I understand the draw and see the romanticism of living like a hermit in a forest; really I do. But for some reason people delude themselves into thinking that this can scale. When you're saying 'I love nature so much, I'm going to go live right in the middle of it!', it's like saying 'I love my horse so much, I'm going to eat it tonight'. Which is fine - I eat horse meat. But don't claim you're 'loving' it in the same way normal people use the word 'love'.
But the world is a pretty big place. We don't all need these norms.
You might have a morally authoritative view on just what basic needs a human has, and certainly can justify these requirements with a human ideal forged in your own social context, but the real honest truth is, most of those ideals are arbitrary.
A lot of people can live without windows, especially if they're surrounded by nature 100% of the time, anyway. Plumbing? Who needs it if the rest of your property is set up for it - not everyone needs to live a decadent western lifestyle where running water is on demand within a few feet of your sleeping area, etc.
A lot of the world survives just fine without all of these requirements, and from that perspective this "romanticism" is less of a fantasy, and more of a "what if .. we could live simpler lives, instead of more complex ones" - and that is the real merit of articles like this. To push us outside the "glass-half-empty/-full" norms that, ultimately, a lot of us are trapped in.
("Normal people use the word 'love'": Please tell me, what is normal. Because I don't believe you have a large enough sample size, honestly, based on your professed view...)
> It has electricity and is heated with a single electric radiator and is cooled with an exhaust fan and small window sized air conditioner
But even if that is your desire, then a dome is a ridiculous way to achieve it, compared to a rectangular structure with a pitched roof, which is easier to build, more stable, is less likely to leak, will probably last longer, and gives you more efficient use of space and materials. Domes solve nothing.
To suggest that wanting to live in nature is to want to destroy it is a bit extreme. If you buy a massive piece of land, and build a house on it, you haven't ruined all of nature in your land. If you farm it, sure.
Back to the article though, I hear you in regards to "I've solved the world with this one idea" sentiment. I will suggest though, that missing from your first paragraph is any notion that people can live differently to the standard house or apartment. Some people live permanently in large rugged tents in mild climates that don't need much in the way of heating. Their showering done in creeks or lakes, their cooking done outside. Some people live permanently and happily in the back of vans, even utility vehicles.
Your complaints about the dome aren't unfounded, surely that's what most people would want so to suggest that the dome could solve the world's housing desires is obviously not correct. But it would be a more than whole and total solution for many people, even if it may be transiently.
I think the domes would make a great temporary structure for someone building a homestead though. Some people live in an RV on the property while they build up their home, which I assume is to skirt some housing regulations while they live on site.
Well no, they don't want to, but they do it anyway - in the aggregate. Look, a single person living in a forest isn't damaging it; it's when many people want to do so, and actually do it, and the infrastructure required to live such a low-density lifestyle. The equilibrium is that almost all inhabitable land had people scattered all across it, along with a few high density cities for those who rather live close to people than have lots of room. But even those want to go to resorts in 'nature' on the weekends, so they still disturb and on the larger scale destroy natural habitats.
If you really care about nature, you go live in a city, and you stay away from nature as much as possible (with the exception of some reserves that could be designated 'nature recreation' areas; I'm not saying nobody should ever be in a forest).
Of course from the individual choice point of view it's more complicated; prisoners dilemma and all. My point is - if you live in a forest, you don't like nature (or at least, you're not doing your best to protect it); you like living in nature, which is different. And it's fine, I understand - but don't pretend you're protecting natural areas by living in them because you're the only one on your 10 acres. You're contributing to the destruction of habitats, biodiversity and most other measures of 'health of natural systems'.
The Yurt seems to have been doing well, it's close to a raised dome, has replaceable modular construction, is easy to erect and move, has been tested for centuries (millennia?) in some of the harshest climate on the planet, namely the Mongolian steppe. In UK a few people use them as permanent homes.
They won't fit well in a rectangular road grid (unless you want to use the margins to provide outdoor space, eg for growing), but would pack in to a tri-/hex-grid.
Of course bugs might get in, just like a house in a Western city, seems a strange objection? Do you live in a cleanroom?
What he does have is a cool temporary structure. Maybe it can be made into a commercial product for residential outbuildings or durable camps. Maybe other people can take this design and make it their own. Maybe it’s just a concept build, without a practical application but some hobbyist potential.
Either way, it’s a pretty cool thing to build or read about someone building. The “frameless” feature that he discusses is interesting. The simplicity is interesting.
I think this was a great article, and it feels like you are more complaining about a genre of articles instead of this article in particular.
"The difference in the ability of these different structures to shelter and provide a nice place to live is dramatic."
(notice the words 'place to live')
"The frameless dome pictured above is the culmination of my experience with these structures. Three and a half years after building it I am ready to advocate it as an excellent alternative lightweight structure."
('advocating an alternative structure' - one doesn't do that about tents)
"I think this frameless dome balances many of the trade-offs of lightweight structures and arrives at an optimal structure that drastically minimizes construction complexity, time and price while maximizing livability."
(again, the reference to 'livability', and wording that suggests something more permanent than a tent, like 'structure')
These are just 3 sentences, but the entire first half makes claims that go beyond 'hey this is nice to go camping in' or 'you can sleep in your backyards for a few nights in summer in this'.
BUT that doesn't make this a terrible idea. I believe the famous Ikea flat-pack shilter[1] is the current state of the art in "emergency" (think refugee camp) shelter. This is certainly comparable.
[1] http://www.bettershelter.org/better-shelters-house-iraqi-ret...
Each of the 15 sides is around 4' long on a 20' dome so you can put square furniture against the side if it isn't over 4' long. It is a problem with long furniture. I have an 8' long counter and I drop stuff behind it all the time.
OK, that's good; a reasonable approach to leaks.
It’s all held together with bolts that bolt through all the layers. The shell of the dome is about 2 1/2 inches thick.
That's not so good. Many potential leak points. Stress concentration at the bolt holes. The plastic may tear. Nothing holding the edges together with a tight seal. Almost all the problems with geodesic domes are at the joints. The author is vague about how the joints work.
Buckminster Fuller's concept for geodesic domes was that they were to be made from factory-built components and modern materials. They were to be products of the industrial age. In a factory, parts could be made to tight tolerances and be weathertight. With modern durable materials such as aluminum and Fiberglas, the domes could have long lives. During the 1950s, many such domes were built for radar stations. There are large radomes in the Canadian north abandoned decades ago, but still standing.
Then came the era of hippie domes, which were built by hand from "natural materials". This did not end well. The author of Domebook I and II has repudiated his work, after a long history of failed structures. Trying to shingle a sphere does not work well. Nor does trying to fit a standard window into a dome. Nothing quite fits, and there are too many bad seams. All this gave geodesic domes a bad name.
The domes in this article look like the ones from Dome Village in LA, but less rugged. [1] That was an attempt to house homeless people. The Fiberglas domes of Dome Village held up fine for 13 years; the project failed for other reasons.
Link? Are you talking about Lloyd Kahn? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Kahn
Personally I think the best thing that came out of the geodesic dome movement was Steve Baer’s Zome idea from Drop City, and more importantly the Zometool construction toys, which should IMO be a standard thinking tool available in every middle school and high school math classroom. http://www.zometool.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zome
Of course, this almost certainly exists already, would raise his parts count (though assembly would probably be easier than with the bolts), and couldn't be home-made. It's also not really frameless anymore, because the channels become the frame. (Not structurally though, so this is sort of a middle ground.) I could see this as being a pre-made kit which you'd add your own panel design to.
The reason hippie domes leaked is getting the details right during construction is hard and foregoing proven practice makes it much much harder.
Like pretty much every machined building concept other than the mobile home, Fuller's ideas were unsuccessful. Mostly because building weathertight buildings is a solved problem. The solutions are just not evenly distributed.
There are competing systems, such as Behlen.[2] ("Good iron. GREAT experience"). All these systems bolt together on site, usually mounted to a concrete slab. Such buildings are dull, boring, weathertight, easy to erect, and durable. They're rarely seen in cities, so many people don't know about them. But get thirty miles outside a big city and they're everywhere.
[1] http://butlermfg.com/en/butler_systems_details [2] http://behlenbuildingsystems.com/resources/photo-gallery/agr...
Yes, but these two things are connected. Cheap, fixed, weathertight buildings are a solved problem. But as soon as you fix a building to the ground, you enshrine a rent seeking opportunity, and that space will then be subject to market rates, which will make the resource unevenly distributed.
If we had cheap, mobile, weathertight buildings (and another of other mobile amenities around them) then you could decouple the living space from the market locked to the location, and you could get something closer to even distribution.
Sill at 2100$ worth of materials it does not need to last very long and frankly he can toss a tarp over it if there is rain in the forecast.
It is literally made of insulation. You didn't read the article.
- Is it livable in temperate zone (-20°C in winter)?
- Is that single sheet plastic window? How does it insulate in winter?
- Is it dark inside?
- Can plants survive inside?
- Building codes usually have minimal volume for bedrooms, does it meet those standards/recommendations?
- What's 2x4?
- What's blueboard?
- Post some closeup pictures of doors, windows, top and base from the outside
- How do doors open?
- Why the working table have so massive bottom? Is it just "art"? Seems like it's unnecessarily heavy.
- Wouldn't mass-produced triangles be simpler/cheaper?
Also previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6355488
There's no way you could live in this at -20 degrees without heating.
See: Agonising death
Here[3] is some very outdated documentation on the first version. We initially tried to connect the walls via bungees - didn't work out at all as you can imagine. The following year we added the velcro system after I found this amazing post [2] on a hexayurt mailing-list, describing someone's experiments with materials. Without that person's efforts and time spent on research I could have never finished this one!
Of course there's already a bunch improvements lined up for a v2 - hopefully next year :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexayurt
[2] https://groups.google.com/d/msg/hexayurt/2QRUl3txk-8/v_A0DDc...
Except sheet material is sold in rectangles, so you end up with a huge pile of offcuts.
As a child I was entranced by geodesic domes in the late 1970s (part of the hangover of the utopian back-to-the-land movement), and I read up on them extensively over the following decades.
I've also done a bit of construction.
Domes are wildly impractical for almost every purpose.
Yes, the hold more volume per surface area. That's great for a liquified natural gas tank. It's not so good for humans who live on flat surfaces.
They are very hard to plumb and wire.
They generate tons of waste.
They are hard to maintain.
Roofs and walls have different purposes (structural support vs shedding preciptation) and different materials are best for each.
The list goes on.
I could write a 500 page book on why domes are almost always the wrong answer, but the shortest proof I have is: if they were so great, they would have caught on.
They use inflatable forms, flexible basalt fiber composite rebar or basalt reinforcement mesh, spray foam, and gunnite (sprayed concrete).
As far as I am aware, even those still have moisture problems.
As mentioned by parent, the article includes cutting patterns for rectangular sheets. All the edges and corners are waste. Every edge is a cut. If you make a dome shell out of panels, you have an incredibly high amount of joints and cracks for that volume, and every one of them could move water or air through the wall. The article itself mentioned that polypropylene breaks down in UV. Maintenance.
So I guess the intrepid geodesic dome builder should sew a big balloon out of pentagonal and hexagonal nylon panels, inflate it with one of those bounce-castle blowers, and spray it with gunnite. Then saw through the top of the shell and add a stick-built cupola for ventilation control and roof pitch. You lose the portability, but if you really need that, most people make do with a tent. Those come in dome shapes, if you really need your living space to be round.
I beg to differ! Yurts as used in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan often have several layers, at least one of them being water-proof. The innermost layer is often wool, which offers excellent insulation and can be dried quickly when it gets wet from prespiration, offering some sort of climate control. Mongolians experience ultra harsh continental climate, going from -40°C in winter to +40°C in the summer, and they have used yurts for centuries.
Source: stayed in yurts in Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan for a total of several weeks on a motorcycle tour, went to a yurt market to check out the building materials in Ulaan Baatar.
The whole idea of geodesic domes is that the trianglular sides distribute load more efficiently. In this case, there's nothing that could be described as load bearing. It's a semi-rigid tent that will disintegrate in a strong breeze.
https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=cdg%20terminal%202e
Note that this design requires impeccable material strength characteristics. Otherwise it will collapse, as 2E did in 2004:
https://failures.wikispaces.com/Terminal+2E+at+Charles+de+Ga...
Does anyone have recommendations on a cheap moisture tolerant flooring? I am thinking of using Marine-Grade plywood as a subfloor on my current project.
I watched a video of the talk where this dome is mentioned last week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-kj2qwJa_E&t=9m16s
I was hoping there'd be some more info about the way he lives in general. Seeing from the outside picture he also seems to grow his own food.
(sorry, I don't have time for a more detailed post just now).
There was another with Jacques Pepin, that I am unable to find, where explains the concept better.
i would have 3d printed (or laser cut) something first.