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Life in Walter Segal's self-build 'anarchist' estate
- markvdb 11y agoWonderfully simple construction method that should appeal to technically oriented people. I'd be grateful for pointers to more contemporary work in this regard, as the insulation value of these is getting rather problematic.
- memracom 11y agoFunny to read about how this guy invented a wonderful NEW way to build houses back in the 1960s, but the article describes the way that most Canadian houses (and Scandinavian ones) have been built for at least 10 years or so. Not to mention that if you go to Russia or other parts of the former Soviet Union you can find lots of people with self-built houses made from bricks and various sorts of stone blocks covered with plaster, whose construction is very much life the average 30's pebble dash home in Britain. Minus the pebbles of course. Russians prefer smooth plaster and paint or decorative tiles. Having participated in building the Canadian way, moving around long heavy timbers, I wonder if the European brick and block way is not superior for self-building. Much easier to lift one block into postion, than a long timber, or a prebuilt truss (crane required) or a prebuilt wall (half a dozen strong helpers required and they bear the risk of it falling on them if a mistake is made).
- DanBC 11y agoPebble dash is an old technique that was "rediscovered" by the Arts and Crafts Movement and repopularised. You can find it on some Cotswold manor houses. It's a bit disconcerting. http://www.pebbledashing.com/why-use-pebbledashing.php http://www.pebbledashing.com/why-use-pebbledashing.php http://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/pebbledash/pebbledash.htm http://www.buildingconservation.com/articles/pebbledash/pebb... http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/21/pebbledash-homes-nick-clegg http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/apr/21/pebbleda...
- markvdb 11y agoI have looked at this quite closely. It looks very similar at first sight, but the process is quite different from conventional Canadian timber framing, in that it has a radical focus on simplicity and self building. On a practical level, this translates into things like much more modest foundations (poles instead of slab), a 60 cm grid system that is perpetuated throughout the house, plasterboard panels that get loosely fit instead of screwed on, an extremely simple but sturdy stair design, and more. A more contemporary descendant seems to be http://irishvernacular.com http://irishvernacular.com .
- NickNameNick 11y agoI worked for just over a year as a builders labourer in NZ. One evening, as prep for the next days work I singlehandedly sorted out all the pre-built roof trusses, and lifted them up on top of the wall frames we'd stood up that day. It wasn't very difficult, and certainly didn't require a crane.
- notahacker 11y agoSimple self build houses built from wood panels are far more common in parts of the world where - unlike London - the cost of construction labour isn't the least of all the problems faced by people wanting housing.
- akgerber 11y agoI would suggest that the real factor preventing more-widespread application of this idea is a lack of developable land near frequent rail service. The houses do appear to make extremely efficient use of land in the Japanese fashion, however, with modest building lots on a very narrow street. The aesthetic is very 1980s US west-coast suburbia.
- georgeoliver 11y agoAs a carpenter living in the western US (where platform wood framing dominates) I'm curious about why masonry building is the norm in England. Is it simply lack of forest/wood products?
- markvdb 11y agoI'm not an expert, but here is my speculation. Historically, in many parts of Europe, wooden housing was cheap housing. In many places, only they rich could afford stone houses. Several cities, seeing wood as a fire risk, even until this day have rules that forbid new wooden construction. Then there's also the fact that streets are organised in a totally different way in many European cities. US visitors sometimes tell me they feel a bit claustrophobic in the streets of my native city. They _are_ quite a bit narrower than the average US street, and they're all townhouses built right next to one another. Oh, and older generations seem to spontanuously associate wooden barracks with soldiers, prisoners of war and cheap post war emergency housing. The tide is turning though, with wood and even straw building gaining in popularity year by year in many of the EU countries that I regularly visit...
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- A_COMPUTER 11y agoWasn't the island almost completely deforested? People have mentioned that here before. I wonder if it's connected.
- rwmj 11y agoWhen my house was built (probably 1920-ish) labour must have been very cheap, because the construction method is very labour-intensive. The whole house is built of brick, with double walls even for interior walls, complex 4-breasted chimney (brick also), windows with inlaid brick patterns, and so on. Since hundreds of thousands of these kind of houses were built around that time[1], there must have been armies of people involved. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/10/metroland-100-years-england-original-vision-suburbia http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/10/metroland-100-...
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- gcb0 11y agoall you can see on streetview: private property signs. doesn't feel very anarchist to me. https://goo.gl/maps/JRUfk7ZRaHo https://goo.gl/maps/JRUfk7ZRaHo
- floydnoel 11y agoSeveral types of anarchists believe in private property.