Interesting.<p>I'd be all up for a low-cost, IKEA style house (in my locale the cost of the building is a small fraction of total cost of property in a city anyway). If nothing else, construction work is such a gamble, the variance of outcome of quality is enormous.<p>The thing that hampers it, as far as I know, is generally quality constraints. Pre-fab houses just tend to be low quality. This is in part self-selecting, there is a stigma to a "pre-fab" or "portable" home, but in part also that somehow building prefab houses to a good standard is hard. I don't just mean colour and feel, but just basics like "not leaking".<p>The staple of Eastern European bleak suburbs, the high-rise apartment buildings, were all built out of prefab components. These were built in central locations ("home factories"), transported and only assembled on site. These were certainly not created equal, and customer satisfaction wasn't high on the requirements list, but they generally suffered from this kind of problems (leaks, poor quality plumbing / gas connections etc.).<p>I wonder how this company would tackle these problems.
This sounds like trying to make a big deal out of something that Europe has been doing for years.<p>Sure, these are "cement like" instead of wooden but otherwise nothing that interesting here. It is common to overskin these pre-made houses with render or bricks if needed for more protection but most wooden framed houses don't get blown down by high winds in Europe, mostly roofs getting blown off from buildings where they weren't tied down properly.
The technology required to build energy efficient housing has been available for many decades at least. What is missing is the political will to require energy efficiency.
The first world housing issues are more about land and zoning than construction, but for energy efficiency and climate change and just cheapness, mass produced
factory built homes are a great solution.<p>McDonalds, Starbucks etc. seem to have moved to this model, new standalone premises go together like Lego.
>As you might have heard, we’re in the midst of a housing crisis ...<p>That has relatively little to do with building homes. More to do with zoning and nimbyism.<p>You can get a home in area where there are no jobs or the commute distances are too long.
Why build factories in the Dakotas? Wouldn't it be better to build them somewhere more accessible to the east coast when shipping something so big and heavy?<p>Also, Vantem's website seems to be having issues. It would have been interesting to see what these houses can look like other than the "modern" gray thing in the picture, as well as get more technical info.
Couldn't find <i>anything</i> on Vantem's site describing how plumbing and electrical go in; it was not possible to see on timelapse either. They had an elevated floor, so maybe the utilities went in there? But it's also used for multi-story, so it can't <i>just</i> be that...<p>With concrete blocks you would cut a chase in the wall, but the primary rigidity seems to come from the panels on either side, so that seems like it might be a bad idea...
Theres a tinyhome builder making using ESP 8x16 tinyhomes for 20k. They call them The Incred-i-box. They justed started to offer solar setup in the tongue box as an option to make it offgrid worthy.<p><a href="https://www.incredibletinyhomes.com/ith-incred-i-box-style-esp-tiny-home/" rel="nofollow">https://www.incredibletinyhomes.com/ith-incred-i-box-style-e...</a><p>They built a large assembly line building so they could start creating many homes per week. Been fun to watch them get their factory built, and each assembly section going, floor, electrical, plumbing, walls, roof, etc.<p>The youtube channel has been pretty good on showing the progress.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lGuApI4fYw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lGuApI4fYw</a>
> The panels were designed as a replacement for brick and cement, which are expensive, difficult to make<p>How much is it? At our place (developing country, heavily depends on imports of everything, but private entrepreneurs somehow mastered the production of "difficult to make" bricks) a traditional 2 floor, 200 sq. meters (~2153 sq. feet) brick and mortar building with reinforced concrete belts (seismically active zone here), insulation, finishing & decoration will cost:<p>1. $80k if you don't want to take part. You give the money, the architect asks what you want and does the rest.<p>2. $40k if you hire workers for every stage of building yourself.<p>3. $20k if you can also make some work yourself, delegating only qualified work.<p>Is this technology going to be cheaper? Or is it like those California kennels for homeless $40k apiece?
I'll wait to see what Construction Physics[1] says about it. He has covered the prefab space in detail.<p>[1] <a href="https://constructionphysics.substack.com/" rel="nofollow">https://constructionphysics.substack.com/</a>
Prefab wall panels are a thing, but I'm not sure I've seen ICF-form style ones. I have to imagine this should be able to do pretty much what ICF construction does but faster. On the other hand, I imagine transporting the forms is cheaper than transporting actual panels.
1 the I cant believe is not cement sure looks like cement on a 360p video they provide. Guess BGates ventures cant afford a good camera.<p>2 walls are soo thin, 2-3x too thin for European standards. Maybe they target hot climates?
I'd rather look into innovative formwork construction and cast-in- place concrete (pr slap labels here: concrete-like, energy-efficient green, zero-emission, insulated).
Sadly, I get a CPanel error page visiting the website of the profiled company.<p>I'm mulling over building a little office detached from my house so this stuff is super interesting to me.
I can recall when architecture made to last was something to be proud of. Nightmare waiting to happen if you live in a Tornado, Earthquake, Hurricane etc zone