51–60 of 223 posts
It is great, however, if your approach to construction was formed by playing Minecraft.
They need to sell on the longevity and robustness of these homes. If the houses are crap, this is going to be an incredibly wasteful project no matter how many environmentally friendly indicators they point to.
Japanese houses depreciate over a ~30 year cycle where, at the end of that cycle, the only value left is in the land and the home is demolished and rebuilt.
If you can use highly recyclable materials, this would encourage more adaptable cities where the housing is more easily adjusted for the needs of the people at the time. Density can go up or down over the course of these long cycles.
The other approach is to build simplified floor plans which are highly robust but adaptable to maximize reusability - like the two column, three row warehouse layout which can be be adapted for almost any use case.
This is my issue with builders like Icon, who are making 3d printed cement walled homes. Homes that last a long time get adapted many times in their life span, and these structures don’t really enable the growth and adaptation we see from buildings that are useful for many decades.
Seems pretty expensive to make everything out of pure plywood. Does anyone have a sense of how cost compares to 2x4's plus drywall? I assume either construction method will need exterior cladding and insulation.
My rough estimate is around $4.75/sf for a high performance wall (drywall+2x6+osb+exterior foam ~ R31). They show £230/m2, so this product would be almost 7x more expensive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My rough estimate is around $4.75/sf for a high performance wall (drywall+2x6+osb+exterior foam ~ R31). They show £230/m2, so this product would be almost 7x more expensive.
It's the UK, so everything is twice as expensive anyway.
The walls are the least expensive part of building a house.
The land?
Permits?
Appliances?
I love the idea of this. My wife and I watch a decent amount of Grand Designs are there are a few houses that experiment with the concept of cnc-cut block based assembly. I intend to build something like it someday (in the US, so it might be harder to find a manufacturer). One thing that strikes me as at odds is that they tout their reusability as well as the customization aspect of the block. It’s cnc cut so they’re…
Its seems like every episode of Grand Design does include an almost spiritual journey to a glue-lam pre-fabricated wood factory in Germany. I’m not sure that stuff is as easy to get over here.
> how would you reuse it in a different project?
The blocks are standard sizes so you can reuse them like legos.
They need to sell on the longevity and robustness of these homes. If the houses are crap, this is going to be an incredibly wasteful project no matter how many environmentally friendly indicators they point to.
There is at least some reason to believe we should make some types of buildings less robust. While there are many beautiful old homes, there is a bit of a bias when we think of older homes towards ones that have been kept up to date or remodeled many times in their lives. A large percentage of homes don’t go through this process and become blight. Japanese houses depreciate over a ~30 year cycle where, at the end of…
I love the idea of modular buildings, but this doesn't quite seem to fit. The materials don't seem ideal for the wet climate, the manufacturing process seems expensive; either you buy or rent a cnc, or have panels manufactured 'locally' then trucked. And the fact that it's precision cnc suggests this is really not modular at all, but custom designed.
Steel frame, and panels in standard sizes, eg steel sip, or home-poured foam-concrete, would be cheap, reusable/recycleable, modular etc. Maybe ugly too, but then mount a nice wood, stone-veneer, or enamel rain screen/siding, and interior paneling.
Note that the walls and interior floors are equally thick and as insulated as the roof. It is not a sensible or efficient use of materials, given how the physics of heat work. It is great, however, if your approach to construction was formed by playing Minecraft.
AFAICT we have far more excess material than excess labor, so it doesn't seem particularly crazy to me?