10-acre underground home and gardens in Fresno (2023) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Dirksen travels North America and Europe with her husband and 3 or 4 kids documenting home designs of all types. Lots of tiny homes in Los Angeles and California ( I believe one or two in Toronto ) as well as Western Europe. Her husband is from Catalunya so they've a bunch of clips from there. There's also one of a man who build a home sort of next to or inside a cave.
The coolest clips by far are ones of ancient abandoned villages and compounds (I think one castle-like structure) in Spain, Portugal and Italy that individuals took over and converted into homes.
I only just discovered her during the pandemic and since then a lot of copy cat projects've popped up and moved on to bigger streaming platforms. I'd buy a DVD/Blu-Ray collection of her YouTubes
A rare gift that she combines with superb editing.
downtoearth is another good one.
We went there a few years ago and it's insane that what you see is only half of what he did: the family was stupid enough to buy half and then destroy it "to use the land". In the category "not understanding what you have", this one's up there.
If you build an American-style house in Bavaria it may end up a disaster because nobody around knows the building materials or how to fix it.
It gets even worse when it's entirely custom like this Skywalker style house, where it's a one-off using techniques nobody knows. You need a dedicated maintenance crew for that so they can learn all about it over time.
So something like this could work for a largish company, or a college campus, but as a one-off house it's going to be expensive and eventually abandoned.
> ... The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
Speak for yourself
Basements are very common throughout the country. Once you've built a basement, you might as well put a house on the next floor up.
Modern insulation technology is very effective. It's much cheaper to put a lot of insulation in the above-ground portion of a house than to try to build the equivalent area entirely below the grade.
Building entirely below the surface without putting anything on top would be massively expensive compared to the same square footage in a traditional home, even if you accounted for equivalent insulation and cooling costs. It's not even close.
I now live in NY and I have a basement. It's generally about 10 degrees cooler. I would have loved that in Fresno.
$400pm just for aircon seems crazy high to me.
Living in Perth, Western Australia id use that over a 2-3mth period over the summer running aircon 24/7
For comparison I'm paying 31.6c/kwh and 113c/per day supply charge. (prices in AUD cents)
Think that's about 21c USD
typical wholesale prices are 2½¢ per kilowatt hour
solar panels are 8¢/peak watt https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis... which works out to 40¢ per average watt assuming a 20% capacity factor. at 7% yearly interest, that's 2.8 cents per watt, and since a year has 8.766 kilohours, it's 0.3¢ per kilowatt hour. for ac inverter systems, balance of system costs typically triple this, and in the us, import tariffs double it again to 1.8¢ per kilowatt hour
the future is already here; it just isn't widely distributed. and that's why you're getting scammed
But for grid electricity even if the generation is dirt cheap the power company in WA is responsible for covering an area the size of a chunk of Europe with a total population of under 3million.
There are significant distribution costs involved and I suspect even at the prices we pay its subsidised by the government.
3x bigger than Texas for the North Americans, with the majority of that population about one extended urban area.
Driving from the southern tip of WA to the northern most point takes over 36hrs of continuous driving (~3600km)
All this is to say its pretty fucking big
so i think you are dramatically overestimating the cost of rooftop solar
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220810-derinkuyu-turkey...
But comparing across several years it is hard to ignore.
I’ve noticed similar and assumed that they are taking a Starbucks-esque approach of adding more and more ad time until they start to see an overall drop in earning.
It was run by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas for years and they did a great job but didn't have any influence over the zoning around the Mission. It is now run by the Alamo Trust and they have a plan and the ability to restore the plaza area around it.
In the future, everything will be underground
It’s fine for a cellar or something like that but larger structures still require air conditioning. See for example the London Underground where they have issues with the deep underground lines heating up over the years.
Spaces inhabited just by people and incidental devices (e.g., LED lighting, fans, personal electronics) should see far less heating effect, particularly if they're well-ventilated such that any accumulated heat could transfer out quickly.
Houses have had cellars and basements for centuries if not longer, and those aren't known for getting uncomfortably warm.
One place this is evident is with naturally-formed caves, where changes in atmospheric air pressure translate to air movements in and out of the caverns themselves, one consequence of which is the many "moaning caverns" --- the airflow and resonances are sufficient to create audible sounds associated with the movement. It can take hours for pressure to equalise if the volumes and apatures are sufficiently divergent.
Warm air will rise, and cold sink, yes, but if there are any trap-type structures (e.g., a tunnel which rises then descends again) the rising/falling air will be trapped at a local maximum or minimum. This is directly comparable to a thermal inversion associated with smog and urban pollution, often occurring during winter time. The only way around this is forced or active ventilation.
You've also got the "stale air" problem. If there's only a single entrance, or entrances are only on one part of the cave complex, air as a whole moves in and out of the caverns, but the deepest and furthest recesses see relatively little interchange. This leads to one of the hazards of spelunking in the event noxious gasses accumulate or oxygen is displaced.
For the London Underground (and other subway systems), much of the air exchange is provided by the trains themselves, through the "piston effect" of a trainset moving through a low-clearance tunnel. You'll experience this as the gust of wind which preceeds a train's arrival, or the suction as it leaves a platform. This effects some thermal transfer, but mechanical ventilation is still required.
Non-transport-oriented underground or partially-subgrade structures typically have far more relative air transfer, and would generally have less-signficant airflow / air exchange challenges, though I suspect there's still quite a bit of HVAC engineering involved, for thermal and other reasons (stale room-space air, radon emissions, mould & moisture, etc.).
The California High Speed Rail is being constructed, so hopefully, by the next trip, I can just pop into Fresno via HSR.
Don’t feel too bad though. I’m simply waiting for them to continue the Bay Bridge bicycle path from Yerba Buena Island to San Francisco (completing the Oakland to SF bicycle path) and that’s also not slated for completion till 2030.
We drove through Merced and saw the new line in and around town. I guess I wasn't paying attention in Fresno.
You can accomplish better insulation and thermal mass above the ground, while having better ventilation and less humidity.
> Since so many people have asked about what happens when it rains, here is Shera's response: "Baldassare actually put drainage systems in place! Many of the rooms are built on a grade and sump pits are placed in strategic areas throughout the Underground Gardens where the water is directed to collect and reuse. While it does get muddy underground, we do not deal with any serious flooding."