> I like to point out that very few house builders use agile methodologies to build a home.
Home construction often has milestones that are fairly comparable: 1) competition of the structural components, 2) drying in, 3) utilities, 3) drywall and Paint, and 4) Finishing.
Each of these are phases where they could theoretically stop. There are times in history and places in the present where people live in structures that don’t have windows and doors, or without utilities, etc.
However I would agree that they’re not marketed as viable until they’re close to finished.
> I genuinely wonder if an actual house designed by carpenters for carpenters wouldn’t be better? Maybe not more attractive, but better built?
Maybe if they really over-build it, but I don't think carpenters know how to calculate stuff like structural load requirements. I know the building code have some rules of thumb, but I kinda doubt those cover all the situations you'd need to design a home (e.g. how strong does this wall need to be based on all the stuff above supported by it).
> If I had an unlimited budget and was aiming for >1000 years I would pour the piles to bedrock with stainless rebar inside fly-ash concrete and top those pilings with plate connectors into which you could socket large wooden columns (perhaps 8x8) and build the structure with large wooden members connected with steel connectors and column caps, etc.
Are there any existing buildings constructed that way that have stood for >1000 years?
If not, my approach would be to copy an existing building that has stood for >1000 years in a region that has had several of the same kind of natural disasters that happen at the place I'm going to be building.
They can be, and there's lots of modern construction techniques that are really good (search term "building science").
One big problem is that a lot of stuff is still built to "minimum code" which just isn't that great. On top of that, sloppy construction work can significantly undermine what is done. In my own house I've fixed several simple things, like missing insulation around vents and holes cut too big (or created by a hammer, rather than cutting).
Here's a good walkthrough of a house under construction showing lots of problems typical to any subdivision (non-custom) build: https://youtu.be/OmU2N_Q732A
> I’ve always found it odd that house construction is so bespoke.
I know very little about building construction but we just bought a new-built in Vienna and very little of that seems bespoke. The entire construction is largely made from standardized prefab elements (I think there are around 130 units in here).
> It saddens me that construction quality is almost irrelevant when building a new building nowadays.
Depends on where you live; houses in the Netherlands are built to high standards when it comes to things like insulation, build quality, electrification, etc.
Are houses in the US still built with 2x4's and drywall? You'd think they would move to what we have here in the Netherlands, mostly sturdy concrete blocks, insulation layer, and a pretty brickwork or brickwork-looking facade.
I mean the amount of clips I see on the youtubes of people breaking walls make me cringe. A wall should break you, not the other way around, :D
KK> I am trying to think of examples of successful future proofing. Where someone figured out what was coming and built something ready for it. Do you know any examples?
Commercial construction.
Don't try to predict the future. Reduce the structural essentials to their minimum requirements (columns, beams, trusses, pans), and make it easy to adapt the finish layer to changing preferences or use cases.
Drop ceilings, non-load bearing walls, conduits for power and signal, locate services (plumbing, HVAC, power, etc) in a centrally-located stack to minimize the horizontal runs to arbitrary locations.
I wish these ideas were more common in residential construction. Most are easy to apply, although there would be a slight bump in cost (10%?).
> This, by the way, supports an entire ecosystem of builders, architects, and suppliers who must keep up with the times and are constantly exploring new innovations in house-building.
Just add the real: Houses aren't good unless you manually choose better one. Known one is that Japanese insulation standards are still quite bad. Aluminum single glass window is still allowed to use for new building. It's horrible to use a material for insulation that used for heat sinks. This is partially due to the window manufacturer is also a big aluminum manufacturer.
> but it kind of proves the point that current construction techniques are optimized for cost
I don't think that's a fair takeaway - drywall lets you do things like insulate, run cabling, provide moisture barriers, easily change room layouts. These are all things that people want to do in their homes today that are straightforward (mostly) with drywall, and borderline impossible for a DIY'er in an older building.
> This looks like standard, low cost modern construction to me.
That's the idea, use as much standard stuff, but in a slightly different way to get a way better result, but similar enough you can use normal contractors to execute.
For example, any framer can make a 2x4 wall. But if you want to use SIPs, AAC, even insulated concrete forms... good luck finding someone in most of the country.
> author has thought a lot about materials and buildings
> but not actually built anything.
That was my impression. As soon as they started talking about unenforced concrete pilings (drilled? monopile?) to bedrock and stressed steel framing I wasn't certain I would enjoy anymore or that it was a good use of my time.
I think costs at this stage are unrealistically low "probably in the neighborhood of $1000-2000 per square foot ... (8 to 16 times as much as conventional construction)". ~$250-400 sq ft is the cost of modern labour expediated and material optimized building. They're describing stainless steel framing with what would be (what?) 316 SS in S-beam with a custom end plate? A blob of rolled 1" x 6' 316 SS is $200.
Material wise we'd look at clay, solid high-density rocks, non-ferrous metals (lead, aluminum, copper, tin), dense naturally mold resistant woods (cedar, redwood), high density with high oil content woods (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignum_vitae), and easily replaceable sacrificial surfaces, dirt with live plant, cobble rock.
Building techniques aren't going to improve with technology, we already have examples that have lasted -- we're looking at building a heap temple with ancient style water and sewers. This is either a rock temple or a log-house with highly resistant woods.
Either we aim for a light-weight footprint or we find solid rock for building on. Solid rock is the most appropriate.
Our fasteners are all based on managing gravity. Rock with concave and convex connections under gravity. Wood pegs in non-load bearing configurations. Lead sheets with crimped folded seams. Solid copper sheet trays with crimped folded seams in rock trays.
The first thought should be "what happens if I drive a truck into the side of this building 10 times?" And the answer should be "not much, you move a few things around, but there is limited stressed coupling, and things rest on top of each other." If you do substantially damage the building, all you should be doing is reassembling the pile.
I called the author out for not having built anything, and in honesty, I haven't built using these ancient approaches, so, perhaps this is a self-destructing prophecy.
We tend to one of a few extremes: a few buildings (often for show) are ultra-green and usually stuffy, others are meticulously space-optimized to maximize residency, and still others are vehemently individualist, a project (usually a house) built on a plot of land as though it were the only plot of land in the Universe. Projects in the last two categories tend to sacrifice energy efficiency because it is too expensive, in the one case because it reduces units per square inch and in the other because owner-built SFH usually optimize for a very idiosyncratic comfort/price ratio.
In the old days, construction was often managed by the army (viz. nobility), and designed at a town scale. Today, as part of a reaction to the crushing inhumanity of feudalism, we silo off our construction projects to preserve our individuality, or we "build by any means necessary" to make optimal use of what little space we haven't yet wasted. A compromise might eventually be reached.
In particular, a lot of old-school heat management relies on having some parts of a building extend high up in to the sky or down into the ground. That sort of construction is heavily regulated these days, by height zoning -- which tends to impose the same limit for a whole parcel, eradicating towers, chimneys and steeples -- and by the great deal of infrastructure underground (sewers, wires, etc). Incidentally, these regulations rule out the construction of the building we're looking at now -- you'd waste the entire "top floor" on a chimney! It would just not be cost-effective relative to a design that fills the zoning envelope with usable space.
> extremely complex and the curve to building your own is almost too ste[e]p
a lot of modern things have reach this point. You cannot possibly build your own car. You cannot possibly build your own house from scratch (too much of it require specialist knowledge, like building code etc).
>> Caution, it is easy to seriously underestimate how much work it is to build a house.
I used to work at a bike shop and thought it would be easy to build a bike from the ground up. Easy. Get a frame, fork set, and some other parts. Easy, right? I had no idea the amount of small parts one needs, including all the other minor stuff you have to buy like brake lines, headset, etc. Instead of a few week process, it became a few month process because I had to keep buying all these things I had forgotten about and didn't know I needed.
Now scale that up a house. I can't imagine the amount of things one could easily forget about on a project that scale and not realize until it was too late.
-But we can build with concrete and steel and plastics and all sorts now.
-Most people use bricks though. And people are not tearing their brick houses down to rebuild them in steel. See? Building is old fashioned, antiquated!
In fact, nobody now starts a new project in F77. There’s a lot of F77 brick code around, yes. And it still does the job it was asked to do even though it gets moved to a new district every ten years.
>There's a startup building prefabricated house using robots and cheap labor in a factory,
Not my area but various companies have been trying to do this sort of thing forever. I can remember reading stories about partially pre-manufactured modular homes decades ago and it's never panned out. It seems to be one of those ideas that makes a lot of sense on paper but people don't want it.
It's a great watch, and a good example of what I think you're referring to overall...that said it looked like an extremely hard way to build and from personal experience helping my sister build their holiday home, also not an approach I would recommend to anyone that doesn't have a very strong conviction and/or passion to see a self build through.
> Is anyone building stuff like this today?
can it even be done while satisfying modern building codes and energy efficiency requirements?
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