the roof so that water from the roof doesn't touch the walls. Water should be diverted away from the base of the building, so the house should preferably be on a hill, or should have drainage built around it. Overall the building walls and base should stay mostly dry.
Most materials of the house should be moisture permeating so that when water gets in, it can dry out. The outermost layer of the roof and the foundation are an exception.
Anything that touches the ground should be stone like granite, or some other material that can be in contact with wet ground for centuries with no changes.
Now, the house could be any shape you wish for, as long as it fills these requirements. I see a lot of the new ideas fail a number of these requirements - they seem to be fanciful dreams not taking the reality of local conditions into account.
So, to turn it around, what if one started an innovative house design from these requirements? A house wouldn't necessarily need to look like old-fashioned houses that have been built for centuries here. It could be weird looking and could still not be a moldy and leaky health and financial problem, with either constant repairs or just bulldozing after a few decades.
Building a house is probably one of the skillsets that humanity has worked at for the longest, usually the set of criteria above would make for a good starting point modulated by available materials.
But sometimes it helps to let go of that for a bit and to just see what kind of options the materials themselves give regardless of the real world criteria, with the hope of extracting something useful that can be made to fit into the real world environment, for instance by adapting it or by re-using some part of it.
But for real world mass produced housing that is meant to work for the long time tradition is an excellent place to start, both for utility and cost efficiency.
For example you can test materials for years, just put some tile outside and come back every year to see how it's weathered.
Or you can research the past. For example with timber there's so many things that need to be done that are not obvious at first. Starting from how you choose the trees and when you fell them.
It's important for climate reasons that we get better insulation for houses, or can replace concrete with other materials, but if it's done badly, it will cause those houses to be torn down after a few decades because of mold issues.
The dome houses linked to below are more interesting (for instance a 'normal' house inside a dome to control the environment).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302334
Buckminster Fuller pretty much exhaustively treated the 'dome' concept and the 1930's were open to all kinds of innovation that we consider settled knowledge now. Some of it remained, for instance large open span buildings, and Spaceframes (Octatube). But domes for everyday life are most likely not going to happen unless you're looking at space.
The expectation that a non-ventilated underside will lead to mold and air quality problems is strictly a wood frame issue. A gravel base with a hard EPS insulator and a continuous hydro proofing membrane will prevent all the issues raised, and is a common construction technique even in rainy climates. As long as the floor level is elevated more than 30-40 cm from soil level, it will stop all seasonal floods; and if you live in a swamp where you regularly have floods over 30 cm, that's a rare situation that requires particular solutions, not relevant to 99% of the housing stock.
Similarly, the idea that rain should not touch the walls. If the walls are hydro proofed and water resistant, the rain will simply run over them and into the ground. The goal is to have a durable house where water does not come in, we should not be prejudiced against any technical solution that achieves it.
Why should a house built from polystyrene foam last centuries? Do you own any car that lasts centuries? Why can't a 50 year house be good enough, if it means you can provide very cheap housing to a destitute family for two generations, breaking the cycle of poverty and allowing the grandchildren to replace the structure with something more durable and up to date when they will be able to?
Believe me, flat roofs and no eaves have been attempted here with gusto for the last 60 years, with billions in investment and billions lost. So many apartment buildings have leaking roofs. It's absolutely a terrible waste and personal financial issue for a lot of families. For the last 10 years, buildings have started to have eaves and sloped roofs again. Basement renovations are not cheap or easy either.
It's like software where you have one interface and then internal functions that operate on internal state. You don't suddenly do some reading of some config from disk deep down in some helper method. If the architecture is good, it's easy to reason about and easy to modify.
About housing price, yes, sure, some styrofoam dome housing can work in a temporary matter. But even there, the design can make a huge difference. Water will come in or will go into cracks and there will be mold. If you design it with a bit more care, maybe that styrofoam house can last for 50 years instead of 10?
Ruining a homes resale value, and forcing a family to buy a new home every generation, would absolutely exacerbate poverty rather than alleviate it. It's the classic "it's expensive to be poor" situation - a poor person has to buy cheap boots twice a year. A rich person can buy expensive boots that last a lifetime, and saves money overall.
I guess it depends on how cheap you think a styrofoam house would be, but I am skeptical. Even if you get significant savings on material costs, you still need to pay for labor. Labor is typically ~40% of the cost to build a home.
Idk if 50 years is long enough, 1,000 years is probably too long, but it's definitely something worth further investigation. It also depends on the climate and potential for disaster. 1,000 year homes in Florida with hurricanes? Probably not. Ohio? Yea that might make sense.
-edit-
To add I also enjoy and wish we took more advantages of past techniques to build homes in harmony with the environment. Easier to think of examples are things like painting a home white in the Mediterranean, or a-frame homes for snow to slide off, etc. versus how we just copy/paste generica American suburban homes that rely on materials moreso than smart design. It's like cities and towns. We already figured out how to do this in the best way hundreds of years ago (small towns in Europe) but we just keep not doing it in favor of bad design.
They go into various details about the sorts of things they need to consider, such as keeping water out and managing it when they can't
Your list is also provides some good pointers. Do you have any other ideas around building something that will last a long time?
Whenever I look at photos of long-abandoned buildings I notice how plants and fungi take up residence and "quickly" (i.e. over hundreds or thousands of years) set to work in degrading the structure, so I've been thinking a lot about how to keep life at bay from "eating" any long lasting building.
Pretty similar construction here, tons of other examples (really, too many to even list) in various publications:
https://www.motherearthnews.com/green-homes/foam-dome-zmaz80...
I really do not see the novelty.
https://live.staticflickr.com/1787/42134502335_045815b1ee_b....
Domes have - since Buckminster Fuller, really - been built from all kinds of materials, this is one of the more interesting combinations because it at least does away with all of the nasty seems at nasty angles that a 'normal' geodesic dome has. But some of the problems remain: windows and doors will always require either a special panel or be a bad match for the rest of the dome. The floorplan will pretty much ensure that there aren't any right angles anywhere, so furniture such as bookcases and such (but hey, who needs books... ok, wardrobes) will have to be custom made or placed inefficiently, or all around the center of the dome where they will have a big impact on light.
It's a super elegant concept, but it has problems. I built a small (8 meter diameter) dome in Canada as a spot to sit near the river that ran through our property, we didn't really get around to finishing it (just foil over wood & steel) but it blended in nicely, in a way that very little other buildings would and for that reason alone I'd love to build another one here in NL. But the problems with the shape have so far withheld me from doing it. It might also work well as an office.
https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/the-restoration...
Higher number of panels will approximate the dome shape better, will be easier to put up by a single individual, but will also cause more length of seam and hence more chance of springing a leak or rot in case of woodwork in the panels.
Also, 8m is pretty big in my eyes - I've made two geodesic domes, one 3v 24' (~7.3m) diameter and one 4v 32' (~9.7m) diameter, and even the 24' was a pretty decent bit of work to fabricate and assemble.
Agreed on the temporary spaces that don't need interior walls, the carrying capacity of a geodesic dome frame is incredible relative to the weight of the materials that are used to put it up. You could hang a couple of hundred kilos from the central joint in the top of the frame and the frame itself was constructed with nothing but 2x4s. I was a bit skeptical about the strength prior to that but afterwards I was totally sold on the concept strength wise. Seeing is believing I guess :)
Perhaps there are different techniques.
What I find a bit annoying about dome construction in general is that people are always incredibly busy showing what things look like as they go up, but not so much when they are in actual use, what kind of maintenance they end up with and how they look after 5, 10, 15 and 30 years. Because the interesting part of a building is how well it holds up over the longer term.
I've visited an Earthship somewhere in Iowa and it was incredible how efficient it was, midwinter and absolutely comfortable inside with barely any extra heating. Passive solar is a very powerful concept, but you will need a massive thermal sink if you don't get enough sunlight during the winter to tide you over the bad days. Probably easier to add a small amount of auxiliary heating to take the edge off if you ever need it.
Was going to comment a link to his video as well.
..and stone, and brick, and glass, and adobe, and straw, and fabric..
(Not to mention that polystyrene does not have any of the sustainability – which is all the rage nowadays – benefits either)
I had a second floor office and it was hard to find good use for the space against the outside wall. Anything tall, like a bookshelf or lamp, had to be quite a ways out from the base of the wall to get enough vertical room.
A desk would have fit in that space, but who wants a desk facing the wall away from the door so you are working with you back to anyone who enters your office?
I ended up putting a couch there. Unless you were quite tall there was little chance of accidentally bopping your head when trying to sit down or get up, and it only took the tall people a couple of hits to learn to be careful. :-)
Domes are cool looking on the outside, but require care to make work on the inside.
They probably work better as houses than office buildings, because the designer of a house can better anticipate what each room will be used for and arrange it so that things you'd naturally want against outside walls are things that would be OK with the curves.
An office building has a lot more variability from tenant to tenant, making it more likely that the tenant's things won't work well against the curved walls.
My main concern if I was considering a dome for a house would be maintenance and repairs. For example if it has a shingled roof and developed a leak could any average roofing company deal with it, or would I be looking at calling in specialists? Probably best for a dome to get one that is not essentially a conventional building in dome shape, like the office building we were in, but rather something like the domes in the article.
Here's a link to the first building at the county parcel search site, showing a photo and drawing with floor dimensions and area [3], and with links to all kinds of other details. Looks like it was last sold a few months ago for $365k in case anyone is curious about how much such a building is worth. That's not bad for an almost 4000 sq ft building.
Here's the parcel search link for the smaller one at the second location [4], and here is the link for the larger one at the second location [5].
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7538416,-122.665396,3a,60y,1...
[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.7433177,-122.6567975,3a,60y,...
[3] https://psearch.kitsapgov.com/pdetails/Details?page=photossk...
[4] https://psearch.kitsapgov.com/pdetails/Details?page=photossk...
[5] https://psearch.kitsapgov.com/pdetails/Details?page=photossk...
Thank you for digging those up!
In particular the use of geofoam at Chicago's Millenium park: https://www.insulfoam.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/april-1...
In the specific case of Millenium Park it makes some intuitive sense since there's a parking garage beneath it that can only bear so much weight. For individual homes, I'm not convinced. I'm probably just ignorant of polystyrene's properties and the tradeoffs relative to other materials, but I'm worried about it just kind of hanging around in the environment as buildings degrade. Concrete, steel, and glass do that, I suppose, but in a less displeasing way...
Some pictures:
https://fpmccann.co.uk/portfolio-items/thermabeam/
Insulated foundations set on foam:
https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/placing-a-concr...
The main reason is to fully insulate the thermal mass of the house from the surroundings. I see this happen around here all the time and even though I understand the basics I'm still not sure that I would like the house that I own and have a good chunk of my saving in built like that because of the long term compression of the foam. I'd be worry about uneven compression and cracks or other foundation issues. But it's really very common.
That's why the ISS is shaped the way it is, cylinders joined with circular joints.
How does it handle fire? Earthquakes? Wind? I see that the panels are joined; have there been stress or pressure tests for leaks? And how difficult/expensive are repairs? Does the surface attract mold?
It seems like a safer bet would be to use this material as a combination sheeting+insulation in traditional homes, but I'll bet it's more expensive, so they're trying to sell it as a complete solution to throw out the costs of foundation and framing.
We were looking into concrete domes for building a home in Florida. We got cold feet when we couldn't find a contractor who would work in our area that had any experience with this procedure.
I still would love to live in a "dome home".
But I understand that, like A-frames, adapting vertical furniture, cabinets, etc. to walls that are not 90-degree vertical can be problematic. So you add vertical walls inside ... and then you're losing space.
Knowing American labor costs, it'll cost an arm and a leg.
The overall effect is that of a Quonset hut. Works OK, used by militaries worldwide, few people live in them by choice.
It’s also simular in principal to Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti and Cosanti - really cool technique where you build a form in sand, pour concrete, and then excavate the sand out to reveal the dome. You can get beautiful organic forms this way, simply carving shapes and even painting the sand - pigment will be picked up by the concrete as it cures [1]
[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/bubble-houses/
[1] https://www.gypsyandthenavigator.com/2019/06/arcosantithe-ci...
See also my comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29224482
> > There is one issue with the developers - they have less incentive to build enough homes to actually drive down prices via market forces because it means less profit for them.
> People were building their own homes for centuries before there were "developers". I would argue that over-regulation has made it extremely difficult for small builders or family builders to attempt to build their own homes. Only large corporations with a legal team can run that gauntlet.
> If regulation were reduced, we'd probably see a lot more small time builders, or people taking classes to learn how to build their own homes, cooperatives being set up (possibly organized through Y Combinator startups dedicated to that) where people could Amish-style bring a community together to build homes.
A difficult balance of:
People should be able to build things themselves cheaply and efficiently
Things should meet some sort of code and not cause greater harm to the area or others. (edited for clarity)
It's disappointing that it hasn't caught on, but there are practical reasons that make the design difficult despite it's greater efficiencies and resilience.
I really like the Monolithic domes, they seem like the most practical way of constructing such a structure. No seams just what you need, no more and no less and a very mature process, far ahead of the company in the article in terms of applicability, all you need to ship from the factory is the inflatables, concrete you can make on-site.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/318854130_An_overvi...
Here's one of the videos showcasing the Igloo house during one of his Journey Across Japan series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqX_2Wmj7xE
Oh god please stop. We are drowning the planet in plastic. Let's NOT produce more polystyrene; Several million tonnes per year is enough already.
It's like an advertizement for an asbestos house or a lead kitchen.
See also the complaints elsewhere about space utilization.
I guess they look cool, that is their main feature. They also seem good for tensile structures (inflated domes) and massive self-supporting spaces. But you can also get most of those properties with extrusions, which are way simpler to fabricate.
So you probably can't build a real home worth living in with this, but it is interesting tech nonetheless - perhaps for large granaries, depots, or other use cases where maybe efficiency is not as much of a concern. E.g. I could see usage for underground living spaces which just want to put up some custom walls which are not plaster, or perhaps for orbital space vessels.
https://www.laconservancy.org/locations/airform-bubble-house https://www.mortarsprayer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Wal...
Also, I wonder whether it's sufficiently wind-resistant. Is there no chance of it being ripped from the ground?
Ignoring the above - this might be useful for temporary construction of dwellings for refugees in a crisis or natural catastrophe. Much better than tents and probably cheaper and easier to set up than those shipping-container-like prefabricated dwellings I remember from years ago.
So... maybe the UN would be a big client? Or governments in crisis zones?
You can stay in one of the dome rooms in what feels a bit like a Smurf village.
I know that someone built one, somewhere, last century.
It involved, basically, a heavy-duty “chicken wire” frame, with sprayed-on concrete.
Why not? They're surprisingly low on resources for their size. They seem to be mostly wood beams and sheet rock, with a thin concrete foundation.
As you already observed, it's all about the insulation, and even though the foam itself may melt the concrete will survive the initial roasting and that just leaves you with a bunch of gaps in the concrete which makes it insulate much better than solid concrete would.
You'd have to set up a proper test to determine the amount of insulation you'd have to add (I'd absolutely hate to have to drywall a surface like this). One way to do it would be to stucco the inside. But depending on the thickness of the walls you might not need much to achieve the amount of structural integrity required by the fire code, these are not going to be multi level buildings anyway.
Edit: I did some more digging and found this image on their website:
http://www.i-domehouse.com/product_type/img/01-04_2.jpg
So it appears that the foam core is just foam, nothing else, so there is no interior structure other than the styrofoam. This won't pass building code or fire code for structural integrity anywhere that I've ever built something. I can see them using these for emergency shelters but not for permanent occupation without more internal structure. They do show a resort built with these, I wonder where it is and what kind of building code they operate under. The cement backing is just a thin layer applied to the outside of the panels, so indeed, when they get too hot the interior will melt and then you're just looking at two thin bits of cement without any kind of reinforcement. It would likely collapse immediately if they did not take any precautions.
Fire safety is not something I could find any information on in their pages, they do mention excellent earthquake resistance, which I totally believe.