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So you want to build a house more efficiently

• grouphugs 5y ago
  i don't have a home
• kingsuper20 5y ago
  Great article. It would be interesting to compare the US to Japan and Japan's tendency to favor new construction (plus the differences in features and styles).
  • germinalphrase 5y ago
    I’ve read that build quality in Japan is significantly lower due to the depreciating nature of houses as an asset and the bias toward building new.
    • xivzgrev 5y ago
      Seems like it's a self-reinforcing cycle: houses are built lower quality, people thus don't value older houses, so builders build lower quality to lower "new" cost https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
    • jbay808 5y ago
      With few exceptions, houses are a depreciating asset just about everywhere; it's only land that appreciates. Japan is no different except that the depreciation rate of the house may be somewhat faster, and appreciation of the land significantly slower than in other countries.
      • greedo 5y ago
        I'm not sure this is accurate. I purchased my house in 2004, and it's currently valued at $349K (purchase price $199K). The lot itself sold for $40K in 2003. Looking at available lots in my neighborhood, they average about $70K for my house size. So that means my house itself is valued at $280K. So yes, the land has appreciated by $30K (over 18 years), but the house itself has appreciated $120K in the same timeframe. The land appreciated at roughly 3% per annum, while the house appreciated at roughly the same rate. Of course this doesn't include any improvements, or maintenance costs associated with the house.
        • jbay808 5y ago
          By "improvements" do you mean sewer hookups and so on? Japan is no different in that those add value, and they don't redo them when rebuilding the house (barring some problem). Also, depreciation of the house includes things like maintenance costs -- did you spend money on your roof? Redo the wiring? Renovate the kitchen? Unless they're intended as a teardown, old houses are often sold post-renovation, and that investment can counter the depreciation but won't show up if you just compare the selling price against the price of the bare lot. Lastly, it sounds like if your lot is $70k and houses are $350k, maybe construction costs have gone up a lot in your area since 2004. That could cause an old house to appreciate by increasing the cost of new houses.
          • greedo 5y ago
            By improvements, I meant things like finishing out a basement (thus adding more usable sq footage), kitchen/bath remodels, decks etc. Maintenance, at least in my area isn't a large cost over the life of a house. In the last year we've replaced a roof ($8K), furnace/AC ($9K), and the water heater ($800). The water heater we've had to replace twice before, so in total we've had roughly $20K in maintenance costs since we purchased the house. We're getting to a point where we need to repaint both inside and out, and replace some carpet. Probably around another $10K for that. So $30k in maintenance over 18 years is pretty small potatoes. I don't know that construction costs have gone up much more than the inflation rate; I do know that material costs have gone up in the last 18 months, but that should drop back down to "normal" in another year or so.
            • jbay808 5y ago
              So would your house sell at a premium relative to a buying the land and having a new house built? If so, it's definitely appreciated, but that sounds like a very uncommon scenario!
              • greedo 5y ago
                It's hard to say. I don't know the permitting costs in my city, nor the costs for water/sewer hookups either. My house is nice, but nothing special for the area. Assuming a $125/sqft cost, a house like mine would be around $225K plus the lot ($70K) for a total of $295K. The only thing I've seen that might have helped the house appreciation is the completion of an elementary school in our neighborhood.
      • prawn 5y ago
        This would be generally true in Australia. Land value for 700sqm where I live is $700k. An older character house or luxury/new build would add value, but almost anything else would have minimal value. A house on a typical block seems to rise in value faster than a unit (say, one of 6-8 on a block) where land is a smaller part of its valuation and redevelopment potential is wrapped up with the wider group.
    • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      I admire the Japanese presence for building new because it means that the owners build the house they want rather than build for what the imaginary buyer 20 years in the future would want. So many people here in the states have nonsense houses for their family situation because their eye is incessantly on resale appreciation value.
  • ianmiers 5y ago
    From what I've seen in residential Tokyo, houses are usually one offs built when the owner buys the land. And look, at least superficially, to be similar construction methods to American construction rather than European: i.e. wood framing as opposed to masonry/concrete. Maybe some of it is prefab, but given the narrowness of roads, I wonder.
    • coryrc 5y ago
      You are correct. The SFHs in Tokyo are usually built roughly similar to stick-built (slightly post-and-beam, but walls are load-bearing). Wood can be precut to length, but they are constructed on-site.
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    > It would be interesting to compare the US to Japan and Japan's tendency to favor new construction You make it sound like these are opposing views but doesn't the US also heavily favour new construction? In the US and Japan I understand that a new build is seen as attractive and the best option for people with money to do it? If you want a real contrast, in the UK new build is seen as the worst option, for people without any money. People with money in the UK buy old houses. The older the better. I would literally never buy a new-build in the UK unless I had no other option whatsoever. I'm saving up to upgrade to an older house here.
    • dimitrios1 5y ago
      > but doesn't the US also heavily favour new construction? I don't know if my view reflects the majority, but around where I am from, older and even historic homes are the crown jewels because they were built before the race to the bottom occured in construction -- namely cheaper, thinner walls, smaller usable space, etc. Older homes are built with old growth lumber, and often come with thicker plaster walls and better layouts.
      • chrisseaton 5y ago
        > I don't know if my view reflects the majority It doesn't. For example this article expressing surprise: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-26/previously-owned-u-s-homes-are-now-more-expensive-than-new-ones https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-26/previousl... Even the term 'previously owned' for a house is baffling to UK ears. Of course a house is previously owned. Why would you be building your own?
        • jjeaff 5y ago
          I have never seen a home listed as previously owned. In the US, homes are by default assumed "previously owned" unless specifically advertised as new. And only the very well off tend to demo and build fresh. Most people will remodel and add in to existing structures.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  One thing I notice is the large volume of waste from stick framing on site. A huge pile of cut lumber that just goes to the dump.
  • Syonyk 5y ago
    If you ever get a chance to tour a manufactured home facility, one of the big things you'll notice is that there is almost no waste coming out the back end, and certainly far, far less waste than you see in a typical site-built home (huge dumpsters of waste being hauled off regularly). They're designed so that there's just not much in the way of waste - because dimensions are standard, and consistency is pretty good, you simply make sure that if you have a cut of a standard piece, you need the other half of it over there. There's just very, very little waste. On top of that, there's very little transporting of random stuff, because it's all built onsite. Cabinets are built as an entire unit in a quarter of the factory I toured, and are simply run across into the house before the roof goes on. There's no need to make sure the cabinets fit through doors and such - the entire assemblies are brought in and dropped in place (or nearly so) through the top. The roof, meanwhile, is built at more or less waist height (depending on slopes). It's assembled, "drywall up," on some jigs that hold it properly, wiring is run, the joists are added, and you end up with a roof segment that is then lifted up, painted, and set down on top of the house. It almost entirely eliminates the "roof work" risk for doing roofs. I know in most modern tech circles it's incredibly popular to hate "trailer homes" - which tells me that most people's vision of them is a 1970s single wide, 50 years of limited maintenance later. Modern manufactured homes have nearly nothing to do with that - ours is 2x6 exterior construction, drywall, Energy Star rated, metal roof, good insulated windows, etc. Out of curiosity I signed up for the power company's free "energy analysis" thing, where they come and check the ducts, do a blower door test, etc, and they left saying "There's literally nothing we can improve - this is a tight house, comfortably in the top range, and your ducts are very well sealed too." I'd wager my results against any similar size site built home in the area. People we have over are consistently surprised to find out that our place is a manufactured, because it doesn't match the "trailer house" image. I think it's blindingly obvious it's manufactured, but I also saw it come in on trucks, and I know the signs to look for - simple rectangular floor plan, a strong marriage line down the center, and typically water only on one half of the house (it avoids having to do any water pipe joins onsite, which reduces the risk of leaks). We have a concrete foundation under the house, and it works great for us. But, you know, we do legally live in a "trailer home." Doesn't bother us in the slightest.
• 4b11b4 5y ago
  I was hoping this was going to be an article about building with earth, but it's stuck in the same framework of thinking.
  • abraxas 5y ago
    Earthships are not cheap nor any other rammed earth style building. It's cool stuff but definitely not cheap.
    • 4b11b4 5y ago
      I wouldn't recommend rammed earth either.
• Grakel 5y ago
  That's a long way to say construction is already optimized for our current level of technology.
  • f38zf5vdt 5y ago
    A somewhat less meandering explanation for the modern dominance of balloon framing, which also draws parallels to software development: https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/balloon-framing-is-worse-is-better https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/balloon-framing-i...
    • redtexture 5y ago
      Balloon framing has been gone for nearly a century, which implies no firestops between floors. Stick built framing is the follow on, also called plate building, the plates constituting inter-floor fire stops.
      • nickelpro 5y ago
        That link describes platform framing as a variant of balloon framing: "The balloon frame addressed this by way of a variant known as 'western style' or 'platform framing'" The piece uses the term "balloon framing" to encompass all light-frame construction as opposed to heavy-frame construction like post-and-beam. It think that's fine, I've certainly heard the term used that way before.
• robotbikes 5y ago
  Nuclear batteries removing the need for electrical wiring seems very pie in the sky to me but perhaps I'm just ignorant of the practical application of it. Concrete seems far more common in residential construction outside of the U.S. I wonder if technologies such as aircrete (concrete with uniform foam produced air bubbles). Also well There's Your Problem had an interesting article about the 5-1 construction that is used for a lot of new apartment buildings in the U.S. https://wtyppod.podbean.com/e/episode-46-five-over-ones/ https://wtyppod.podbean.com/e/episode-46-five-over-ones/
  • vbezhenar 5y ago
    Aerated concrete is extremely popular in Kazakhstan and Russia in private houses. It's cheaper than bricks, it's sturdy enough, it provides good insulation, it does not require much skill to use, pieces are huge, so it's much faster to build. There are drawbacks, of course, but overall it's a very popular technology.
    • bolangi 5y ago
      I know a guy who researched aerated concrete. He used a slimy additive to help hold the bubbles. Basically, the compression strength of concrete is so much higher than necessary that addition of a large portion of air results in a material that is much lighter with more than adequate compression strength. He couldn't find interest among concrete companies in his state.
    • elihu 5y ago
      I think in the U.S. the only place that makes the stuff (Aercon) is in Florida, and there's Hebel that has a plant in Mexico near Texas.
    • jessaustin 5y ago
      ...it provides good insulation... This might be true, but it would be surprising, since even "aerated" concrete would still be made of highly thermally conductive... concrete.
      • 5y ago
• dctoedt 5y ago
  FTA: "Flexible technologies that work within the current system and simplify processes have had the most success. These technologies allow the high precision and efficiency of factories to make it to the building site. [Example:] Experienced carpenters use chisels to create post and beam members on site. -> 2x4s and nails are mass manufactured and assembled by semi-skilled workers on site."
• Fiahil 5y ago
  This kind of article depress me to the highest point. I'm not a "consumer" with "expensive taste", nor someone who put a brake on innovation. I want a house built to last, by a skilled professional, with wood, steel, stones, and slates. Less plastics and only locally sourced materials. If I'm going to live there for the next half century, it better be a place I love. Please stop pushing your capitalism and your economy of scale in every corner of the world.
  • cies 5y ago
    > I'm not a "consumer" with "expensive taste" Saying so does not make it true. If you want to live in a house, your a consumer of house. If you like a nicer than most basic/economic house because "I'm going to live there for the next half century, it better be a place I love"; voila there come the expensive taste. Author explained where and where not the scale-upping worked in construction. It seems author was on point, even in your case. To author does not shove anything down our reader throats by saying how it is. You link to capitalism is pretty far of: the scale-upping worked really well in socialist places as well, in fact Marx himself obsessed over industrial scale-upping. You seem to be misguided over what capitalism actually means (spoiler alert: a system of law/govt that protects a person's hoarded wealth ad infinitum).
  • jessaustin 5y ago
    You don't have to let the capitalists build your house. All building trades of today and (especially) yesterday are accessible to capable people. First, however, you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that "professional" is a capitalist word.
    • readflaggedcomm 5y ago
      Capitalists build for ourselves as amateurs, hobbyists, or artisans, too. Do we offend you as much as dog whistles do?
      • jessaustin 5y ago
        Who is offended? Building for yourself is great, but it is not an activity that is approved by the capitalists. If you didn't know that, you might not be a capitalist.
• 015UUZn8aEvW 5y ago
  Great essay. This is a much more sophisticated analysis of construction efficiency than you typically find; most of them basically imply that construction is inefficient because contractors are dumb. One minor comment: balloon framing is not a synonym for light wood framing, it's a (mostly archaic) version of it. Balloon framing features long exterior wall studs that extend up multiple stories, as opposed to modern "platform framing", in which the studs stop at each floor.
  • jakewins 5y ago
    Came here to say exactly this. Balloon framing was abandoned due to fires. This made me hesitant about the rest of the text.
    • aardvarkr 5y ago
      Saying something is invalid due to a personal choice in vernacular is quite brazen and ignorant… it’s like writing off someone’s opinion because they used the wrong their/they’re/there
      • gpm 5y ago
        If I was reading an article about grammar and the author used the wrong version of their/they're/there I would seriously consider whether or not I should stop reading it.
      • earleybird 5y ago
        Would you clarify your comment please. Are you saying balloon vs platform framing is a personal choice?
      • function_seven 5y ago
        It's more than "personal choice in vernacular". Someone speaking authoritatively on construction methods should know the differences in terms. Calling a vertical wall framing member a "joist" would be just as wrong. Balloon framing and platform framing are different, exclusive terms. Author uses it as a catch-all for stick framing throughout the article. The rest of the article seems fine and insightful, but it's totally reasonable to see that incorrect terminology usage as an indicator of knowledge gaps. And the author appears to be more involved with cryptography and related concepts, so it tracks.
• jeffbee 5y ago
  The article does not even mention planning and permitting until the last sentence, but in my city that is virtually all of the cost. Fancy cabinet faces have nothing to do with the fact that a house costs $2 million. When I look at what techies are trying to do I just shake my head. Factory_OS built an apartment building on Union Street in Oakland “in ten days “ but planning, permitting, site prep, finishing, and inspections added up to seven years. Believing that off-site fabrication helps this problem is right up there with believing that hyperloops can solve traffic jams, in the universe of nonsensical American beliefs.
• lrgzdmn 5y ago
  Anyone have any experience with SIPs (structural insulated panels)? The claim is that their use reduces waste and labor, but I'm not aware of any independent analysis to corroborate the claims.
  • R0b0t1 5y ago
    I tried to price them out. They definitely save on labor but they are not particularly cheap. Depending on area your codes may not permit them and/or your local PEs may not want to sign off on them, even though they're fine. (This usually comes about by the local codes only assuming a finite set of valid structures, and some structure you wish to build not neatly fitting into those classifications.) They could nebulously reduce "waste" but with how much more you're paying for them, it seems economically unviable to use them. In the sense that money is a signal, the waste is still there, you're just not seeing it and being put at an economic disadvantage for paying more.
  • twothamendment 5y ago
    I worked with them twice and loved it. But three times I've built my own house and passed them over. By my math, it makes sense to spend on a really good envelope like SIPs or a very efficient HVAC like ground source heat pumps - but buying the best of both is only for bragging rights and never pays off. Pick one or the other to go all out on and your bills won't be that much different if the other is just above average. The downside of spending extra on anything that isn't seen by the buyer is that they done want to pay extra for it. To bring it back around to SIPs, if two similar houses are for sale, nobody picks the more expensive one because it has SIPs. (ok, not nobody, maybe I would)
• manmal 5y ago
  The concepts in the article sound foreign to me - they are, since I live in the EU. In Central European countries, most houses are built to last 80-150+ years. People like to use bricks, aerated concrete or specially treated wood that will last for a very long time. There are other systems too, like walls filled with small clay pellets mixed with concrete. Houses built in such a way are quite expensive, usually €300k or more for a typical family home where I live. That leaves some room for prefab (Fertigteilhaus) to be cheaper, contrary to what OP wrote. There are small model cities you can visit where several dozen prefabbers exhibit their current model homes, and if you stick to their plan, you will usually pay less than building on your own. Those are often built on wood frames, but are still quite sturdy and supposed to last at least 100 years. Others are built with bricks or aerated concrete just like individually built homes. Savings are probably achieved by bulk orders, prefab, and a well coordinated team who has built the exact same house ten times already.
  • bumbada 5y ago
    Europe has much more density of people living in the same space. And Asia is even more dense. In the US there are things that do not make sense because people density is so low there, even in places like New York, most people live in individual homes, spread over a big area. When I was living in China I saw lost of things made sense that do not make sense in Europe just by the economic of scale of so much people living in such small areas.
    • marcinzm 5y ago
      >In the US there are things that do not make sense because people density is so low there, even in places like New York, most people live in individual homes, spread over a big area. That's patently false. In NYC only 9% of homes are single unit detached and in NY state it's only 41%.
    • 411111111111111 5y ago
      While it's true that Europe has a few cities that are significantly more dense then new York, your phrasing makes it sound like the average town is more dense then NY is... And that's not the case I don't know the exact number, but there are very few cities in Europe with a density higher then NY (10,716.36 people/km2), and i'm pretty sure they're all in France, Greece and Italy
• bumbada 5y ago
  >Vinyl flooring, vinyl siding, one-piece shower stalls, and laminate countertops are examples of innovations that reduce the cost and increase durability. Vynil is one of the worst thing you could have in your house. And the production of it is horrible for the environment too. Vynil chemical group is not toxic, but the "Polyvinyl chloride" people are referring to when they talk about "Vynil" is. It is extremely toxic because of the chemical additives it has like plasticizers that are breathable and never go away in your body. It is also extremely toxic when burn as it generates dioxins, and flame retardants are added to it, also very toxic. It is also extremely cheap so people use it so much over big surfaces. It is great for plumbing and I would only use it for that use. But don't use it on big surfaces because you and your family are going to breath its additives when it is exposed to sunlight.
• jackcosgrove 5y ago
  I think we already have the future of housing: mobile homes. With remote work gaining acceptance, location will lose its premium for many. Socially we have pared down our living arrangements to small nuclear families if that, which can fit in a mobile home. Mobile homes offer better protection against deterioration of a real estate or job market, and also better opportunities for moving to a growing market. Mobility is in the name. Trailer parks have a bad rap because of classism. But the less well-off are often trailblazers because they need to make things work with less. The mobile homes of tomorrow need not be run-down single-wides. They could be more luxurious and larger if broken apart into components. I think this is mostly a marketing and image problem which is only starting to change, mostly because of cost-of-land pressures.
  • toast0 5y ago
    > Mobile homes offer better protection against deterioration of a real estate or job market, and also better opportunities for moving to a growing market. Mobility is in the name. Mobility is in the name, but not in reality. Once you install a mobile home, it's expensive and unlikely to move it and install it somewhere else. It's better to call these buy their new name, manufactured homes, which eliminates the misconception from having mobile in the name. Now, that doesn't mean they couldn't be the future of housing, but it doesn't seem to be what developers are building or what people are buying when they've got choices. I think the cost difference vs a wood framed house built on site doesn't make up for the lack of flexibility.
    • bradleyjg 5y ago
      A few people have made this point in this thread. There’s still actual trailers (“RV”) though, which is what the grandparent poster meant.
    • handrous 5y ago
      > Mobility is in the name, but not in reality. "Mobile" wasn't in the name, originally. "Mobile" (Alabama) was.
      • 5y ago
• landryraccoon 5y ago
  If I'm reading this correctly, optimizing construction costs is a very difficult problem because a huge part of the costs is transportation, not the material itself or assembly thereof. Transportation is by nature highly distributed among a wide range of actors, unlike industries like semiconductors where the costs are centralized in a factory where a single agent can optimize everything. In other words, the majority of improving construction costs is actually a political problem, and engineers are unsuited to optimizing it. Transportation costs can be reduced, but only at a collective, national or state-wide level. Moving vast quantities of lumber, insulation, wiring, drywall, roofing and other housing materials across state lines is much more a political coordination problem than an engineering one. Sure, a team of engineers could design a more efficient, cost effective transportation method - but how would consensus ever be achieved to actually build the thing and align all the disparate interest groups to rally around it rather than opposing it? My hot take is that in the current era (at least in the United States) "Smart" people have neglected political concerns in favor of technical concerns. But the risks aren't technical, they are political, so this is inefficient. The problem will not be solved simply by engineering, no matter how clever the engineers are, if they are limited to purely technical approaches.
  • kingsuper20 5y ago
    > If I'm reading this correctly, optimizing construction costs is a very difficult problem because a huge part of the costs is transportation, not the material itself or assembly thereof. You have to go beyond the first section. His main points are that (a) it's hard to standardize on the larger parts and (b) there is no low hanging fruit.
    • gpm 5y ago
      > You have to go beyond the first section. Please don't imply people didn't read the article. It's boring, unnecessarily rude, against the guidelines [1], and at least in this case I did read the entire article and agree with that comment. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > (b) there is no low hanging fruit. There is no low hanging fruit when you divide up the pricing the way he did, but transportation is part of nearly every category that he divided it up into. From the data he shows we don't have any reason to think that transportation is not a single substantial fraction of the house cost, when you some up all the different transportation costs between the different sections he uses. To make an analogy to programming, transportation is like an allocator, and his data shows that execution time is spent evenly between 20 different functions. But all of those functions allocate, it's perfectly plausible the program is spending 50% of it's time in it's allocator and that speeding up that allocator by 50% would reduce the overall execution time by 25%.
• opportune 5y ago
  I don't understand the worldwide disdain for the concrete paneled construction the article briefly mentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka Most of the "badness" people associate with these, IMO, are due more to the fact that 1. in recent times they are inhabited by less well-off people 2. they usually need to be washed or painted, probably because they are inhabited by less well-off people who don't make it a priority 3. to the extent they are seen as crime/drug dens, that's because they have a stigma/are in disrepair so only poor people want to live there. It is possible for them to be nice, even moreso if they are new (and not poorly maintained, 60 years old). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelenograd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelenograd as an example of a city with this style (go to Google images for more pictures). The whole city is like a park. From an urban planning perspective, they have a lot of benefits. People can actually end up with a lot of green space in between buildings. They make it easy to set up bus or train-based public transportation, with walking a viable way to navigate toward a hub. The density creates obvious economies of scale in other areas. From a cost perspective, they are inexpensive to construct because of the economies of scale. The article mentions them as one of the few building styles amenable to mass-production/assembly off-site. Probably my main gripe is that they are not often 'mixed use' and could perhaps do with shops on the first floor, though this is partially an artifact of the economic regime under which they were mostly built.
  • OminousWeapons 5y ago
    The worldwide disdain arises from what you said, the additional association with communism / cheapness, and the fact that they are mass produced, generic, and boring, and no one wants to spend a lot of money to get generic and boring.
    • nine_k 5y ago
      If McMansions aand cookie-cutter suburban communities are any indication, some still want to spend a lot of money on generic and boring. The reasons must be different.
      • 5y ago
• zarzavat 5y ago
  Semi-autonomous road convoys and electric trucks are technologies that are in development. That may completely alter the calculus of the article and unlock those economies of scale that are missing at the moment.
• swiley 5y ago
  The most efficient way to build houses is in bulk by building large buildings with condos/apartments, no one seems to want to hear or accept that though.
  • xnx 5y ago
    Or as large subdivisions built all at once, like Levittown mentioned in the article.
    • analog31 5y ago
      I grew up in such a subdivision in another state. It was fine. With a couple of exceptions, all of the houses were identical. They all had the same floor plans, but were oriented in different ways, and some were mirror images. There were also a number of different facades. I lived there for upwards of 10 years before I figured this out, one day when I was at a new friend's house, and realized that I already knew my way around.
  • bradleyjg 5y ago
    Californians would rather preen about with paper straws and compost bins and then drive their telsas back to single family homes with lawns. Meanwhile New Yorkers are taking the subway to their apartment homes. Different cultures.
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    Everyone knows and accepts that. They just don't really want those houses.
    • occz 5y ago
      I very much doubt that to be true. As far as I've understood it, a far too large amount of land in the U.S is zoned to be single-family housing, effectively preventing this type of home to be built. That precludes any choice in the matter. People in the U.S opt for single-family homes because they are really the only available option.
• elihu 5y ago
  If fancy manufacturing facilities with expensive equipment don't scale well because construction materials are manufactured in a lot of small factories rather than a few big ones, it seems like an obvious way to improve construction is to reduce the cost of that fancy equipment so that it's available even to small operations. We see this with a lot of smaller-scale tools: 3D printers, CNCs, laser cutters, welders, pick-and-place machines for assembling circuit boards, etc.. are things that have become affordable to casual hobbyists. I could see augmented reality being a big deal for construction. See exactly where everything is supposed to go as you install it. Maybe eventually a mobile 3D-printing gantry that can be quickly deployed on site will be something that a small local business would own.
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  I think the solution to reduce housing costs is simple and three-fold. First: most people can build a house. It's really not difficult. Today's homes are quite complex in terms of their layers of parts, and constantly varying building codes don't help. But if you can swing a hammer and push a saw, you can build a house. Ikea has shown it's not only possible, but profitable, to sell virtually everything that goes in a home to consumers and have them put it together themselves. So why not the rest of the house too? We've done it before: Sears shipped people houses on the railroad along with instructions and (eventually) pre-fab parts. They sold them for 30 years. https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/06/sears-mail-order-homes.html https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/06/sears-mail-order-homes... A huge chunk of the cost of a home is the labor. So let the homeowner handle more of it! They can build in stages, offsetting costs and building at their own pace. And if somebody gets tired of doing it themselves, they can always hire a contractor. Second: customers interest in having a unique home is a huge cost. So let's focus on building either the variable parts, or on making a "core home" that can be customized after the fact by customers. Most homes are just boxes. It should be possible for us to construct some basic designs that can then be modified or "spruced up" by the homeowner later. Most of the features that make a home look unique could be turned into add-ons, so that we could focus on efficiency of the bare home, and let customers take on additional cost when and if they choose. Third: most people don't need huge houses! Due to the increasing cost of renting, most renters rent apartments that are absolutely tiny by comparison to the average new home. We can reduce housing costs further by simply making the building smaller, and gaining efficiencies by taking advantage of that smaller size. Want a bigger home? By having simpler designs by default with add-on exteriors, we can make it much easier to add extensions on to houses. Simply unbolt the exterior facade, build on your extension, and bolt the facades back on. This allows us to spend less money on materials and labor, while still allowing the consumer to add to the property over time.
  • orthoxerox 5y ago
    > most people can build a house. It's really not difficult You would appreciate some help with raising the walls, but that's certainly doable alone. Raising the rafters, though, requires at least two people with good upper body strength. Or a very ingenious tackle system.
• mortenjorck 5y ago
  It was interesting to see architecture and engineering broken out as ~1.5% of the total cost of building a home, and it made me wonder: How much does better residential architecture actually cost? If I were in the market to build a home, and the difference between building something that looks like your average suburban detached versus something modern and striking were, say, an extra 1.5% (doubling the cost of architecture and engineering), I wouldn't even consider skimping on architecture. And yet, most architecturally-interesting homes are most certainly not 1.5% or even 15% more than average-looking homes, being generally restricted to luxury markets. Why is that?
  • ghaff 5y ago
    Probably because the architecture and engineering is only a small part of the cost, the things the architects design in are much more expensive to build. The actual design of the striking granite-block construction with large windows on the coast may not cost all that much. But the materials and skilled artisans sure do.
• trunnell 5y ago
  I recently read Gates’ book How To Avoid a Climate Disaster which left me with the impression that the overriding factor in building costs is the energy required (and CO2 produced) for construction, heating, and cooling. Unfortunately I didn’t see any mention of energy or carbon in this post. Seems like the biggest breakthrough would be a pre-construction estimate of energy costs over, say, 30 years. Similar to the Energy Star sticker on appliances sold in the US which tell you the cost to run a given appliance with typical usage compared to the range for other models. This would allow you justify spending more upfront for better insulation, HVAC, air sealing, etc. and recoup that over time. At scale this would allow our civilization to be more energy efficient and reduce the need to build more power plants. This suggestion stood out: ”...move to resistance heating and thermoelectric cooling“ Unless I’m missing something, this would be a step backward. Modern heat pumps are 3-4x more efficient than resistance heating, since they aren’t creating heat but moving it from one place to another. For cooling, if the author is referring to Peltier type thermoelectric cooling, the same applies: heat pumps are many times more efficient. The building revolution we need is one that cheaply produces extremely energy-efficient homes, IMO.
  • rhinoceraptor 5y ago
    This video is a great explainer on heat pumps [1]. The TL;DR is that they are essentially nothing more than air conditioners that run in the opposite direction. Plus, a heat pump and an air conditioner can be combined into a single system. 1: https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto
    • sgerenser 5y ago
      Not just can be combined they effectively always are. I’m not aware of any residential heat pumps sold in the US at least that don’t also operate in cooling mode. The additional cost is basically just a reversing valve.
  • wffurr 5y ago
    Heat pumps need plumbing and installation which increases the construction cost. Agreed that they are the way to go, but it's not going to bring down construction costs. The author's strawman proposal was a nuclear battery for effectively unlimited onsite power with no marginal cost in order to minimize construction costs.
• deleted 5y ago
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• brianolson 5y ago
  Framing is a plausible place to optimize, so how about steel? The factory cuts all the pieces to be assembled on site. It goes up real fast. This is what we want, right?
  • lostapathy 5y ago
    At very small scales, this is already done with wood framing. There are vendors that will send out a pre-cut framing package with every piece of wood cut and marked, and even stacked in the right order for fairly optimal assembly. The trouble is that most house plans are not put together to a sufficient level of detail for this to work - contractors rely on all kinds of field decisions/adjustments.
    • ianbicking 5y ago
      How many house plans does the world need? 100? 1000?
      • lostapathy 5y ago
        I don't disagree. This shouldn't be an insurmountable problem, but it's definitely the current state of the art. I'm currently in the process of having a house built, and it's infuriating to me as an engineer how little detail I'm allowed to have either before or during the process. I have to rely on change orders to fix things that were totally preventable/plannable.
        • ianbicking 5y ago
          I'm sure it's my naive hubris that makes me think someone should just design a dozen houses, each with a handful of well defined modifications (including to the facade), and do it with enough specificity that it could be turned into very exact instructions and material lists that suppliers could easily fulfill. Hubris in particular because I'm sure architects think a lot about this and if they don't do it it's for some good reason... or they have done it and it just doesn't effect the market like I imagine it could. I read about a government research program into building (70s?) that failed to reach its own goals but did advance building standards, and this does feel like something where government funded research could help. Something closer to how highway safety research is done, as opposed to scientific research.
• iandanforth 5y ago
  I was onsite at a modular manufacturer today and I can tell you a lot of what is said here is just wrong. The cost estimate is not quality adjusted. If you look at cost per square foot and don't take into account the quality of work provided then you haven't calculated anything worth knowing. Also the article doesn't price out the value of speed. Modular can take half the time to move-in as stick build. I agree there are plenty of points for improving efficiency. For example the builder I visited was not vertically integrated at all. They bought manufacturing time on a modular line for their box plans, worked with external designers and all kinds of subs they can't guarantee for onsite work. But having seen it up close I can tell you there is far more opportunity for process improvement on a assembly line (even if each build is custom) than there is in the field. If you look to Japan, Toyota is getting into modular with steel framing that is way ahead of anything in the states. I look forward to that being available here.
  • kixiQu 5y ago
    I grew up in a "manufactured home" and have been shocked by the ambient draftiness in every site-built house I've inhabited since. Similarly rated materials end up with nowhere near as tightly sealed an end result. Now I'm in an extremely high-efficiency condo, and while there are certainly no drafts, air sensors confirm the windows don't open enough to get decent ventilation. Makes me miss the huge banks of properly openable windows on the manufactured home...
  • 015UUZn8aEvW 5y ago
    Modular home manufacturing has been around for many decades. It certainly has a role to play, but if it were that much better it would have put the traditional contractors out of work long ago. The main problem is transportation. You can make every box the size of a standard shipping container, and thus greatly reduce your home design options and size of rooms while still spending plenty on shipping. Or you can make bigger boxes, which gives you more design flexibility but still a lot less than stick building does. And with the bigger boxes you need special highway permits, escort vehicles, etc. And then, when you have everything on site, there's still a lot to be done. Tree clearing, grading, excavation, concrete work, paving, utility lines, on-site assembly of the boxes (using an expensive crane)... When you've added it all up, modular isn't the obvious improvement that it seems to be at first glance.
• aaron695 5y ago
  > Almost every advancement in construction is small enough for someone to carry > Each advancement fits within a simple construction system. Powerful idea.
• dcolkitt 5y ago
  If anybody's interested in learning the nitty gritty details of the process of homebuilding, especially with an eye towards what drives costs, I highly recommend Contracting Your Home[1]. If you're a neophyte like me, it's pretty illuminating how much you don't know. All the steps involved, what are the tradeoffs between the major approaches, issues that you might not even consider, and the like. [1]https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Contracting-Step-Step-dp-1440346011/dp/1440346011/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Guide-Contracting-Step-Step-...
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  I am just going to say one thing: Superadobe.
• failwhaleshark 5y ago
  Favelas tin-roof shanties would be cheaper too. In the US, why not distribute value, transportation, and land sufficiently so people can have a better basic standard of living? Right now, I'm looking at 1000 homeless people and tents huddling under a highway, while my drunken idiot neighbors shout and dance with glee feet from them in a gentrifying, mixed-use development pool. The people who have just enough have no shame or consideration because their motto is "F U, I got mine."
  • lelanthran 5y ago
    > The people who have just enough have no shame or consideration because their motto is "F U, I got mine." What do you expect them to do? You just said that they "have just enough".
    • failwhaleshark 5y ago
      I wrote too quickly. I meant to say "plenty," as in the jerk-off neighbors who act like their lives haven't graduated past freshman year Spring Break. I suspect this to be true because they're single, aging their bodies rapidly, smoking, doing drugs, sharing diseases, every forced smile and idiotic snark is for Facebook and Gram, and letting their dogs pee in the hallway and not cleaning it up... from their door to the elevator 80 feet / 27m away.
• csours 5y ago
  If there was a way to never have electric cables or plumbing in walls, that would speed up construction and reduce the cost. The savings for this don't just show up in the plumbing and electrical categories, but also in framing and finishing, as well as hidden inefficiencies - you have to pre-wire and plumb, and then late come back to finish wiring and plumbing. Also, this article is about how to construct a house in an efficient manner, not how to construct a house that is efficient throughout it's life.
  • ianbicking 5y ago
    Instead of walls I guess you could use... the floor and ceiling? Would that help? Walls at least don't have people walking on them. In some sense just having "channels" through walls or floors would make things simpler, if electric and plumbing could be installed after the structure of the house was completed. But I can't come up with a way that would make sense. If you integrate channels into the framing that seems very similar to the current process (where "channels" are drilled through the wood), only you've added bulk and access panels. If you add channels that aren't part of the framing then you've increased the wall size with a lot of cascading effects. Though there are basically channels through the floors that align with the joists. Maybe you could save effort by using those channels? But at the cost of material unless there was some wholistic design change. Kind of related: it does seem possible that all-electric HVAC could be distributed through the house instead of using a central unit, and that might simplify things. Like it's unclear to me that central A/C is really much better than smaller split units, and certainly electric heat doesn't benefit from centralization.
• walrus01 5y ago
  Ctrl-f "SEER" No results found Since nobody has mentioned it yet, I recommend doing some dedicated research into the efficiency level and measurements of various types of air conditioners, mini split and otherwise. There is a great deal of variation.
• weeboid 5y ago
  i think balloon framing fell out of favor because 1. the length of timber required for two story structures is not efficient; old growth stuff has been felled and straight, seasoned, 24 and 36 foot lengths of wood are tough to find 2. and fire; platform framing has far better fire control
  • nickelpro 5y ago
    I think it's pretty clear the author is using "balloon framing" to encompass all forms of light-frame construction. You can tell because in the very first sentence he describes them as synonyms, "Stick frame construction, also known as light-frame construction or balloon framing"
• indigodaddy 5y ago
  Not related to the post content, but does anyone know how to actually register a .eth domain (eg subdomain under eth.link) ? On the following page it appears the instructions assume that one already has/owns a (sub)domain, and I don’t see anything talking about how to actually register one.. https://eth.link/#how-to-access-ethdns https://eth.link/#how-to-access-ethdns
  • avernon 5y ago
    First you need to get a metamask wallet. Then you buy some ETH for the wallet. Finally go to ens.domains and register your name. It is very friendly with IPFS, which is how I host my blog. So I put the IPNS permalink in my ENS name contract (managed on ens.domains). The .link is there because browsers can't resolve ENS names. Cloudflare runs a system that checks Ethereum for the browser and redirects to the correct IPFS name if you add the .link. I wrote a post on how to set up a blog like this. It is way simpler to use something like Fleek, though. edit to add link: https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/ipfsbasics.html https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/ipfsbasics.html
    • foobar33333 5y ago
      This seems like the same issue namecoin was trying to solve but never got anywhere. Does eth.link look more promising?
      • avernon 5y ago
        austinvernon.com was taken, I had the ENS name, and I was curious about IPFS, so I used it. The system works surprisingly well, mostly thanks to Cloudflare. I've only been using it for a month, though. And its a static site with zero JS or any analytics. I haven't tried to add it to google search console or anything.
      • KirillPanov 5y ago
        Namecoin failed mainly because it was way, way, way too cheap to register names, so everything got squatted in the first few years. ENS appears to have fixed this; the registration and renewal fees are denominated in USD (but paid in ETH) and cost about the same ($5/yr) as ICANN names. Unfortunately ENS has the same problem that a lot of "new crypto" does: the rules can be changed at any time by a tiny handful of (mostly) anonymous people who hold the magic multisig keys to update the special contract. There is no developer/user separation, where the users can simply choose not to upgrade. The ever-present threat of this "declined to upgrade" situation is a major check on the developers' power in bitcoin/namecoin-style cryptocurrencies, and it is the central topic of discussion in any hard fork proposal.
• cout 5y ago
  I wonder if earthbag technology could help to reduce building costs. Labor seems to be a big factor, but perhaps this could be reduced with the right equipment. Rural homes already need a big hole for septic; earthbags would then just make use of the dirt that's already sitting there, if not for the whole house then perhaps for some part of it.
• hanniabu 5y ago
  @dang The link preview for eth.link domains should be shown with the subdomain and probably without the TLD. So for this case instead of eth.link it should show austinvernon.eth. For reference in case you're unfamiliar, .eth domains are ENS domains (Ethereum Name Service), a decentralized domain system, and are resolved for casual browsing by Cloudflare with the .link TLD for people not running an Ethereum node.
  • iso8859-1 5y ago
    ENS is not DNS, and ETH is not a TLD since it is not in the Root Zone Database maintained by IANA. If ENS is recognized, where does it stop? What happens when there is a collision and IANA makes a TLD that collides? Why should Hacker News recognize domain names that are not recognized in browsers or operating systems by default? Why should Hacker News start redefining domain names as commonly understood and widely supported? What about OpenNIC, FurNIC, Zilliqa, Namecoin and New Nations? Should they also be recognized?
    • madars 5y ago
      That's a minor point. The fact that eth.link seems to have a public suffix list [1] type status stands, so HN should display abc.eth.link as abc.eth.link (not eth.link), just like abc.github.io is shortened to abc.github.io (not github.io). [1] https://publicsuffix.org/ https://publicsuffix.org/
      • judge2020 5y ago
        You saying "For reference in case you're unfamiliar" is also "a minor point".
    • hanniabu 5y ago
      I never said eth was a TLD and TBH your comment sounds like you were in a bad mood and just looking for something to nitpick to take some frustration out.
      • 5y ago
• carapace 5y ago
  Some relevant tidbits, apologies for not writing this up in more detail. (Especially since the article was so detailed and well thought out.) Bucky Fuller had the idea to build houses in factories and deliver them by helicopter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_house Or build whole cities at once: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology Christopher Alexander thought that we should build our houses ourselves (using foamed concrete): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircrete
• seniorsassycat 5y ago
  * drywall taping and mudding makes plumbing and electrical inaccessible. * moulding could be built into drywall panels or eliminated in favor of reinforced panels. * houses are unmonitored, I should be able to see how much electricity or water every fixture uses. How hot, how humid is my house or the attic.
• falcolas 5y ago
  About cost savings, point 1: If you’re putting insulation on the outside, why not also put it between the studs (you can blow it in pretty dang quickly), and perhaps even another 2” of foam insulation inside the studs? You’ll turn an R-20 into an R-40+ wall, reducing the long term cost of the house. i.e. high efficiency houses.
• axiolite 5y ago
  The author has some interesting points, but with a labor price of $104.62 per sq. ft. it seems like there's a huge opportunity to reduce housing prices. That would be $157,000 of the price of a 1500 sq ft home. If factory-built homes could be assembled in a few days, instead of a few months, that would be a big savings. Of course transportation is a big problem. Something like pre-assembled wall sections which can be more or less flat-packed with several other sections could get the transportation costs down. And if they could fit in shipping containers from China (or trucks from Mexico) the price could be even lower. Consumer preference shouldn't be a show-stopper. Changing the color of the paint isn't any more difficult in a factory than it is on-site. Switching the model of window as well (though I can see how each change would eat a bit into the factory efficiency. There are only so many ways to lay-out a house, I seriously doubt each site-built home is such a custom design that it can't be a model number for a pre-fab factory. Regular home builders are already usually going off a small set of plans, not re-engineering home design on every outing.
  • prawn 5y ago
    Maybe wall sections with built in services could work too. e.g., a wall with plumbing to handle a bathroom on one side and laundry on the other. Design a house around these service walls in strategic locations, then fill in the other, more-standard plasterboard walls. If the more technical bits (electrical, plumbing, etc) could be done by accredited tradesman in the factory, leaving a general worker to screw on taps and plug in power cables, that might reduce the individuals required on site during the assembly process. The factory professionals could knock out dozens of custom service walls (even if each was slightly different) in a day, versus driving around to individual building sites in the traditional model.
• artificialLimbs 5y ago
  >> Replace gas appliances with electric or nuclear versions, eliminate gas piping I closed the tab here. Not today, satan.
• frankus 5y ago
  I’d love to see someone make insulation displacement crimping work for wiring. Maybe even build it into the wall box rather than the fixture, and just have the fixture plug into to wall box.
• kristianp 5y ago
  I was thinking about how many of the trades would still exist in 20 years due to automation. I find it hard to think of houses built with robotic electricians or bricklayers reducing the costs. Maybe if prefab wall panels came with wiring and wall sockets built in?
• aktuel 5y ago
  The future of efficient housing construction will be 3D printed on site.
  • agumonkey 5y ago
    So far the ideas are not amazing, but let's see how it goes
    • aktuel 5y ago
      It's already more than ideas: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/30/dutch-couple-move-into-europe-first-fully-3d-printed-house-eindhoven https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/apr/30/dutch-cou...
• jokoon 5y ago
  The tiny house movement is interesting, but in the end, what matters is health and durability when faced with heat, cold, water, dust, mold. I would certainly like to buy a quality tiny house or cheaper housing for residency if I could be taught how to maintain it.
• indigodaddy 5y ago
  I sent this article to my builder brother and here is his very frank feedback: ——— interesting. Certainly true that building materials are bulky and very costly to ship. Seems to be a reality that is hard to change. he has a poor understanding of framing and got terminology wrong: "balloon" was a bridge between post-and-beam and modern platform framing and is no longer used. Although commercial steel buildings are basically balloon. His constant reference to "balloon" framing is a joke to a professional. The fact is that all the processing of building can be and often are quite efficient. If a person wants to keep everything simple it can be much less expensive than it often is. I guess he alludes to that with mentioning "consumer tastes". for sure custom homes are expensive for a reason. it's hard for someone with absolutely zero experience to judge home building, obviously. For example he thinks 4x8 sheathing panels don't have to be cut, when of course they do, just like boards do.
• wreath 5y ago
  I spent the last year watching This Old House videos. What I gather is that wooden houses are easier to remodel and maintain yourself than brick or cement houses (but also cement/brick houses don't require much maintenance.
• plaidfuji 5y ago
  > Transformational cost reduction would have to come from changing what we think a house is. Imagine you had a thin suit that provided heating, cooling, processed your urine and waste, and kept you clean. Then you could have a house without bathrooms, insulation, heating, cooling, plumbing, and have the electrical eliminated with nuclear batteries. No kitchen because robotic takeout is so cheap. The house could cost $20 per square foot (with low-end finishes) and be smaller. A new home would go up in weeks. The technology is in the bodysuit instead of the house. Bodysuits can be mass-produced and shipped long distances. Ripe for cost reduction. The volumetric value of a home would be even lower. This sounds lovely, sign me up. But seriously, I was excited about this article having misinterpreted the title, thinking it would be a critical analysis of the operating efficiency of a house, not the construction efficiency. Amortized over the lifetime of the house, I have to assume the up-front costs pale in comparison to the operating costs of a household. Especially as more work becomes remote-friendly, I would expect new construction to be required less often. How about addressing the massive societal drain of doing dishes and laundry? Has anybody seriously tried to rethink those processes, not just in terms of roboticization, but in terms of house design and layout? How about heating/cooling? I guess what I’m curious about is more how an increase in capital expense could revolutionize operation, not the other way around. And certainly not involving a urine-processing body suit and relying on Uber eats indefinitely.
  • prawn 5y ago
    I always think about how in 2021 we're still manually scrubbing toilets or paying other humans to do it for us. Always leaves me thinking about Airbnbs and how even if you have a great set up to rent, you still need to clean it every day or two, or pay someone to do it. Ends up being a significant portion of the cost. Assuming it's too difficult to automate stripping and making a bed, or auto-cleaning an existing toilet, it's crazy we don't reinvent toilets, bed linen and various other things so they are no effort at all.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  The biggest forthcoming revolution in housing will be self driving EV RVs. Your house takes you to your job, then takes you somewhere else on weekends or evenings. Ultracheap solar, which is still in it's main phase of cost improvement, same with batteries and drivetrain, will make EV RVs cheaper from TCO. And the guts of the RV will be efficiently centrally manufactured.
• nottorp 5y ago
  > Precast concrete panels are another small success story. Post-WWII, Eastern European countries built apartment buildings using this technology. No. No and no. The precast concrete panel apartment buildings in Eastern Europe are so badly insulated that such a house will ruin any building savings with the heating/cooling costs. That is, if you don't get water infiltrations through the spaces between said concrete panels which are obviously filled with ... something else. I guess you could do it properly, but then it won't be cheap. Source: I live there. They're that bad.
• blendo 5y ago
  Can I suggest that smaller homes (700-1200 SF) are the “low hanging fruit” to reduce single family home construction costs? Perhaps incentivize by basing property taxes on home size?
• woeirua 5y ago
  It's just bizarre to me that people are focused on building homes more efficiently, when the overwhelming majority of the cost of housing in most areas is the cost of the land, not the actual cost of building the house. How do we know this is true? Well just look at the cost of building a new home in lower cost of living areas. You can still build quite large custom homes for under $300k in much of the country. So it's not the cost of labor, or the cost of raw materials. Sure there's some difference between LCOL areas and HCOL areas, but even generously assuming that it would be a 50% premium you still dont arrive at California level prices. This is yet another conversation about housing that whistles right by the true cause: exclusionary, and racist zoning practices.
  • helen___keller 5y ago
    It's right there in the article: > Rezone to allow more multi-family construction and remove minimum parking requirements. America has some of the cheapest multi-family in the world. We need more of it!
• silexia 5y ago
  The article here contains absolutely brilliant ideas. I am especially amazed by the idea of a suit for each person that takes care of everything a house does.
• xnx 5y ago
  Good article. I wonder what improvements/efficiencies would be possible if consumer tastes could be shifted significantly (e.g. through marketing). I'm not thinking about small things like vinyl finishes, but larger shifts like building structures. Example: Could a company like Apple or Tesla make alternative structures like Quonset huts seem modern and fashionable.