There have been many variations on building houses with prefab forms, going all the way back to Edison. Works fine, but the result is a concrete box. The shell is not the big cost item in homes.<p>If you want a small, low-cost box structure, there are companies that will sell you one. Concrete.[1] Metal.[2] Steel frame with wood siding.[3]<p>[1] <a href="https://precastbuildings.com" rel="nofollow">https://precastbuildings.com</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.butlermfg.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.butlermfg.com/</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.homedepot.com/p/Rose-Cottage-2-Beds-443-3-sq-ft-Tiny-Small-Home-Steel-Frame-Building-Kit-ADU-Cabin-Guest-House-Home-RC2B443/320746690" rel="nofollow">https://www.homedepot.com/p/Rose-Cottage-2-Beds-443-3-sq-ft-...</a>
The most expensive bit in a building is the land it sits on. The denser the cluster of people the more expensive the land becomes. People cluster around jobs. The more the jobs get distributed geographically the less people need to cluster and the more affordable housing becomes.<p>Remote work is the way to solve the housing crisis. There can be smaller regional clusters of people working in shared offices or small offices but there’s no real need for cramming people in offices in densely populated cities.<p>Free range chicken and cattle farms have minimum space requirements, yet human farms require people to sit in overcrowded spaces at least 8 hours a day every day usually limited to the space of a seat and a desk.
In what way is concrete a sustainable building material? It's a huge carbon emitter, a poor insulator, concrete production is devastating to natural habitats turned into sand quarries, etc. Plant-based construction materials, e.g. hemp, seem to be vastly superior on every ecological consideration.<p>Plus, an unreinforced concrete dome has to be one of the inherently least population dense structures, and density potential is probably as important a consideration in sustainability as actual construction techniques.<p>Edit: not necessarily a dome, but also not able to safely scale the structure very high with this technique without losing the only purported advantage, the low labor cost.
Not quite the same, but made me think of <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binishell" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binishell</a>, which is also interesting.
The structural frame is easy. Stick frame, CLT, SIPs already exist and are better than this basically everything except a blockwork structure already takes less than a week. Insulation, airtightness and services integration is hard. Services takes way longer than the frame.
This is fairly common with styrofoam.<p><a href="https://www.concretecontractornc.com/a-house-built-with-styrofoam-and-concrete-icf-insulated-concrete-forms/" rel="nofollow">https://www.concretecontractornc.com/a-house-built-with-styr...</a>
Sounds like someone watched too much Barbapapas as a kid:<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/621986.Barbapapa_s_New_House" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/621986.Barbapapa_s_New_H...</a>
Is concrete actually a good building material for homes? It doesn't seem like it'd be insulating, and you're definitely not getting internal plumbing/wiring. And concrete is actively bad for the environment. It all feels like the shipping container home -- seems great at a glance, but doesn't really pan out to be lived in.<p>Ikea style flatpacked prefabs still seems like a vastly better option to me.
Here are two more pictures:
<a href="https://newatlas.com/good-thinking/ifff-construction-inflatable-concrete-buildings/#gallery:1" rel="nofollow">https://newatlas.com/good-thinking/ifff-construction-inflata...</a><p>But without reinforcement, this is only a toy. But I find it interesting nonetheless.
Monolithic Dome has been doing this for years. Precast concrete vaults are made very efficiently and can be used for this purpose with much better quality control. Neither are popular solutions.<p>Housing construction is pretty cheap. The materials are mass produced on thin margins and in the US we’ve insourced the cheapest labor available on the continent to put it together. If you’re really on a budget, you can get a pre-manufactured mobile home for very little. Even living in Soviet style concrete multi-family housing, like a human factory farm, is actually an option for most of us if we’re to move. People seem to avoid these choices when they have the option though.<p>I find it very conspicuous that in the commentary around this issue, finance and the market distortions they create never seem to get any blame.
This reminds me of an emergency shelter I saw on Natgeo years ago [1].<p>Difference is that they produced a canvas containing everything needed for the concrete, only requires to add water and blow it up.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/Vb1pdvvoVoQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Vb1pdvvoVoQ</a>
It seems like a ton of these prefab projects show up on HN, but does anyone know of any that produce houses/structures that actually… look nice? It seems like everything I’ve seen on here have all the aesthetics of a shipping container. (Or, to be more on the nose, a concrete box).
I'm not sure how this is an improvement compared to ICFs which look like hollow Lego blocks you put together & then fill with concrete.<p>For anyone interested in building materials, ICF & SIP seem to be the most interesting methods to me.
Hmmm, so I'm aware that a significant difficulty in normal concrete construction is ensuring that all the concrete gets everywhere it needs to go - and that's with relatively direct access a lot of the time.<p>I'm also not entirely clear what the saving is here - you still have to get concrete from somewhere to the construction site, to somewhere that presumably already has some local material that could be use instead?<p>Also if it's just making a box, that's not the problem - people have already have shelter. Where things break down are access to clean water, food, and similar. But I guess those don't sound sexy and so don't get funding.
> Perhaps a more accurate description would be “houses built using giant house-shaped balloon walls that get cement pumped into them.”<p>Surely it would be better to call these injection moulded homes?
> reinforcing elements like rebar and tension cables pre-installed inside the forms eventually.<p>Without these you have a weak shell not a liveable structure. Concrete doesn't have tensile strength for shear and compressive loads.<p>I watch a new building go up nearby. It was 4-5 days of welding rebar and pouring concrete took 4-5 hours.
Sounded like quite a pain when Robert Downey Jr did it: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/t-magazine/robert-downey-jr-malibu-home-binishell.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/t-magazine/robert-downey-...</a>
What good is more housing without more schools, new parks, wider roads, more public infrastructure, etc? Net net it becomes a step-backwards for the group when just adding more housing alone<p>Startups like this are extremely guilty of offloading massive externals costs on the communities they sell to