10 ms·

Bolwoningen: Living in spherical homes

84 points by hochmartinez 3y ago

TacticalCoder 3y ago
They do look quite similar to the "Futuro" or "Futuro pod" from the late 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuro
- ortusdux 3y ago
  They also remind me of inflatable concrete buildings. Most use an inflatable dome as a mold, and then are spray coated with concrete and reinforced. https://baptistedarboistexier.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/bubble-houses/ https://baptistedarboistexier.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/bubbl... https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/craft/skill-inflatable-concrete-domes https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/craft/skill-infl... My favorite utilitarian version is Concrete Canvas, which makes pre-impregnated concrete fabric shelters. You open the pallet, inflate, spray with water, and then give them 24 hours to cure. The finished structure is sterile, fire resistant, can be buried, and has good insulating properties. https://www.concretecanvas.com/us/cc-shelters/ https://www.concretecanvas.com/us/cc-shelters/
- dheera 3y ago
  There's one on Airbnb near Joshua Tree NP, though I had a bad experience on Airbnb that customer service wasn't willing to attend to, and stopped using them. https://zh-t.airbnb.com/rooms/33518282 https://zh-t.airbnb.com/rooms/33518282
ortusdux 3y ago
I wonder how the acoustics are?
- squirtlebonflow 3y ago
  I read an article that said they're great for singing or music
- mayormcmatt 3y ago
  Though not directly analogous, geodesic dome cabins are not unusual in the Sierras (I see them in some of the communities along highway 4) and they are notorious for allowing sounds to bounce all over the place, making privacy difficult. For listening to music/watching movies, maybe it would be awesome?
ArnoVW 3y ago
If you like that, you'll love the cube houses (mentionned in the article, built also in the Netherlands, around the same time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_house
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
  This is exactly what popped into my mind. I've been inside one of those, I wouldn't like to live there.
- susiecambria 3y ago
  I get motion sick looking at the outside. The inside could barely stand looking at. Cool, but not for me, thanks.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Cube houses were radical back in the day and they are still there in Rotterdam more than 50 years later. A more recent experiment in Amsterdam is also worth mentioning: http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen/ http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen/ This is basically a project where they built cheap student housing using pre-fabricated container sized units for a 1000+ students. Apparently, the company behind this, Tempohousing, has been running projects around the world building temporary housing using shipping containers for refugees, homeless people, and other use cases, etc. There are a few more companies doing similar things at this point.
sgt 3y ago
I like the fact that they are extremely cheap to manufacture and also to maintain. With housing shortage in many parts of the world, could this be a solution for the poor? You could even stack them on top of each other like marbles (assuming an edging so they don't roll off), and be able to use a very small space for hundreds if not thousands of dwellings. Electricity and network could be done by using a meshing technology.
- RhodesianHunter 3y ago
  Something being individually cheap does not mean that it'd be cheaper to make and stack a bunch of them then say, a regular old apartment complex. Also, "cheap housing for poor people" has a bad habit of becoming "projects".
- c22 3y ago
  How would you get to the doors?
- interdrift 3y ago
  there is absolutely nothing wrong with the commie blocks we have in Bulgaria other than the need to fix the facade. They are extremely cheap to mass manufacture, build and also they easily can last 100 years with enough living space for everyone. This already works, it's just not done due to regulations in many countries.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  The shell of a house is not where most of the cost goes. Why would stacking spherical shells like marbles be cheap?
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  This particular form factor seems inefficient. But there is quite a bit of innovation in the area of building pre-fabricated homes for refugees. These are popping up in a lot of places. Including the Ukraine recently. And of course there are also some high end options that are popular for building bespoke houses in e.g. the Scandinavian and North American markets. Basically, pre-fabricated housing is a solved problem from a technical point of view. Cheap to manufacture, easy to deploy, and pretty comfortable to live in. If you think about it, there are numerous viable ways of providing people with some form of shelter to shield them from the elements. Mostly the issue is not technical challenges but the fact that there's a lot of local push back against the deployment of any form of cheap housing projects in a lot of places. This has nothing to do with their pricing (cheap) or quality (pretty decent) but with the level of protectionism in place to guard prices of existing houses. Solving cheap housing would collapse prices. That's why you don't find trailer parks in richer parts of the US. However, they are very popular as semi-permanent slums in less rich parts and have been so for many decades. Tens of millions of people live in those actually. Just mostly not anywhere near where the housing shortages are the most urgent.
gpvos 3y ago
The most amazing type of house, and one I'd like to live in, is the Heliodome, which apparently is heated by the sun even in winter while staying cool enough in summer: https://www.heliodome.com/ https://www.heliodome.com/ .
- sixstringtheory 3y ago
  That's pretty cool. I imagine the parameters need to change with the latitude? Didn't seen anything about that on the site.
- somedude895 3y ago
  How does it stay cool in summer? Are the windows oriented in a way that winter sun gets in but summer sun doesn't?
  - gpvos 3y ago
    Correct. In summer the main window façade is not in direct sunlight.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  I would like to live in a toroidal house, preferably raised above the ground by standing on some pillars, and with trees around, both outside the torus and inside the torus. I am lucky that even if I live in an apartment (a.k.a. flat), when I look through the windows I do not see some other ugly building, but I see the crowns of several beautiful trees, which are close, at a distance of about 5 meters. I am working most of the time being seated in front of a computer, but whenever I have to think about something more difficult I prefer to stand up and walk, while thinking. Doing this in an apartment, even when choosing the longest possible path, requires frequent direction reversals for walking. In a toroidal house, it would be possible to walk for any duration, without paying attention to the environment while thinking and without being distracted by the necessity of doing reversals.
Jiro 3y ago
Furniture is rectangular with corners. Boxes are rectangular shaped. Windows that are rectangular can slide in ways that circular windows cannot. Look at the picture in the article showing a couch and chair at angles to one another. This is a stupid idea.
- upon_drumhead 3y ago
  You can make rounded furniture. I actually have a quarter circle couch in front of the fire place. it's nice.
  - 6th 3y ago
    Round furniture being nice =/= round rooms being nice. And a round room might be a cylinder with a flat curved edge at least. A spherical room/wall is the absolute worst use of space case possible.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Round furniture exists too, like the fabled round table. Curved windows could totally slide along a spherical surface.
- mc32 3y ago
  Yep. It would make sense only if these were to be anchored below sea level or somewhere beyond the stratosphere, else it’s not space efficient.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - 6th 3y ago
    Sure, spheres acting as a pressure vessel make 100% sense. Even conceding they may be the only sensible choice for that environment - they are still not space efficient.
- tempaway15755 3y ago
  But its good to try something different, at least once, somewhere in the world? People live in yurts, and they are circular. Perhaps it was good to explore the idea that living spaces didn't need to be rectangles. Perhaps it feels different? Perhaps living in a space that doesn't easily fit rectangular furniture would lead to some new insights?
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
I live under an angled roof which is slightly annoying but I cannot imagine what it must be like not having straight walls
- pengaru 3y ago
  Surely you mean angled ceiling?
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
    Both? The ceiling is angled because of the roof. I guess some houses might not have rooms that high so one doesn't mean the other.
    - pengaru 3y ago
      Most roofs are angled, I wouldn't say the same of ceilings. Here in the US anyways, it's pretty common to just have dead space separating the sloped roof from the interior horizontal ceiling. Maybe you have a usable attic in that space, but it's kind of unusual for it to be living space IME. It's wasteful, but it establishes a precedent of wasting interior volume. The distinction matters in this discussion specifically since you can take the same approach to the dead space in the walls of a spherical exterior if you prefer a boxy interior living space... Put shelves and other infra/amenities in that area to achieve cosmetically orthonormal interior walls. There's some advantage to a curved structural exterior... large flat surfaces aren't great structurally. But they don't have to result in curved interior walls. Just like our angled roofs don't always result in angled interior ceilings.
picometer 3y ago
A sphere’s minimized surface area per volume also means that temperature control is more efficient: there’s less surface area for heat to escape in the winter, or enter in the summer. So for the same (or similar) wall material cost & ongoing energy cost, you get more interior space. Then the question is: can you actually use the extra interior space?
- MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  Yeah, the wastage of the "average" home bugs me, but there's got to be lower hanging fruit than somehow living in spheres. Even just a cylinder would give you some great improvement (and it would be mostly rectangles, with normal windows), but even better than that? On the other side of the wall I am typing this at, there's a heat engine removing heat from a freezing box, but then it has to drop all that heat into the space I am sitting in . . so then another box has to try and get the heat outside. Oh! But wait! There's another box that HEATS UP - a lot! - so I can put food in it. Another one dries my clothes, and makes hot water, both of them putting heat back in. Jiminy beeswax. Not even going to touch the way water is brutally wasted in the typical setup.
  - alanlammiman 3y ago
    I have often thought of this. It may turn out that those inefficiencies are fairly small - the devices themselves small, well insulated, etc. One would have to do the maths. But I imagine that cooling all the air with AC (and letting it leak whenever you open a door or window) and then heating an outdoor pool is huge
  - throw9away6 3y ago
    I think we should start with dc power. Each house should have a 12/24 volt low voltage high efficiency power supply to eliminate the need for individual converters everywhere
    - marssaxman 3y ago
      48V would be a better choice. It is increasingly popular for off-grid applications because the higher voltage reduces heat and power loss, letting you use thinner wires, which are both cheaper and easier to install; but 48V is still considered "low voltage" and does not require any special safety precautions.
vram22 3y ago
Check out earthships: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship I have seen one, and met and talked briefly with the guy who built it. He is Alex Leeor, a British guy living in the mountains in Tamil Nadu, South India. He built one there with local help. It is perched almost on the edge of a cliff that drops steeply 7000 feet (about 2000 meters) down to the plains. There are multiple articles about him, which you can google. Edit: It was round, but not spherical in shape. Round in the horizontal dimension. With a lot of glass windows. He said the overall design made it warm in winter and cool in summer, although summers are hardly hot there.
- govg 3y ago
  I was initially confused by the comment that it doesn't get hot in summers - Tamil Nadu during summers is one of the hotter regions of India. The actual earthship / community is built in Kodaikanal, a famous "hill station" in the Nilgiri mountain range.
  - vram22 3y ago
    >I was initially confused by the comment that it doesn't get hot in summers NP. I did say (knowing both that state (TN) and specific area well) "mountains" (not "hills") and "7000 feet". That makes it a much more cold place than the plains of TN. You need a winter jacket in winter, and your ears and hands (and whole body, really) freeze like shit if exposed (not comparable to the northern areas of earth, like EU and US, but still). Moderate to heavy rain in many months of the year, including winter, makes it colder. The place gets both the south-west and north-east monsoons, since it is high up and near the Kerala border, so escapes the rain-shadow effect that the rest of Tamil Nadu has. Minimum temperatures are in the range of 10 to 5 degrees Celsius or lower, indoors, and you sometimes see frost on grass outside. >The actual earthship / community is built in Kodaikanal, a famous "hill station" in the Nilgiri mountain range. A few kilometers outside Kodaikanal, only reachable by jeep or motorbike. And it is in the Palani Hills, not the Nilgiris. Both are part of the long Western Ghats mountain range, which extends down the western side of India, near the coast, from Maharashtra or Gujarat, down to Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
- 3y ago
throwme_123 3y ago
Better pictures: https://unusualplaces.org/bolwoningen-neighborhood-of-spherical-homes/ https://unusualplaces.org/bolwoningen-neighborhood-of-spheri...
- Freak_NL 3y ago
  Better user experience too. No mailing list sign-up beg-screen after three seconds.
nologic01 3y ago
The very first houses (stone age) where circular rather than square. So you could say that our architectural fashions are going around in circles
causality0 3y ago
Spherical house are good for locations with extreme wind conditions. Other than that they foolishly waste half their potential square footage of floor for the sake of aesthetics.
SirLJ 3y ago
Those are the best developed by architect and CalEarth founder Nader Khalili https://www.calearth.org/intro-superadobe https://www.calearth.org/intro-superadobe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthbag_construction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthbag_construction
thiscatis 3y ago
This website is as unusable as the spherical houses the article is about.
- zevv 3y ago
  amen.
CrazyPyroLinux 3y ago
I like the monolithic.com approach better - Not totally spherical, but a lot more options.
impissedoff1 3y ago
[flagged]
tzs 3y ago
I once worked in an office that was in a two story geodesic dome. It was kind of annoying on the second floor due to the slope of the outside wall making it hard to find a good use for space on that side of my office. More details here [1]. That said, those spherical homes look like they might work out OK. As I said about domes in the comment linked in the prior paragraph, > They probably work better as houses than office buildings, because the designer of a house can better anticipate what each room will be used for and arrange it so that things you'd naturally want against outside walls are things that would be OK with the curves. > An office building has a lot more variability from tenant to tenant, making it more likely that the tenant's things won't work well against the curved walls. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29301072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29301072
jacquesm 3y ago
Interesting! There are also the Cube houses by Dutch architect Piet Blom: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuswoningen_(Rotterdam) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuswoningen_(Rotterdam)
dvh 3y ago
Imagine your window breaks, you try to diy cut round glass pane and it keeps breaking...
WeylandYutani 3y ago
This architecture is just a hobby for a rich country. The vast majority of the population dreams of Dutch suburbia. According to the media the housing market tanked. I sold a 1970s 200k family home with garden on the first day. A house from a time when they were still building homes for the lower middle class.
hansc 3y ago
Nice, these are located less than a mile from my home and nicely situated along a stream, just like a bunch of mushrooms in a forest. They have been around for decades and were an innovation project from an alternative living cooperation in the city (Den Bosch). I think they are now mostly occupied by students and 30-.

84 points by hochmartinez 3y ago

They do look quite similar to the "Futuro" or "Futuro pod" from the late 60s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuro

ortusdux 3y ago
They also remind me of inflatable concrete buildings. Most use an inflatable dome as a mold, and then are spray coated with concrete and reinforced. https://baptistedarboistexier.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/bubble-houses/ https://baptistedarboistexier.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/bubbl... https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/craft/skill-inflatable-concrete-domes https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/craft/skill-infl... My favorite utilitarian version is Concrete Canvas, which makes pre-impregnated concrete fabric shelters. You open the pallet, inflate, spray with water, and then give them 24 hours to cure. The finished structure is sterile, fire resistant, can be buried, and has good insulating properties. https://www.concretecanvas.com/us/cc-shelters/ https://www.concretecanvas.com/us/cc-shelters/
dheera 3y ago
There's one on Airbnb near Joshua Tree NP, though I had a bad experience on Airbnb that customer service wasn't willing to attend to, and stopped using them. https://zh-t.airbnb.com/rooms/33518282 https://zh-t.airbnb.com/rooms/33518282

ortusdux 3y ago

I wonder how the acoustics are?

squirtlebonflow 3y ago
I read an article that said they're great for singing or music
mayormcmatt 3y ago
Though not directly analogous, geodesic dome cabins are not unusual in the Sierras (I see them in some of the communities along highway 4) and they are notorious for allowing sounds to bounce all over the place, making privacy difficult. For listening to music/watching movies, maybe it would be awesome?

ArnoVW 3y ago

If you like that, you'll love the cube houses (mentionned in the article, built also in the Netherlands, around the same time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_house https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_house

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
This is exactly what popped into my mind. I've been inside one of those, I wouldn't like to live there.
susiecambria 3y ago
I get motion sick looking at the outside. The inside could barely stand looking at. Cool, but not for me, thanks.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Cube houses were radical back in the day and they are still there in Rotterdam more than 50 years later. A more recent experiment in Amsterdam is also worth mentioning: http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen/ http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen/ This is basically a project where they built cheap student housing using pre-fabricated container sized units for a 1000+ students. Apparently, the company behind this, Tempohousing, has been running projects around the world building temporary housing using shipping containers for refugees, homeless people, and other use cases, etc. There are a few more companies doing similar things at this point.

sgt 3y ago

I like the fact that they are extremely cheap to manufacture and also to maintain. With housing shortage in many parts of the world, could this be a solution for the poor? You could even stack them on top of each other like marbles (assuming an edging so they don't roll off), and be able to use a very small space for hundreds if not thousands of dwellings. Electricity and network could be done by using a meshing technology.

RhodesianHunter 3y ago
Something being individually cheap does not mean that it'd be cheaper to make and stack a bunch of them then say, a regular old apartment complex. Also, "cheap housing for poor people" has a bad habit of becoming "projects".
c22 3y ago
How would you get to the doors?
interdrift 3y ago
there is absolutely nothing wrong with the commie blocks we have in Bulgaria other than the need to fix the facade. They are extremely cheap to mass manufacture, build and also they easily can last 100 years with enough living space for everyone. This already works, it's just not done due to regulations in many countries.
CyberDildonics 3y ago
The shell of a house is not where most of the cost goes. Why would stacking spherical shells like marbles be cheap?
jillesvangurp 3y ago
This particular form factor seems inefficient. But there is quite a bit of innovation in the area of building pre-fabricated homes for refugees. These are popping up in a lot of places. Including the Ukraine recently. And of course there are also some high end options that are popular for building bespoke houses in e.g. the Scandinavian and North American markets. Basically, pre-fabricated housing is a solved problem from a technical point of view. Cheap to manufacture, easy to deploy, and pretty comfortable to live in. If you think about it, there are numerous viable ways of providing people with some form of shelter to shield them from the elements. Mostly the issue is not technical challenges but the fact that there's a lot of local push back against the deployment of any form of cheap housing projects in a lot of places. This has nothing to do with their pricing (cheap) or quality (pretty decent) but with the level of protectionism in place to guard prices of existing houses. Solving cheap housing would collapse prices. That's why you don't find trailer parks in richer parts of the US. However, they are very popular as semi-permanent slums in less rich parts and have been so for many decades. Tens of millions of people live in those actually. Just mostly not anywhere near where the housing shortages are the most urgent.

gpvos 3y ago

The most amazing type of house, and one I'd like to live in, is the Heliodome, which apparently is heated by the sun even in winter while staying cool enough in summer: https://www.heliodome.com/ https://www.heliodome.com/ .

sixstringtheory 3y ago
That's pretty cool. I imagine the parameters need to change with the latitude? Didn't seen anything about that on the site.
somedude895 3y ago
How does it stay cool in summer? Are the windows oriented in a way that winter sun gets in but summer sun doesn't?
- gpvos 3y ago
  Correct. In summer the main window façade is not in direct sunlight.
adrian_b 3y ago
I would like to live in a toroidal house, preferably raised above the ground by standing on some pillars, and with trees around, both outside the torus and inside the torus. I am lucky that even if I live in an apartment (a.k.a. flat), when I look through the windows I do not see some other ugly building, but I see the crowns of several beautiful trees, which are close, at a distance of about 5 meters. I am working most of the time being seated in front of a computer, but whenever I have to think about something more difficult I prefer to stand up and walk, while thinking. Doing this in an apartment, even when choosing the longest possible path, requires frequent direction reversals for walking. In a toroidal house, it would be possible to walk for any duration, without paying attention to the environment while thinking and without being distracted by the necessity of doing reversals.

Jiro 3y ago

Furniture is rectangular with corners. Boxes are rectangular shaped. Windows that are rectangular can slide in ways that circular windows cannot. Look at the picture in the article showing a couch and chair at angles to one another. This is a stupid idea.

upon_drumhead 3y ago
You can make rounded furniture. I actually have a quarter circle couch in front of the fire place. it's nice.
- 6th 3y ago
  Round furniture being nice =/= round rooms being nice. And a round room might be a cylinder with a flat curved edge at least. A spherical room/wall is the absolute worst use of space case possible.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Round furniture exists too, like the fabled round table. Curved windows could totally slide along a spherical surface.
mc32 3y ago
Yep. It would make sense only if these were to be anchored below sea level or somewhere beyond the stratosphere, else it’s not space efficient.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- 6th 3y ago
  Sure, spheres acting as a pressure vessel make 100% sense. Even conceding they may be the only sensible choice for that environment - they are still not space efficient.
tempaway15755 3y ago
But its good to try something different, at least once, somewhere in the world? People live in yurts, and they are circular. Perhaps it was good to explore the idea that living spaces didn't need to be rectangles. Perhaps it feels different? Perhaps living in a space that doesn't easily fit rectangular furniture would lead to some new insights?

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago

I live under an angled roof which is slightly annoying but I cannot imagine what it must be like not having straight walls

pengaru 3y ago
Surely you mean angled ceiling?
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago
  Both? The ceiling is angled because of the roof. I guess some houses might not have rooms that high so one doesn't mean the other.
  - pengaru 3y ago
    Most roofs are angled, I wouldn't say the same of ceilings. Here in the US anyways, it's pretty common to just have dead space separating the sloped roof from the interior horizontal ceiling. Maybe you have a usable attic in that space, but it's kind of unusual for it to be living space IME. It's wasteful, but it establishes a precedent of wasting interior volume. The distinction matters in this discussion specifically since you can take the same approach to the dead space in the walls of a spherical exterior if you prefer a boxy interior living space... Put shelves and other infra/amenities in that area to achieve cosmetically orthonormal interior walls. There's some advantage to a curved structural exterior... large flat surfaces aren't great structurally. But they don't have to result in curved interior walls. Just like our angled roofs don't always result in angled interior ceilings.

picometer 3y ago

A sphere’s minimized surface area per volume also means that temperature control is more efficient: there’s less surface area for heat to escape in the winter, or enter in the summer. So for the same (or similar) wall material cost & ongoing energy cost, you get more interior space. Then the question is: can you actually use the extra interior space?

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Yeah, the wastage of the "average" home bugs me, but there's got to be lower hanging fruit than somehow living in spheres. Even just a cylinder would give you some great improvement (and it would be mostly rectangles, with normal windows), but even better than that? On the other side of the wall I am typing this at, there's a heat engine removing heat from a freezing box, but then it has to drop all that heat into the space I am sitting in . . so then another box has to try and get the heat outside. Oh! But wait! There's another box that HEATS UP - a lot! - so I can put food in it. Another one dries my clothes, and makes hot water, both of them putting heat back in. Jiminy beeswax. Not even going to touch the way water is brutally wasted in the typical setup.
- alanlammiman 3y ago
  I have often thought of this. It may turn out that those inefficiencies are fairly small - the devices themselves small, well insulated, etc. One would have to do the maths. But I imagine that cooling all the air with AC (and letting it leak whenever you open a door or window) and then heating an outdoor pool is huge
- throw9away6 3y ago
  I think we should start with dc power. Each house should have a 12/24 volt low voltage high efficiency power supply to eliminate the need for individual converters everywhere
  - marssaxman 3y ago
    48V would be a better choice. It is increasingly popular for off-grid applications because the higher voltage reduces heat and power loss, letting you use thinner wires, which are both cheaper and easier to install; but 48V is still considered "low voltage" and does not require any special safety precautions.

vram22 3y ago

Check out earthships: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship I have seen one, and met and talked briefly with the guy who built it. He is Alex Leeor, a British guy living in the mountains in Tamil Nadu, South India. He built one there with local help. It is perched almost on the edge of a cliff that drops steeply 7000 feet (about 2000 meters) down to the plains. There are multiple articles about him, which you can google. Edit: It was round, but not spherical in shape. Round in the horizontal dimension. With a lot of glass windows. He said the overall design made it warm in winter and cool in summer, although summers are hardly hot there.

govg 3y ago
I was initially confused by the comment that it doesn't get hot in summers - Tamil Nadu during summers is one of the hotter regions of India. The actual earthship / community is built in Kodaikanal, a famous "hill station" in the Nilgiri mountain range.
- vram22 3y ago
  >I was initially confused by the comment that it doesn't get hot in summers NP. I did say (knowing both that state (TN) and specific area well) "mountains" (not "hills") and "7000 feet". That makes it a much more cold place than the plains of TN. You need a winter jacket in winter, and your ears and hands (and whole body, really) freeze like shit if exposed (not comparable to the northern areas of earth, like EU and US, but still). Moderate to heavy rain in many months of the year, including winter, makes it colder. The place gets both the south-west and north-east monsoons, since it is high up and near the Kerala border, so escapes the rain-shadow effect that the rest of Tamil Nadu has. Minimum temperatures are in the range of 10 to 5 degrees Celsius or lower, indoors, and you sometimes see frost on grass outside. >The actual earthship / community is built in Kodaikanal, a famous "hill station" in the Nilgiri mountain range. A few kilometers outside Kodaikanal, only reachable by jeep or motorbike. And it is in the Palani Hills, not the Nilgiris. Both are part of the long Western Ghats mountain range, which extends down the western side of India, near the coast, from Maharashtra or Gujarat, down to Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
3y ago

throwme_123 3y ago

Better pictures: https://unusualplaces.org/bolwoningen-neighborhood-of-spherical-homes/ https://unusualplaces.org/bolwoningen-neighborhood-of-spheri...

Freak_NL 3y ago
Better user experience too. No mailing list sign-up beg-screen after three seconds.

nologic01 3y ago

The very first houses (stone age) where circular rather than square. So you could say that our architectural fashions are going around in circles

causality0 3y ago

Spherical house are good for locations with extreme wind conditions. Other than that they foolishly waste half their potential square footage of floor for the sake of aesthetics.

SirLJ 3y ago

Those are the best developed by architect and CalEarth founder Nader Khalili https://www.calearth.org/intro-superadobe https://www.calearth.org/intro-superadobe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthbag_construction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthbag_construction

thiscatis 3y ago

This website is as unusable as the spherical houses the article is about.

zevv 3y ago
amen.

CrazyPyroLinux 3y ago

I like the monolithic.com approach better - Not totally spherical, but a lot more options.

impissedoff1 3y ago

[flagged]

tzs 3y ago

I once worked in an office that was in a two story geodesic dome. It was kind of annoying on the second floor due to the slope of the outside wall making it hard to find a good use for space on that side of my office. More details here [1]. That said, those spherical homes look like they might work out OK. As I said about domes in the comment linked in the prior paragraph, > They probably work better as houses than office buildings, because the designer of a house can better anticipate what each room will be used for and arrange it so that things you'd naturally want against outside walls are things that would be OK with the curves. > An office building has a lot more variability from tenant to tenant, making it more likely that the tenant's things won't work well against the curved walls. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29301072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29301072

jacquesm 3y ago

Interesting! There are also the Cube houses by Dutch architect Piet Blom: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuswoningen_(Rotterdam) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuswoningen_(Rotterdam)

dvh 3y ago

Imagine your window breaks, you try to diy cut round glass pane and it keeps breaking...

WeylandYutani 3y ago

This architecture is just a hobby for a rich country. The vast majority of the population dreams of Dutch suburbia. According to the media the housing market tanked. I sold a 1970s 200k family home with garden on the first day. A house from a time when they were still building homes for the lower middle class.

hansc 3y ago

Nice, these are located less than a mile from my home and nicely situated along a stream, just like a bunch of mushrooms in a forest. They have been around for decades and were an innovation project from an alternative living cooperation in the city (Den Bosch). I think they are now mostly occupied by students and 30-.