Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses

Note that the walls and interior floors are equally thick and as insulated as the roof. It is not a sensible or efficient use of materials, given how the physics of heat work.<p>It is great, however, if your approach to construction was formed by playing Minecraft.

I love the idea of this. My wife and I watch a decent amount of Grand Designs are there are a few houses that experiment with the concept of cnc-cut block based assembly. I intend to build something like it someday (in the US, so it might be harder to find a manufacturer).<p>One thing that strikes me as at odds is that they tout their reusability as well as the customization aspect of the block. It’s cnc cut so they’re super accurate, but how would you reuse it in a different project? It’s like saying you can reuse puzzle pieces in a different puzzle. The shape may match but they won’t fit together.

If you live in California, you can potentially build one of these as an ADU (Accessory Dwelling Unit). Local agencies are required to approve an ADU within 60 days, and recent state bills (AB 976, 434, 1033, and 2221) make it easier to build&#x2F;sell&#x2F;rent ADUs on your property. You&#x27;ll have to wait until 2025 before every locality is forced to have a process for pre-approved ADU plans (at which time you could potentially have an &quot;open-source permit&quot; to construct one of these very quickly).

Hopefully the roof of Wikihouse doesn&#x27;t get any Wikileaks.

Hm I’d like a house where everything is as easy to assemble &#x2F; repair &#x2F; replace as IKEA furniture, and where you can run cables, and install builtins

There&#x27;s an episode of Grand Designs (great show) where some people build an entire house by bringing a CNC machine onsite and banging out pre-fab wall sections exactly like this and connecting them in place.<p>Here&#x27;s the full episode: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymotion.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;x6hsxwd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymotion.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;x6hsxwd</a><p>It&#x27;s pretty cool to see, but in the end it seemed like way more effort than nailing some 2x4&#x27;s together.

I&#x27;d like a better idea of what the &quot;basic, medium, high&quot; fit and finish options mean. Clicking around various links on the site didn&#x27;t seem to talk about it anywhere else besides the cost estimator.

Just learned about a Belgian company called Gablok doing something similar. One of the cool things about a Gablok house is that you can move it. The company that builds it for you can dismantle and reassemble it. For example if you live in Michigan and retire to Florida you can take your house with you!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gablok.be&#x2F;en&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gablok.be&#x2F;en&#x2F;</a><p>The video doesn&#x27;t clearly show they deal with electrical and plumbing. They actually have slots built in where you can run the utilities. Then some small boards are screwed into the blocks and drywall is nailed into them.

Where I live people build houses mostly with brics and mortar, autoclaved aerated concrete or concrete. Wikihouse system won&#x27;t help.

They need to sell on the longevity and robustness of these homes. If the houses are crap, this is going to be an incredibly wasteful project no matter how many environmentally friendly indicators they point to.

Just like yesterday [1] I’m confused by that name: what’s the &quot;wiki&quot; part in Wikihouse? Anybody can modify your house?<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38915999">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38915999</a>

Seems pretty expensive to make everything out of pure plywood. Does anyone have a sense of how cost compares to 2x4&#x27;s plus drywall? I assume either construction method will need exterior cladding and insulation.

I like their cost calculator on the website. I have never seen such a simple interactive method to determine the cost of a house to be built. My experience with building a house is that either you get a very rough estimate by someone which is often wrong or you have to pay an architect or engineer to come up with a more detailed and more accurate cost estimate.<p>Apart from that I noticed that building my current home with their method would cost about 20% more than building it the oldschool way. That might be a problem for their business model.

There is a pretty cool project for a complete open source village: -<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opensourceecology.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.opensourceecology.org&#x2F;</a><p>Supposed to be all the machines you need to supply a whole village, made from low cost basic materials.<p>I think it’s from 2014 not sure if it’s still being worked on or if anyone actually has used the blueprints in a real world scenario.

The most expensive part of house is the land it’s built on. Remote work alleviates that. No surprise that landowners in large cities push for a return to office work, along with workers that have no desire for a life of their own.<p>Nonetheless wood houses are frowned upon in Europe. Except in the UK where housing is low quality overall anyway.

Only for subtropical climate? is this also suitable for tropics? like 0-15 degree N and S? How about termite?

Great idea, to design a house nowadays means you need to do a lot more mandatory calculations. For example a wooden beam between insulation has to be calculated, where a few years ago we could pretend they did not exist. Builders are now switching to some sort of engineered beams (two square beams connected with board). To offer this work in the public domain could reduce the cost significantly.<p>However, watching the video on the front page makes me wonder what code they are following. I can&#x27;t imagine there is any country where you still can build with such low ceilings. It makes me wonder if you actually then save money using this approach when you still have to pay the full fees for your architect?

Building technologies do need to evolve, but this ain&#x27;t it.<p>Starting with the tagline &quot;Simple, beautiful zero-carbon building for everyone&quot;. WHAT? - Claiming that timber building products are carbon neutral is dubious, just talking about the timber alone, before any value added lifecycle. They should put some pictures of the Spruce forests their plywood comes from and let people decide for themselves. - Simple? Not really. They don&#x27;t say much at all about what happens after you get walls and a roof. Who is going to plumb and wire, and how? How simple will it be to find a tradesperson who wants to actually figure out from scratch how to pull cable through your ikea home and put their license on the line? - Beautiful? Meh.. ask again in 30 years and see if people don&#x27;t say it looks like it was built in 2023.<p>And then just all the stuff that doesn&#x27;t matter. The problem of making a building isn&#x27;t putting up walls and a roof. That&#x27;s usually the part that goes the fastest. Who cares that it&#x27;s &#x27;precision engineered&#x27; (spoiler alert, if it&#x27;s OSB, theres no precision) and that it has 3x more compressive strength than stick frame. When was the last time you thought to yourself &#x27;I wish I could put a car on my roof&#x27;?

This is some kind of Cory Doctorow dream come true

I remember meeting one of the founders to see if this could help with a project I had 5 years back. Was a great concept and I wanted to buy into it but the costs were high versus a custom build which would give me a better product for my needs. Glad they are still going but not that many projects on their site.

Can I build a 6-story, multi-family, point access block apartment building with this system?

People build much worse houses now, from aesthetic perspective. No matter where I go, I usually prefer to live in a city center because that&#x27;s where the most pleasing houses are. We forgot how to build nice houses. Sad.

At the county level, you can download plans of pre-fab homes and sheds that were already approved&#x2F;reviewed by an engineer... I got thousands of shed plans for free when I built mine

The walls are the least expensive part of building a house.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iso-bella.nl&#x2F;containerwoning&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iso-bella.nl&#x2F;containerwoning&#x2F;</a>

They should have start with standard sizes and publish their standards for all sub components ( and to matching existing pipe and electrical standards)

Houses aren&#x27;t expensive because of the houses, they&#x27;re expensive because of the spaces where you build the houses.

Not sure if I would trust a UK initiative for housing. My experience of the build quality here isn&#x27;t great

The best form of open source houses are free and complete framing plans with material and cut lists and detailed instructions that don&#x27;t assume the builder is a professional. Add some guides on exterior and interior finishing, basic plumbing and electrical and walk-throughs on how to obtain permitting and being your own general contractor and you&#x27;d have something genuinely useful for everyone.

This looks cool, I&#x27;m just wondering if something like this would pass a building inspection in the US?

This costs about twice as much as an existing modular home even if you count the labor as free.

Why has this post dominated the top page for the last 18 hours? Reeks of astroturfing to me.

One thing caught my attention. Cost: £2,540 - £2,950 per m².

Cease building dwellings using unsealed wood.

I hope the site uses metric

Big Lincoln logs. Cool.

This is fantastic!

I like the ethos but to me it&#x27;s pointed in entirely the wrong direction. Why not just make standard sections of 2x4 or 2x6 framing? Start standardizing window sealing details? Literally anything that will actually get some use? Instead we get opensource plywood boxes?<p>Using plywood for all of the structural components means if you get a leak, which all houses get, you are in danger of much more significant damage than lumber framing. And with this system you still need to do all the normal things to build a house (get a designer, route plumbing, electrical, get a civil engineer, install all that stuff, etc.) just instead of framing you have custom blocks you need made.<p>I just don&#x27;t think these make sense.

Hi, architect here. Wikihouse has been chasing many of the dragons we&#x27;ve been collectively chasing in AEC[0] for... a long time. Seriously I wish I had time to reply to every single comment here because there are a lot of excellent critiques (not just of WH). It shows what kind of communication problem we have in AEC that even the critiques that HAVE good answers within their weelhouse aren&#x27;t adequately addressed by WH.<p>In the US nothing is EVER going to beat light gauge wood framing on cost. That&#x27;s why you see even large (but not tall) complexes build from it.[1] It&#x27;s been reduced to the 0th degree of expense because of the profit motive. That said, this is only when the &quot;unskilled&quot; labor of rough framing is cheap. But this doesn&#x27;t necessarily hold for other economies.<p>The early WH work seemed cartoonishly idealistic (they were literal kids so I don&#x27;t really fault them). But that foundation never changed and a lot of what they built on that has seemed like solution in search of a problem. Especially when you consider you don&#x27;t even have to leave the UK to find a better model for self-build[2] and automated modular small scale construction is a really active space right now.<p>Other competitors[3] actually have online configurators that work well to arrange these kinds of elements. But they&#x27;ve realized that&#x27;s where the value is and are holding their systems closer so they can maintain quality and monetize the expertise they brought to bear.<p>And yet other systems have been using industrial scale and logics to great effect for a long, long time.[4]<p>TBH the &quot;open source&quot; aspect is really kind of a gimmick. Their designs are useless without the overall system and the system is useless without some way of arranging it all properly. Plus - what are you going to do - buy and learn to run a mill, work your own ply with an extremely slow machine, assemble it in this (ridiculously) finicky way, source and install the insulation properly yourself, and still be confronted with the nontrivial tasks of... everything that&#x27;s not structure and insulation? Not to mention approvals. In the end you&#x27;d need an architect to do all this for you. And... doesn&#x27;t that defeat the point? It&#x27;s very generous that they&#x27;ve assembled all the guides they have but there are cheaper and more flexible construction systems (light gauge wood, block, SIPS, ICF, etc) that are much more mature, non-proprietary (except ICF), much better documented, and much easier to train a helper or two for assistance.<p>I really do appreciate what they&#x27;re -trying- to do. But again, I just think it&#x27;s a solution in search of a problem.<p>[0] Architecture, Engineering, and Construction [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lamag.com&#x2F;urbandevelopment&#x2F;geoff-palmers-faux-italian-renaissance" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lamag.com&#x2F;urbandevelopment&#x2F;geoff-palmers-faux-italia...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;architecturefoundation.org.uk&#x2F;programme&#x2F;2015&#x2F;walter%E2%80%99s-way-the-anarchist-housing-estate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;architecturefoundation.org.uk&#x2F;programme&#x2F;2015&#x2F;walter%...</a> [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;automatedarchitecture.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;automatedarchitecture.io&#x2F;</a> [4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ithouseinc.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ithouseinc.com&#x2F;</a>

So I&#x27;m the hexayurt guy -- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hexayurt.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hexayurt.com</a> and <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;appropedia.org&#x2F;hexayurt" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;appropedia.org&#x2F;hexayurt</a><p>We&#x27;ve been at this FOSS housing thing for 20 years, aiming for upgradable shelters for climate refugees rather than middle class housing. I&#x27;ve known the wikihouse folks from before the beginning and (frankly) I&#x27;ve always found the to be predatory jerks. Wikihouse came out of a potential collaboration between that team and the hexayurt project. We spent quite a bit of time discussing doing an FOSS house together, then they cut me out of the deal and six months later launched wikihouse.<p>Never have I been more grateful that somebody ignored every bit of advice that I gave them. Nothing of our thinking is in this bloody thing. Fortunately.<p>The core problem with wikihouse is that *it is designed to get grant funding* not to be buildable. The architecture group behind it is a grant farming operation with a rumoured tendency to implementing ideas that are very close to (but not exact copies of) things which are around in the ecosystem. So they took a good look at the hexayurt, ignored everything about it which made it practical (uses standard 4x8s, uses widely available fasteners like deck screws or aluminium tape), and then shipped something which they knew was never going to be economic to build but hit the grant funding sweet spot: CNC machines, parametric design, and so on. That&#x27;s why it looks this way.<p>Like any technology which is designed to live on grand funding practicality has never been the point. The point is that universities etc. can noodle around with it, learn from it, get some ideas tested, make a contribution, and then move on. Architecture has a constant need for things to design and things to do.<p>Architecture for Humanity used to have a web site which collected together hundreds of designs for emergency shelter and basically it was just a place for students to publish impractical designs because they had to be published <i>somewhere</i>.<p>No harm in it as long as nobody expects it to be <i>buildable</i> and fortunately that mistake was not made: theory stayed theory.<p>Hexayurt Project has never been incorporated, and never taken grant funding. Once or twice people have paid me as an engineer to work on specific projects, but I make a living as a tech CEO. Many thousands of builders for Burning Man, and a <i>ton</i> of genuine grass roots innovation on multiple fronts. It is, by any standards, a pretty good open source project with a lot of contributors and a lot of users.<p>What it isn&#x27;t <i>yet</i> is a refugee shelter. To turn the &quot;well proven at Burning Man&quot; design into something that can be built at scale to cushion climate refugees and other displaced people is going to require a serious investment from <i>somebody</i> in testing in a range of environments, and refining the designs particularly when it comes to flooring and variants like spraying the shelters with shotcrete to make them permanent where needed.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.appropedia.org&#x2F;Hexayurt_project&#x2F;Master_List_of_Designs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.appropedia.org&#x2F;Hexayurt_project&#x2F;Master_List_of_D...</a><p>Donor driven aid is a huge problem. Lack of testing regimes for new shelter technology is a huge problem.<p>There is a total revolution in open source architecture <i>coming</i> but nobody seems to know how best to get it started. Neither one of these projects is it.<p>Not yet. Roll on the day.

So, $1M USD for a 1200 sqft DIY house? No, thanks.

This is cool, but it&#x27;s not carbon free if you have to drive to it.<p>Also, it would be nice to see this technique for multifamily, would be a big improvement to how they build apartments in the US.

&gt; However, any modifications you make must be re-shared under the same licence. By everyone, for everyone.<p>I’m gonna have to raise the alarm at this remark. There is no reasonable license that would permit enforcing this, that anyone should dare construct a structure bound by such license on their property.<p>I am all for the idea of an open building system, but get real.