8 ms·

Ok, what's the catch? We see new ideas for home building all the time, dome shaped, 3D printed, using shipping containers, etc... and yet, everyone in the worl

by GuB-42 5y ago

Ok, what's the catch? 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.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
One problem I see is the same problem I see when considering a greenhouse with vertical walls or a hoophouse with curved walls. Vertical walls don’t waste space. In a hoop house or these dome houses there will be weird parts all around the edge that aren’t very tall that could be considered wasted space.
anonporridge 5y ago
The catch is that curved edges are a pain in the ass to fit furniture in, and varying sizes of dome homes have different curve angles, so you can't just make standard "curved" furniture. An box is a box regardless of size, and any couch fits against any flat wall. Sectional couches now let you customize the size to fit bigger or smaller boxes. 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.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  And where would I hang all my collected art work?
  - vb6sp6 5y ago
    You just put two hooks up top and let the bottom hang
    - kurthr 5y ago
      And at a 6 foot viewing height you lose half of your living area.
    - tomcam 5y ago
      Highly specific username appreciated
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    By throwing away that physical shit and just projecting your NFTs via your augmented reality contact lenses of course.
    - ehnto 5y ago
      I bet some people are genuinely living your comment out, just with VR goggles. We are in that weird bit between "normal" and cyber dystopia/utopia that doesn't get much explanation in fiction.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - vangelis 5y ago
        Makes me think of Akane's apartment in Psycho Pass. Who needs decorations when you have holograms/VR. Although personally I won't those darn monkeys looking at me.
- 5y ago
vb6sp6 5y ago
The catch is that most builders only have experience with stick built homes so you will be paying a premium for specialized labor
jacquesm 5y ago
A couple of catches: building codes, fire safety, no straight walls, hard to affix windows, solar panels etc, plenty of ways to bump your head on the inside. Some of these can be fixed by first having a 1 m or even higher circular 'riser' on which you place the dome. 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.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  aka regulatory capture (not saying that dome houses are any good tho)
- fnord77 5y ago
  Boxes are nicer to live in than half-spheres.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    That depends on how large the half spheres are :) 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 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviodome and https://amsterdome.nl/ https://amsterdome.nl/ What I love about the story is that the building was simply dismantled and put up again in a new location.
    - Retric 5y ago
      That’s not a half sphere. Pure half sphere structures are extremely rare as they waste a lot of space and building materials. Your better off using more than half a sphere so the walls curve in slightly at the base. You get more useable internal volume from a slightly smaller exterior footprint and use less building materials. The next obvious improvement is to use a dome on top of a cylinder which again improves useable space over a half sphere and is a fairly common design as seen with silos and observatories etc. 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.
aegis4244 5y ago
The catch is getting a mortgage. It does cost less to build, unless it's not in the standard building codes. It's not. So to legally build it and live in it, you need a structural engineer to draw up the plans and get a county building department to OK the engineer's plans. Also, all the regular trades aren't familiar with it, and give higher "nervous" quotes, if they give any at all. It's just faster and cheaper to build something the building trades call a "shit box". Everyone is familiar with it. Building departments and contractors are ok with it, and most importantly, you can get a mortgage on it.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  That's not true at all about the mortgage. 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.
pippy 5y ago
Kitset houses are cheaper and better. 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.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  50 years is longer than Japanese housing is presumed to last. According to https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
- saxonww 5y ago
  I don't have any good sources to back this up, but I thought it was typical for homes in Japan to only have a 30-40 year lifespan anyway. This [0] cites average age of wood-framed homes between 27-30 years, with concrete more like 37 years, and contrasts with US wood frame building lifespan roughly 2x that. Would enjoy reading comments from someone who really knows about this. [0] https://japanpropertycentral.com/2014/02/understanding-the-lifespan-of-a-japanese-home-or-apartment/ https://japanpropertycentral.com/2014/02/understanding-the-l...
  - fomine3 5y ago
    Market value is going to zero by getting 30 years old (probably more earlier), but it not mean that current residents don't live there. They would just live until die. 35yr loan is pretty common so the house must have 35yr life at least. 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.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  This video blew up a while ago explaining exactly the same thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7yEDz6bCfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7yEDz6bCfU 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.
bootlooped 5y ago
Consumer taste would be enough to kill this. See the following article that was posted here a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27644334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27644334
hericium 5y ago
> Dome houses are far from a new idea, neither are plastic houses, I have never seen them except as a novelty or experiment. Igloos are popular in certain parts of the world.
- jaclaz 5y ago
  Strengely enough, traditional building techniques depend on the local availability of materials, you will find stone buildings where stone is available, wood buildings where wood is avaialble and brick buildings where clay is available. 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).
KaiserPro 5y ago
If its pure EPS, then its going to have a flammability issue. 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.)
klaushougesen1 5y ago
Looked into building a house out of EPS panels, since it (at first look) looks like a splendid material with built in insulation. However: 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/1-fire-safety/eps-behaviour-in-case-of-fire.pdf https://eumeps.construction/content/8-downloads/4-documents/... source of initial inspiration: https://vimeo.com/81180775 https://vimeo.com/81180775 cork source: http://www.edisughero.com/en/#prodotti http://www.edisughero.com/en/#prodotti blocks: https://www.gencork.com/2020/about-us/ https://www.gencork.com/2020/about-us/
- klaushougesen1 5y ago
  For completeness sake: -------------- so next house is going to be made from Poroton instead: https://archello.com/product/s9-p-climate-neutral-poroton-bricks 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.

by GuB-42 5y ago

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

One problem I see is the same problem I see when considering a greenhouse with vertical walls or a hoophouse with curved walls. Vertical walls don’t waste space. In a hoop house or these dome houses there will be weird parts all around the edge that aren’t very tall that could be considered wasted space.

anonporridge 5y ago

The catch is that curved edges are a pain in the ass to fit furniture in, and varying sizes of dome homes have different curve angles, so you can't just make standard "curved" furniture. An box is a box regardless of size, and any couch fits against any flat wall. Sectional couches now let you customize the size to fit bigger or smaller boxes. 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.

ajmurmann 5y ago
And where would I hang all my collected art work?
- vb6sp6 5y ago
  You just put two hooks up top and let the bottom hang
  - kurthr 5y ago
    And at a 6 foot viewing height you lose half of your living area.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    Highly specific username appreciated
- anonporridge 5y ago
  By throwing away that physical shit and just projecting your NFTs via your augmented reality contact lenses of course.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    I bet some people are genuinely living your comment out, just with VR goggles. We are in that weird bit between "normal" and cyber dystopia/utopia that doesn't get much explanation in fiction.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - vangelis 5y ago
      Makes me think of Akane's apartment in Psycho Pass. Who needs decorations when you have holograms/VR. Although personally I won't those darn monkeys looking at me.
5y ago

vb6sp6 5y ago

The catch is that most builders only have experience with stick built homes so you will be paying a premium for specialized labor

jacquesm 5y ago

A couple of catches: building codes, fire safety, no straight walls, hard to affix windows, solar panels etc, plenty of ways to bump your head on the inside. Some of these can be fixed by first having a 1 m or even higher circular 'riser' on which you place the dome. 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.

dzhiurgis 5y ago
aka regulatory capture (not saying that dome houses are any good tho)
fnord77 5y ago
Boxes are nicer to live in than half-spheres.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That depends on how large the half spheres are :) 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 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviodome and https://amsterdome.nl/ https://amsterdome.nl/ What I love about the story is that the building was simply dismantled and put up again in a new location.
  - Retric 5y ago
    That’s not a half sphere. Pure half sphere structures are extremely rare as they waste a lot of space and building materials. Your better off using more than half a sphere so the walls curve in slightly at the base. You get more useable internal volume from a slightly smaller exterior footprint and use less building materials. The next obvious improvement is to use a dome on top of a cylinder which again improves useable space over a half sphere and is a fairly common design as seen with silos and observatories etc. 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.

aegis4244 5y ago

The catch is getting a mortgage. It does cost less to build, unless it's not in the standard building codes. It's not. So to legally build it and live in it, you need a structural engineer to draw up the plans and get a county building department to OK the engineer's plans. Also, all the regular trades aren't familiar with it, and give higher "nervous" quotes, if they give any at all. It's just faster and cheaper to build something the building trades call a "shit box". Everyone is familiar with it. Building departments and contractors are ok with it, and most importantly, you can get a mortgage on it.

BizarroLand 5y ago
That's not true at all about the mortgage. 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.

pippy 5y ago

Kitset houses are cheaper and better. 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.

dfxm12 5y ago
50 years is longer than Japanese housing is presumed to last. According to https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...
saxonww 5y ago
I don't have any good sources to back this up, but I thought it was typical for homes in Japan to only have a 30-40 year lifespan anyway. This [0] cites average age of wood-framed homes between 27-30 years, with concrete more like 37 years, and contrasts with US wood frame building lifespan roughly 2x that. Would enjoy reading comments from someone who really knows about this. [0] https://japanpropertycentral.com/2014/02/understanding-the-lifespan-of-a-japanese-home-or-apartment/ https://japanpropertycentral.com/2014/02/understanding-the-l...
- fomine3 5y ago
  Market value is going to zero by getting 30 years old (probably more earlier), but it not mean that current residents don't live there. They would just live until die. 35yr loan is pretty common so the house must have 35yr life at least. 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.
Gigachad 5y ago
This video blew up a while ago explaining exactly the same thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7yEDz6bCfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7yEDz6bCfU 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.

bootlooped 5y ago

Consumer taste would be enough to kill this. See the following article that was posted here a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27644334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27644334

hericium 5y ago

> Dome houses are far from a new idea, neither are plastic houses, I have never seen them except as a novelty or experiment. Igloos are popular in certain parts of the world.

jaclaz 5y ago
Strengely enough, traditional building techniques depend on the local availability of materials, you will find stone buildings where stone is available, wood buildings where wood is avaialble and brick buildings where clay is available. 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).

KaiserPro 5y ago

If its pure EPS, then its going to have a flammability issue. 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.)

klaushougesen1 5y ago

Looked into building a house out of EPS panels, since it (at first look) looks like a splendid material with built in insulation. However: 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/1-fire-safety/eps-behaviour-in-case-of-fire.pdf https://eumeps.construction/content/8-downloads/4-documents/... source of initial inspiration: https://vimeo.com/81180775 https://vimeo.com/81180775 cork source: http://www.edisughero.com/en/#prodotti http://www.edisughero.com/en/#prodotti blocks: https://www.gencork.com/2020/about-us/ https://www.gencork.com/2020/about-us/

klaushougesen1 5y ago
For completeness sake: -------------- so next house is going to be made from Poroton instead: https://archello.com/product/s9-p-climate-neutral-poroton-bricks 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.