32 ms·

Thomas Edison's Concrete Houses

107 points by adrian_mrd 3y ago

clashmoore 3y ago
The concrete houses reminded me of the George Eastman (founder of Eastman Kodak camera company) [estate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eastman_Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eastman_Museum) which is now a museum in Rochester. Built in 1905 of reinforced concrete. Worth a visit.
xnx 3y ago
Concrete is probably underutilized as a building material for homes in the US. Though there are high carbon costs for cement production, there are a lot of benefits to concrete: very strong against wind, very fire resistant, impervious to most pests, sound proofing, air-tight, good insulator when sandwiched with foam. https://www.iconbuild.com/ https://www.iconbuild.com/ isn't yet 3D printing concrete homes at scale, but they have a small neighborhood of some really good looking homes going up in Texas.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > there are a lot of benefits to One disadvantage: much harder to do changes / remodelling down the road. Cinder block may be better for later flexibility than poured concrete: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_block https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_block
  - samtho 3y ago
    Most of the time, rebar and concrete is placed and poured in the vertical column created by laying the block effectively turning into a vertical slab. It’s so much easier to build a wood-frame dummy wall on the inside to house utilities.
- jschveibinz 3y ago
  Unfortunately, concrete production is a pollution problem. Cement industry accounts for about 8% of CO2 emissions https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cement-industry-co2-emissions-climate-change-brimstone/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cement-industry-co2-emissions-c...
  - scythe 3y ago
    This number keeps growing because all of the other emissions are finally going down. I memorized it as five percent a decade ago. It's a point source of carbon, which is the best case for capture. Some of the carbon could be made into plastic (particularly polyoxymethylene would be easy) although you might find that demand is saturated well before you have used up all of the capture. Bigger problem is that due to the extreme temperatures required (the essential crystal structure, called alite, can only form above 1250 C) the facilities are large, expensive to construct and difficult to modify. Because the reaction produces a dust plume, they are often sited in less regulated jurisdictions, which compounds the problem. But capturing the carbon and capturing the dust likely require some common components. This is arguably an opportunity for Latin America, which has historically had low local cement production due to tighter environmental regulations vs Asia. Its road and rail infrastructure lags as a result. (The durability of PC is also highly desirable in tropical environments!) But a proper implementation of clean cement is not yet well understood, and economic incentives for cleaner imports are merely theoretical at this point.
    - little_goat_boy 3y ago
      Cement is so c02 intensive largely because the chemical reaction which occurs release a large amount of c02. From what I remember the energy use for the furnace is 10% compared to 90% from the fundamental chemistry. This is what I remember from working for a start up that was helping make low carbon cement, the numbers could be wrong, but it's more complicated than just the energy to reach the high temps.
      - b112 3y ago
        We need to bioengineer vines or something, actually bacteria would be best, to grow insanely fast. Then grow them while the slab cures. Then after grind them up as mulch abd fertilizer. We can outfit the bacteria with a natural inhibitor. Maybe a lack of lysine. Yeah. That'll work.
        WorldMaker 3y ago
- boringg 3y ago
  High carbon cost of cement for sure (until we find viable new materials to bring that down which companies are actively investing in). That said a concrete home, if properly built, lowers the lifetime costs of CO2e as you have better heating and the product life is exceptionally longer!
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Too many contractors can’t get concrete right. I see so many new builds with cracks and spall damage. So many basement or garage slabs with a few big cracks in them. Stick frame is more fool proof for sure
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    The problem is too many contractors are crooks.
- Animats 3y ago
  Most of the world lives in concrete buildings. There's a problem of where to put the infrastructure. If you lay pipes inside concrete, they're really hard to maintain. So, often plumbing, electrical, and HVAC just punch through the walls to outside equipment, plumbing, and conduit. Look at small low-cost housing in Asia. Mini-split air conditioners and pipes all over the exterior.
  - bloomingeek 3y ago
    <So, often plumbing, electrical, and HVAC just punch through the walls to outside equipment, plumbing, and conduit.> That's true for commercial bldgs, but almost all home dwellings in America with slab foundations have the plumbing and some hvac lines inside the slab. Repairing water and sewer lines in these homes is very expensive.
    - xp84 3y ago
      If I understand correctly from my neighbors’ experiences, they just cut up your walls and put new pipes in there and in the attic when the time comes that you inevitably develop a slab leak. it seems like this is probably a case where it has plenty of advantages for the first owner/1st 30 years (pipes neatly out of sight on the first floor) and when it eventually fails, it will be someone else’s problem besides the original builder or even original owner in most cases. Maybe this has changed in recent years though with the switch from copper to PEX, idk if they can just put that in the slab.
      - teruakohatu 3y ago
        In New Zealand PVC pipes are used in concrete slabs for sewage, which in theory should last something like 75+ years. Water, I think, is still put in the dry wall cavity.
      - bloomingeek 3y ago
        That's correct for water lines, and is expensive. But drain and sewer lines are in the slab. Just imagine the cost of removing your tile flooring, then cutting up the slab, removing the usually copper drain line (on older homes), laying new PVC, back filling with sand or gravel, THEN recovering the floors. Carpet would be a little cheaper.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Wood is also very strong against wind if engineered correct. Both need something else to air seal as air will go through. Yes it is fire resistant, but unless your insulation and other building material is also fire resistant you gain nothing important: either way a fire will gut the house and need expensive work to repair. Wood is also a good insulator when paired with insulation. Concrete is a useful material to build with. However it isn't the miracle that many advocates claim.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- somethoughts 3y ago
  Here's a detailed walk through of the Lennar development from last month by a pretty detailed home builder/contractor: Revisiting Lennar & ICON's 3D Printed Neighborhood 6 Months Later with Matt Risinger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPTps7e9SqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPTps7e9SqY Here's one of the homes at the level of a lay person's level of knowledge: Inside a 3D Printed House That's Actually (kind of) Affordable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG7KMjV8zMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG7KMjV8zMk
  - xnx 3y ago
    That Matt Risinger video is exactly the one I watched that educated me that this process has gotten beyond the prototype stage. Great videos, but I usually watch on 2x speed because the information density is kind of low otherwise.
DWakefield 3y ago
Does anyone know where there are pictures of the interiors of these homes? I'm very curious about the concrete bath fixtures, but can't seem to find anything online that definitively shows the inside of an Edison concrete home. It's also interesting to see this in light of all the news recently about 3D printed concrete and how there are many of the same challenges now that Edison must have had to deal with then. Plumbing, electrical, insulation, and so forth all have to be incorporated into the design or tacked on afterward.
- graphe 3y ago
  Check out some urban exploration videos https://youtu.be/-knB658OpC0 https://youtu.be/-knB658OpC0
throw0101c 3y ago
Insulating concrete form (ICF) is popular in some quarters: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulating_concrete_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulating_concrete_form Instead of setting up formwork [0] with rebar, pouring and curing concrete, and then spending time (=money) tearing things down, the formwork is an insulating foam that is left in place. One consideration is that you then have to put some paneling in front of it (on either/both interior and exterior faces). Depending on the aesthetic you wish to have, you can have smooth concrete exposed or have textures, e.g., board-formed: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1JLy8ZSH2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1JLy8ZSH2Q * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=688MeG_RKRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=688MeG_RKRM [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formwork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formwork
- tastyfreeze 3y ago
  I built a 100'x60' 2 story building using these blocks with just me at age 20 and a 16 year old kid. Spent the days building lego brick wall and laying and tying rebar. Cement day was mostly a rest day watching the pump truck fill the section of wall. This is a fantastic construction method in many climates. The biggest downside of raw concrete structures is the lack of insulation.
  - tomcam 3y ago
    Amazing! How did you learn this at age 20? Now I feel like a pathetic underachiever
    - tastyfreeze 3y ago
      On this job. Pretty much read the instructions and off to the races. The GC that hired me stuck around for a week or so to make sure everything was going smooth then he was off keeping the supplies flowing and would just check in every few days. The ease of building with ICF is a huge draw. It takes zero experience with concrete or building forms.
      - tomcam 3y ago
glimshe 3y ago
You can still custom-build a concrete house today and put regular siding so it looks just like any other house. You can't tell it's concrete from the outside, but the house is a lot tougher - especially against hurricanes.
samtho 3y ago
Prior to tech, I primary worked in construction during and right out of high school. Cast-in-place concrete dwellings have never caught on despite it making a tremendous amount of economic sense. While it has a foothold in the market for specific applications (basements, retaining walls, commercial buildings, etc), a concrete house form in-a-box poses some logistical challenges and human ones. First, the vision here was to be able to drop a form and creates a single pour/unibody structure (like injection molded plastic). That is very difficult to do and most concrete work is done in multiple stages for this reason. The main challenge is the creation a form that is sufficiently supported on the inside to create the “void” of the living space. You’re having, instead, to pour a slab, wait a sufficiently long time for it to cure enough to support weight, and do the walls and ceiling next. The other logistical issue is internal reinforcement, which is what rebar is for. Concrete, as a building material, can really only resist compressive loads, which makes unaided concrete highly unsuitable for applications where there is a void underneath (in our home, for example, under a window frame, under a ceiling, or in infrastructure, as an overpass) However, by using iron-reinforced concrete, we can turn shear forces into compressive and by using pretensioned concrete (stretching of reinforcement cables prior to concrete pour), we turn tension into compression as those stretched steel wires want to return back to their original shape, it’s like an internal lasso keeping it together. The last logistical challenge is installation of all utilities, which means in/under slab and wall piping (water supply lines, in floor heating, DWV, etc), electrical with conduit setup going to masonry boxes, outlets, switches, light fixtures. The point here is, setting up for a concrete pour is not as simple as erecting forms. When the concrete pour is cured into a structure, it’s now a very inflexible material to work with and any wall penetration needs to be checked against blueprints, new electrical need to be run on the surface, leak repairs need to be done with very specialized equipment and a tunnel created under the dwelling, etc. The other main problem is that people don’t want complete concrete homes. Without in-slab heating, it is a cold, hard, unforgiving material that allows for zero flexibility and repairs are a nightmare. Just like software, homes should be built with maintenance in mind because that’s the normal state in which it is worked on. Plus, it feels like a prison. At least it won’t burn down? I have a lot of gripes with slab-on-grade construction[0] for this reason, and every dwelling I’ve built has had at least a crawl space, often a basement where everything is serviceable. The basement is usually CMU (concrete masonry units, aka cinder block), precast concrete (slabs trucked in), or, rarely, ICF (insulated concrete forms, basically in-place formwork with concrete in the middle of two pieces of foam insulation like an ice cream sandwich[1]). I think there are some things we can learn from commercial buildings where you can have concrete skeletons[2][3] but large cut-outs where you can build walls. Inside the concrete pillars are PVC channels that let you thread wiring and plumbing, and other things through without having to do a concrete penetration. To built the house part, you effective put up wood frame walls in the voids or an aluminum-framed window installation (like a storefront assembly). Side note: If you have ever wondered why you see basements in colder climates (and conversely more slab-on-grade in warmer ones) is because the bottom of your construction need to be situated under the frost line to prevent shifting caused by the ground freezing. So if you have to dig 4ft down anyway to reach that point, maybe just dig out a 5ft hole and install a basement instead, then your can have your home’s first/ground floor about 3-5 feet elevated. Slabs made to handle the shifting of ground due to freezing, liquefaction, or unstable building surfaces are called “rafts” and are not used very often compared to other methods. [0]: https://anchorfoundationrepair.net/blog/slab-foundation-how-made/ https://anchorfoundationrepair.net/blog/slab-foundation-how-... [1]: https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2017/10/30114505/Amvic-ICF-process-1x12.jpg https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2017/10/3011... [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_frame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_frame [3]: https://www.understandconstruction.com/concrete-frame-structures.html https://www.understandconstruction.com/concrete-frame-struct...
carabiner 3y ago
Anyone reminded of Tesla's gigacasting? Pop out an entire car frame as a single part from molten steel, versus 400 separate parts:https://www.reuters.com/technology/gigacasting-20-tesla-reinvents-carmaking-with-quiet-breakthrough-2023-09-14/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/gigacasting-20-tesla-rein.... Wonder if we could do this with houses now.
- intrasight 3y ago
  Perhaps cast from AL a set of standard panels which can then be bolted together and have shotcrete and insulation be sprayed against them. The AL would remain on the exterior. All kinds of cool designs possible. They could do all that in a factory and ship out modules.
- bick_nyers 3y ago
  If it can't fit down a highway or requires a crane to install you're not going to save much money when compared to labor is my understanding.
rmason 3y ago
A non-profit just created a 3D printed concrete home in Detroit. It cost over $230,000 although they expect in volume the cost would drop. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2022/10/18/detroit-nonprofit-kicks-off-3d-printed-home-build-project/69571636007/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2022/10/18/detroi... You can buy a pretty nice house in a nice neighborhood in Detroit for under $150,000 and a decent one for $75,000. Both far larger than 1,000 square feet and featuring two car garages as well. So the only market I can see for these homes is government subsidized projects.
- TrainedMonkey 3y ago
  First cars vs horses would be an apt comparison here. Automation had been slowly displacing human labor... the question is when, not if.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- fragmede 3y ago
  I can buy a shed from Home Depot for <$1,000 which is $229k less than that concrete home in Detroit if all we want to compare is price. So the question is how good are those $150k and $50k houses? If they're anything like the rest of American housing stock, they have utter shit for sound insulation, andmoft aren't much better for heat/cold insulation. Not that concrete is any good for thermal insulation, but sound insulation is a very underrate but very critical aspect for anything resembling dense housing.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > You can buy a pretty nice house in a nice neighborhood in Detroit for under $150,000 and a decent one for $75,000. That’s probably under cost of construction, though, right? Maybe this is just way cheaper in the US than here, somehow, but current all-in cost of construction in Ireland for a one-off house is on the order of 2500eur/sqm, so about 250k eur for a house this size.
jccooper 3y ago
Notable that the Edison houses aren't form-cast like we do today, which is just structural and rather rough; the concrete was meant to be the finished wall both interior and exterior, including the roof and all interior and exterior ornament. The forms were nickel-plated cast iron. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/edisons-system-of-concrete-houses/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/edisons-system-of...
- rasz 3y ago
  so hot in summer, cold in winter, best of both worlds :)
  - valdiorn 3y ago
    Uh, quite the opposite. Thermal mass is a thing. How houses are built in Iceland: https://youtu.be/7RuTizbnH4s?si=JxRjqzVFy4NLg3wa https://youtu.be/7RuTizbnH4s?si=JxRjqzVFy4NLg3wa (Spoiler; we cast them from 1 foot thick concrete slabs)
    - schiffern 3y ago
      "Thermal mass" and thick concrete isn't what keeps that house at a comfortable temperature from summer to winter. It's comfortable for the same reason as any other house: because it has thick insulation both outside and inside the concrete. See @4:30 in your linked video.[0] If you like, sit down and do the math for how thick concrete you'd need in order to store heat for 6+ months and average out the summer/winter temperature change. It's not 1 foot thick, it's more like 30 feet thick!! In general, the effect of thermal mass tends to be strongly overrated by people who aren't experts in building science.[1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RuTizbnH4s&t=270 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RuTizbnH4s&t=270 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130509032945/http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/all-about-thermal-mass https://web.archive.org/web/20130509032945/http://www.greenb...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
elzbardico 3y ago
Even outside the US, concrete houses are not very common outside specific architectural styles like brutalism. What is very common are reinforced-concrete structural elements, but the walls themselves are made of bricks and mortar, or even concrete blocks, but rarely cast concrete.
clnq 3y ago
The purchasing power equivalent of $1,200 in 1990 is about $40,000 today.
- clnq 3y ago
  I mean… 1900. Noticed it too late for an edit.
adolph 3y ago
Edison's Patents Regarding Concrete Houses: Process of constructing concrete buildings: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1219272A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US1219272A/en Apparatus for the production of concrete structures: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1326854A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US1326854A/en The first was cited by John Zachary Delorean in a patent titled "Building construction." [0] DeLorean managed the development of a number of vehicles throughout his career, including the Pontiac GTO muscle car, the Pontiac Firebird, Pontiac Grand Prix, Chevrolet Cosworth Vega, and the DMC DeLorean sports car, which was featured in the 1985 film Back to the Future. He was the youngest division chief in General Motors history, then left to start the DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) in 1973. [1] 0. https://patents.google.com/patent/US3778953A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US3778953A/en 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeLorean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeLorean
graphe 3y ago
Menlo park was also made of Edison concrete. https://www.menloparkmuseum.org https://www.menloparkmuseum.org it looks like it's in great condition, so is a certain road on the east coast. Forgot the Edison concrete contracts, but the old stadium was also made of Edison concrete. I always wondered about it's makeup, it's an excellent concrete.

107 points by adrian_mrd 3y ago

The concrete houses reminded me of the George Eastman (founder of Eastman Kodak camera company) [estate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eastman_Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eastman_Museum) which is now a museum in Rochester. Built in 1905 of reinforced concrete. Worth a visit.

xnx 3y ago

Concrete is probably underutilized as a building material for homes in the US. Though there are high carbon costs for cement production, there are a lot of benefits to concrete: very strong against wind, very fire resistant, impervious to most pests, sound proofing, air-tight, good insulator when sandwiched with foam. https://www.iconbuild.com/ https://www.iconbuild.com/ isn't yet 3D printing concrete homes at scale, but they have a small neighborhood of some really good looking homes going up in Texas.

throw0101c 3y ago
> there are a lot of benefits to One disadvantage: much harder to do changes / remodelling down the road. Cinder block may be better for later flexibility than poured concrete: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_block https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_block
- samtho 3y ago
  Most of the time, rebar and concrete is placed and poured in the vertical column created by laying the block effectively turning into a vertical slab. It’s so much easier to build a wood-frame dummy wall on the inside to house utilities.
jschveibinz 3y ago
Unfortunately, concrete production is a pollution problem. Cement industry accounts for about 8% of CO2 emissions https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cement-industry-co2-emissions-climate-change-brimstone/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cement-industry-co2-emissions-c...
- scythe 3y ago
  This number keeps growing because all of the other emissions are finally going down. I memorized it as five percent a decade ago. It's a point source of carbon, which is the best case for capture. Some of the carbon could be made into plastic (particularly polyoxymethylene would be easy) although you might find that demand is saturated well before you have used up all of the capture. Bigger problem is that due to the extreme temperatures required (the essential crystal structure, called alite, can only form above 1250 C) the facilities are large, expensive to construct and difficult to modify. Because the reaction produces a dust plume, they are often sited in less regulated jurisdictions, which compounds the problem. But capturing the carbon and capturing the dust likely require some common components. This is arguably an opportunity for Latin America, which has historically had low local cement production due to tighter environmental regulations vs Asia. Its road and rail infrastructure lags as a result. (The durability of PC is also highly desirable in tropical environments!) But a proper implementation of clean cement is not yet well understood, and economic incentives for cleaner imports are merely theoretical at this point.
  - little_goat_boy 3y ago
    Cement is so c02 intensive largely because the chemical reaction which occurs release a large amount of c02. From what I remember the energy use for the furnace is 10% compared to 90% from the fundamental chemistry. This is what I remember from working for a start up that was helping make low carbon cement, the numbers could be wrong, but it's more complicated than just the energy to reach the high temps.
    - b112 3y ago
      We need to bioengineer vines or something, actually bacteria would be best, to grow insanely fast. Then grow them while the slab cures. Then after grind them up as mulch abd fertilizer. We can outfit the bacteria with a natural inhibitor. Maybe a lack of lysine. Yeah. That'll work.
      - WorldMaker 3y ago
boringg 3y ago
High carbon cost of cement for sure (until we find viable new materials to bring that down which companies are actively investing in). That said a concrete home, if properly built, lowers the lifetime costs of CO2e as you have better heating and the product life is exceptionally longer!
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Too many contractors can’t get concrete right. I see so many new builds with cracks and spall damage. So many basement or garage slabs with a few big cracks in them. Stick frame is more fool proof for sure
- MisterTea 3y ago
  The problem is too many contractors are crooks.
Animats 3y ago
Most of the world lives in concrete buildings. There's a problem of where to put the infrastructure. If you lay pipes inside concrete, they're really hard to maintain. So, often plumbing, electrical, and HVAC just punch through the walls to outside equipment, plumbing, and conduit. Look at small low-cost housing in Asia. Mini-split air conditioners and pipes all over the exterior.
- bloomingeek 3y ago
  <So, often plumbing, electrical, and HVAC just punch through the walls to outside equipment, plumbing, and conduit.> That's true for commercial bldgs, but almost all home dwellings in America with slab foundations have the plumbing and some hvac lines inside the slab. Repairing water and sewer lines in these homes is very expensive.
  - xp84 3y ago
    If I understand correctly from my neighbors’ experiences, they just cut up your walls and put new pipes in there and in the attic when the time comes that you inevitably develop a slab leak. it seems like this is probably a case where it has plenty of advantages for the first owner/1st 30 years (pipes neatly out of sight on the first floor) and when it eventually fails, it will be someone else’s problem besides the original builder or even original owner in most cases. Maybe this has changed in recent years though with the switch from copper to PEX, idk if they can just put that in the slab.
    - teruakohatu 3y ago
      In New Zealand PVC pipes are used in concrete slabs for sewage, which in theory should last something like 75+ years. Water, I think, is still put in the dry wall cavity.
    - bloomingeek 3y ago
      That's correct for water lines, and is expensive. But drain and sewer lines are in the slab. Just imagine the cost of removing your tile flooring, then cutting up the slab, removing the usually copper drain line (on older homes), laying new PVC, back filling with sand or gravel, THEN recovering the floors. Carpet would be a little cheaper.
bluGill 3y ago
Wood is also very strong against wind if engineered correct. Both need something else to air seal as air will go through. Yes it is fire resistant, but unless your insulation and other building material is also fire resistant you gain nothing important: either way a fire will gut the house and need expensive work to repair. Wood is also a good insulator when paired with insulation. Concrete is a useful material to build with. However it isn't the miracle that many advocates claim.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
somethoughts 3y ago
Here's a detailed walk through of the Lennar development from last month by a pretty detailed home builder/contractor: Revisiting Lennar & ICON's 3D Printed Neighborhood 6 Months Later with Matt Risinger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPTps7e9SqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPTps7e9SqY Here's one of the homes at the level of a lay person's level of knowledge: Inside a 3D Printed House That's Actually (kind of) Affordable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG7KMjV8zMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG7KMjV8zMk
- xnx 3y ago
  That Matt Risinger video is exactly the one I watched that educated me that this process has gotten beyond the prototype stage. Great videos, but I usually watch on 2x speed because the information density is kind of low otherwise.

DWakefield 3y ago

Does anyone know where there are pictures of the interiors of these homes? I'm very curious about the concrete bath fixtures, but can't seem to find anything online that definitively shows the inside of an Edison concrete home. It's also interesting to see this in light of all the news recently about 3D printed concrete and how there are many of the same challenges now that Edison must have had to deal with then. Plumbing, electrical, insulation, and so forth all have to be incorporated into the design or tacked on afterward.

graphe 3y ago
Check out some urban exploration videos https://youtu.be/-knB658OpC0 https://youtu.be/-knB658OpC0

throw0101c 3y ago

Insulating concrete form (ICF) is popular in some quarters: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulating_concrete_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulating_concrete_form Instead of setting up formwork [0] with rebar, pouring and curing concrete, and then spending time (=money) tearing things down, the formwork is an insulating foam that is left in place. One consideration is that you then have to put some paneling in front of it (on either/both interior and exterior faces). Depending on the aesthetic you wish to have, you can have smooth concrete exposed or have textures, e.g., board-formed: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1JLy8ZSH2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1JLy8ZSH2Q * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=688MeG_RKRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=688MeG_RKRM [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formwork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formwork

tastyfreeze 3y ago
I built a 100'x60' 2 story building using these blocks with just me at age 20 and a 16 year old kid. Spent the days building lego brick wall and laying and tying rebar. Cement day was mostly a rest day watching the pump truck fill the section of wall. This is a fantastic construction method in many climates. The biggest downside of raw concrete structures is the lack of insulation.
- tomcam 3y ago
  Amazing! How did you learn this at age 20? Now I feel like a pathetic underachiever
  - tastyfreeze 3y ago
    On this job. Pretty much read the instructions and off to the races. The GC that hired me stuck around for a week or so to make sure everything was going smooth then he was off keeping the supplies flowing and would just check in every few days. The ease of building with ICF is a huge draw. It takes zero experience with concrete or building forms.
    - tomcam 3y ago

glimshe 3y ago

You can still custom-build a concrete house today and put regular siding so it looks just like any other house. You can't tell it's concrete from the outside, but the house is a lot tougher - especially against hurricanes.

samtho 3y ago

Prior to tech, I primary worked in construction during and right out of high school. Cast-in-place concrete dwellings have never caught on despite it making a tremendous amount of economic sense. While it has a foothold in the market for specific applications (basements, retaining walls, commercial buildings, etc), a concrete house form in-a-box poses some logistical challenges and human ones. First, the vision here was to be able to drop a form and creates a single pour/unibody structure (like injection molded plastic). That is very difficult to do and most concrete work is done in multiple stages for this reason. The main challenge is the creation a form that is sufficiently supported on the inside to create the “void” of the living space. You’re having, instead, to pour a slab, wait a sufficiently long time for it to cure enough to support weight, and do the walls and ceiling next. The other logistical issue is internal reinforcement, which is what rebar is for. Concrete, as a building material, can really only resist compressive loads, which makes unaided concrete highly unsuitable for applications where there is a void underneath (in our home, for example, under a window frame, under a ceiling, or in infrastructure, as an overpass) However, by using iron-reinforced concrete, we can turn shear forces into compressive and by using pretensioned concrete (stretching of reinforcement cables prior to concrete pour), we turn tension into compression as those stretched steel wires want to return back to their original shape, it’s like an internal lasso keeping it together. The last logistical challenge is installation of all utilities, which means in/under slab and wall piping (water supply lines, in floor heating, DWV, etc), electrical with conduit setup going to masonry boxes, outlets, switches, light fixtures. The point here is, setting up for a concrete pour is not as simple as erecting forms. When the concrete pour is cured into a structure, it’s now a very inflexible material to work with and any wall penetration needs to be checked against blueprints, new electrical need to be run on the surface, leak repairs need to be done with very specialized equipment and a tunnel created under the dwelling, etc. The other main problem is that people don’t want complete concrete homes. Without in-slab heating, it is a cold, hard, unforgiving material that allows for zero flexibility and repairs are a nightmare. Just like software, homes should be built with maintenance in mind because that’s the normal state in which it is worked on. Plus, it feels like a prison. At least it won’t burn down? I have a lot of gripes with slab-on-grade construction[0] for this reason, and every dwelling I’ve built has had at least a crawl space, often a basement where everything is serviceable. The basement is usually CMU (concrete masonry units, aka cinder block), precast concrete (slabs trucked in), or, rarely, ICF (insulated concrete forms, basically in-place formwork with concrete in the middle of two pieces of foam insulation like an ice cream sandwich[1]). I think there are some things we can learn from commercial buildings where you can have concrete skeletons[2][3] but large cut-outs where you can build walls. Inside the concrete pillars are PVC channels that let you thread wiring and plumbing, and other things through without having to do a concrete penetration. To built the house part, you effective put up wood frame walls in the voids or an aluminum-framed window installation (like a storefront assembly). Side note: If you have ever wondered why you see basements in colder climates (and conversely more slab-on-grade in warmer ones) is because the bottom of your construction need to be situated under the frost line to prevent shifting caused by the ground freezing. So if you have to dig 4ft down anyway to reach that point, maybe just dig out a 5ft hole and install a basement instead, then your can have your home’s first/ground floor about 3-5 feet elevated. Slabs made to handle the shifting of ground due to freezing, liquefaction, or unstable building surfaces are called “rafts” and are not used very often compared to other methods. [0]: https://anchorfoundationrepair.net/blog/slab-foundation-how-made/ https://anchorfoundationrepair.net/blog/slab-foundation-how-... [1]: https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2017/10/30114505/Amvic-ICF-process-1x12.jpg https://images.finehomebuilding.com/app/uploads/2017/10/3011... [2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_frame https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_frame [3]: https://www.understandconstruction.com/concrete-frame-structures.html https://www.understandconstruction.com/concrete-frame-struct...

carabiner 3y ago

Anyone reminded of Tesla's gigacasting? Pop out an entire car frame as a single part from molten steel, versus 400 separate parts:https://www.reuters.com/technology/gigacasting-20-tesla-reinvents-carmaking-with-quiet-breakthrough-2023-09-14/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/gigacasting-20-tesla-rein.... Wonder if we could do this with houses now.

intrasight 3y ago
Perhaps cast from AL a set of standard panels which can then be bolted together and have shotcrete and insulation be sprayed against them. The AL would remain on the exterior. All kinds of cool designs possible. They could do all that in a factory and ship out modules.
bick_nyers 3y ago
If it can't fit down a highway or requires a crane to install you're not going to save much money when compared to labor is my understanding.

rmason 3y ago

A non-profit just created a 3D printed concrete home in Detroit. It cost over $230,000 although they expect in volume the cost would drop. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2022/10/18/detroit-nonprofit-kicks-off-3d-printed-home-build-project/69571636007/ https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2022/10/18/detroi... You can buy a pretty nice house in a nice neighborhood in Detroit for under $150,000 and a decent one for $75,000. Both far larger than 1,000 square feet and featuring two car garages as well. So the only market I can see for these homes is government subsidized projects.

TrainedMonkey 3y ago
First cars vs horses would be an apt comparison here. Automation had been slowly displacing human labor... the question is when, not if.
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fragmede 3y ago
I can buy a shed from Home Depot for <$1,000 which is $229k less than that concrete home in Detroit if all we want to compare is price. So the question is how good are those $150k and $50k houses? If they're anything like the rest of American housing stock, they have utter shit for sound insulation, andmoft aren't much better for heat/cold insulation. Not that concrete is any good for thermal insulation, but sound insulation is a very underrate but very critical aspect for anything resembling dense housing.
rsynnott 3y ago
> You can buy a pretty nice house in a nice neighborhood in Detroit for under $150,000 and a decent one for $75,000. That’s probably under cost of construction, though, right? Maybe this is just way cheaper in the US than here, somehow, but current all-in cost of construction in Ireland for a one-off house is on the order of 2500eur/sqm, so about 250k eur for a house this size.

jccooper 3y ago

Notable that the Edison houses aren't form-cast like we do today, which is just structural and rather rough; the concrete was meant to be the finished wall both interior and exterior, including the roof and all interior and exterior ornament. The forms were nickel-plated cast iron. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/edisons-system-of-concrete-houses/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/edisons-system-of...

rasz 3y ago
so hot in summer, cold in winter, best of both worlds :)
- valdiorn 3y ago
  Uh, quite the opposite. Thermal mass is a thing. How houses are built in Iceland: https://youtu.be/7RuTizbnH4s?si=JxRjqzVFy4NLg3wa https://youtu.be/7RuTizbnH4s?si=JxRjqzVFy4NLg3wa (Spoiler; we cast them from 1 foot thick concrete slabs)
  - schiffern 3y ago
    "Thermal mass" and thick concrete isn't what keeps that house at a comfortable temperature from summer to winter. It's comfortable for the same reason as any other house: because it has thick insulation both outside and inside the concrete. See @4:30 in your linked video.[0] If you like, sit down and do the math for how thick concrete you'd need in order to store heat for 6+ months and average out the summer/winter temperature change. It's not 1 foot thick, it's more like 30 feet thick!! In general, the effect of thermal mass tends to be strongly overrated by people who aren't experts in building science.[1] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RuTizbnH4s&t=270 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RuTizbnH4s&t=270 [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130509032945/http://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/blogs/dept/musings/all-about-thermal-mass https://web.archive.org/web/20130509032945/http://www.greenb...

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elzbardico 3y ago

Even outside the US, concrete houses are not very common outside specific architectural styles like brutalism. What is very common are reinforced-concrete structural elements, but the walls themselves are made of bricks and mortar, or even concrete blocks, but rarely cast concrete.

clnq 3y ago

The purchasing power equivalent of $1,200 in 1990 is about $40,000 today.

clnq 3y ago
I mean… 1900. Noticed it too late for an edit.

adolph 3y ago

Edison's Patents Regarding Concrete Houses: Process of constructing concrete buildings: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1219272A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US1219272A/en Apparatus for the production of concrete structures: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1326854A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US1326854A/en The first was cited by John Zachary Delorean in a patent titled "Building construction." [0] DeLorean managed the development of a number of vehicles throughout his career, including the Pontiac GTO muscle car, the Pontiac Firebird, Pontiac Grand Prix, Chevrolet Cosworth Vega, and the DMC DeLorean sports car, which was featured in the 1985 film Back to the Future. He was the youngest division chief in General Motors history, then left to start the DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) in 1973. [1] 0. https://patents.google.com/patent/US3778953A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US3778953A/en 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeLorean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_DeLorean

graphe 3y ago

Menlo park was also made of Edison concrete. https://www.menloparkmuseum.org https://www.menloparkmuseum.org it looks like it's in great condition, so is a certain road on the east coast. Forgot the Edison concrete contracts, but the old stadium was also made of Edison concrete. I always wondered about it's makeup, it's an excellent concrete.