3 ms·

Self-Sustaining Buildings

8 points by ph0rque 18y ago

tjic 18y ago
Transportation costs are incredibly cheap. For example, the "eat locally" folks are anti-scientific, and don't acknowledge/realize that you can move a cargo container full of food across an ocean of 1% of the cost of raising the food. Moving sewage is even cheaper, by several orders of magnitude. Shit rolls downhill. These two things being the case, why would we POSSIBLY want to put housing, waste processing, and agricultural land all in the same place? The New Urbanists tell us that density is the key to interesting places, and they get all upset about folks in the suburbs daring to want and have large yards and swing sets, when they could live more densely and share parks. So, if YARDS are a waste of precious urban land, suddenly we're supposed to import FARMS into our residential areas? This is a crack addled idea from start to finish.
- DannoHung 18y ago
  Yards are vacant space consuming resources and producing nothing. We can all acknowledge that importing water from Fiji is silly though, right?
- kiddo 18y ago
  Transportation costs my be cheap now, but consider what would happen if fuel prices rose or the cost of containing the pollution produced through the transportation increased. New Urbanists aren't saying yards are a waste of precious urban land. They don't really even say urban land is "precious". They mostly just think living in closer proximity to others is good for the economy, the environment and people's social lives.
swombat 18y ago
It takes more than a 5-minute 3D diagram and a passing thought to design a building. "I have this interesting idea for a start-up. People give it money, and it spends some of that money on costs, and overall makes money, according to the formula: profit = revenue - cost I'm sure we could make that work" ^-- this is roughly the level of implementation of the idea in this blog post at the moment.
- derefr 18y ago
  Sure, but if you're using the idea of this start-up to introduce capitalism to an Amazon tribe, maybe that's the level of abstraction you need, at first. For people who have never considered a self-sustainable living space, this level of abstraction is a good place to start before moving on to specific examples. It's like reading a dictionary entry before an encyclopedia one.
ph0rque 18y ago
Wow, tough crowd today... this blog post wasn't meant to be a comprehensive design, just a high-level idea I wanted to capture/jot down. The subcomponents aren't original, so I didn't spend too much time explaining them. The urban greenhouse component is better known as vertical farming (http://www.verticalfarm.com/ http://www.verticalfarm.com/); much analysis has been done on the idea, including advantages to having farms in the city, near the populace. The waste-treatment idea is better known as living machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_machines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_machines), also widely analyzed and implemented.
GHFigs 18y ago
We have a word for this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

8 points by ph0rque 18y ago

tjic 18y ago

Transportation costs are incredibly cheap. For example, the "eat locally" folks are anti-scientific, and don't acknowledge/realize that you can move a cargo container full of food across an ocean of 1% of the cost of raising the food. Moving sewage is even cheaper, by several orders of magnitude. Shit rolls downhill. These two things being the case, why would we POSSIBLY want to put housing, waste processing, and agricultural land all in the same place? The New Urbanists tell us that density is the key to interesting places, and they get all upset about folks in the suburbs daring to want and have large yards and swing sets, when they could live more densely and share parks. So, if YARDS are a waste of precious urban land, suddenly we're supposed to import FARMS into our residential areas? This is a crack addled idea from start to finish.

DannoHung 18y ago
Yards are vacant space consuming resources and producing nothing. We can all acknowledge that importing water from Fiji is silly though, right?
kiddo 18y ago
Transportation costs my be cheap now, but consider what would happen if fuel prices rose or the cost of containing the pollution produced through the transportation increased. New Urbanists aren't saying yards are a waste of precious urban land. They don't really even say urban land is "precious". They mostly just think living in closer proximity to others is good for the economy, the environment and people's social lives.

swombat 18y ago

It takes more than a 5-minute 3D diagram and a passing thought to design a building. "I have this interesting idea for a start-up. People give it money, and it spends some of that money on costs, and overall makes money, according to the formula: profit = revenue - cost I'm sure we could make that work" ^-- this is roughly the level of implementation of the idea in this blog post at the moment.

derefr 18y ago
Sure, but if you're using the idea of this start-up to introduce capitalism to an Amazon tribe, maybe that's the level of abstraction you need, at first. For people who have never considered a self-sustainable living space, this level of abstraction is a good place to start before moving on to specific examples. It's like reading a dictionary entry before an encyclopedia one.

ph0rque 18y ago

Wow, tough crowd today... this blog post wasn't meant to be a comprehensive design, just a high-level idea I wanted to capture/jot down. The subcomponents aren't original, so I didn't spend too much time explaining them. The urban greenhouse component is better known as vertical farming (http://www.verticalfarm.com/ http://www.verticalfarm.com/); much analysis has been done on the idea, including advantages to having farms in the city, near the populace. The waste-treatment idea is better known as living machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_machines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_machines), also widely analyzed and implemented.

GHFigs 18y ago

We have a word for this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology