Good points. In general, water running down the sides will wick to places you don't want it to. Everything gets a lot harder. You have openings in the wall like

Good points. In general, water running down the sides will wick to places you don't want it to. Everything gets a lot harder. You have openings in the wall like doors and windows that now have to be designed for a lot more water coming in there. Is it really a good design choice? And then it will run down the side and get to the base of the building too... Believe me, flat roofs and no eaves have been attempted here with gusto for the last 60 years, with billions in investment and billions lost. So many apartment buildings have leaking roofs. It's absolutely a terrible waste and personal financial issue for a lot of families. For the last 10 years, buildings have started to have eaves and sloped roofs again. Basement renovations are not cheap or easy either. It's like software where you have one interface and then internal functions that operate on internal state. You don't suddenly do some reading of some config from disk deep down in some helper method. If the architecture is good, it's easy to reason about and easy to modify. About housing price, yes, sure, some styrofoam dome housing can work in a temporary matter. But even there, the design can make a huge difference. Water will come in or will go into cracks and there will be mold. If you design it with a bit more care, maybe that styrofoam house can last for 50 years instead of 10?