Seems pretty expensive to make everything out of pure plywood. Does anyone have a sense of how cost compares to 2x4's plus drywall? I assume either construction method will need exterior cladding and insulation.
Seems pretty expensive to make everything out of pure plywood. Does anyone have a sense of how cost compares to 2x4's plus drywall? I assume either construction method will need exterior cladding and insulation.
I like the ethos but to me it'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?
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.
I just don't think these make sense.
It's a flawed solution based on a misunderstanding of how houses are actually built/designed/engineered. Most of what you see being built today is dimensioned based on available timber. It's part of why all the houses look the same, because it's the most efficient way to build. Everything structural gets built with 2x4's or prefab trusses (which are also made of 2x4's), windows are all standard sizes, as are cabinets and flooring, and siding, and trim, and if you weren't terribly concerned with building homes that were interesting to look at, you could probably optimize all of this further on the design side of things and then prefab things like walls and door frames then lego them together and wind up with something much nicer and likely cheaper than what they're doing.
The premise isn't terribly flawed though, prefab everything into 4x8ft panels, standardize your roof trussing, standardize your layout, and you can probably dig up a little more margin for builders to put directly in their pockets, and have perfectly cookie cutter houses with no regard to the environment they're placed in. Not really a neighborhood I'd like to live in, but, also not too dissimilar from what most of america lives in, so, I suppose it's tolerable.
That's not how we build in my country though
Yeah most countries in the world dont have 2x4s
We do in some sense but we call it something else like 45x120 or similar. That's not 2x4" but nor is a 2x4 actually 2 inches by 4 inches generally.
But what we definitely don't do is stick build homes using 2x4s apart from interior walls. An exterior wall where I live would probably use 45x220mm studs and probably more wood as well for a total depth of 350+ mm.
2x6 is becoming more common for framing walls. The extra depth allows for more insulation.
We don't use that wood to build houses. The US is special in that respect.
If one wants to go the "lego things together" route, ICF and AAC are also options that exist already.
AAC is great, but
- I don't think it's super common in the US - it's a high-tech product that quickly loses its legolike value if quality controls get sloppy (you have to spend hours sanding down each row or switch to mortar) - it's just walls, you still need a system for building foundations, floors, ceilings and roofs.
based on a misunderstanding of how houses are actually built/designed/engineered. Most of what you see being built today is dimensioned based on available timber. It's part of why all the houses look the same
It's worth pointing out that this is a UK-based project (where typical houses are concrete construction). A lot of the comments dismissing it are suggesting it should conform to American standards on the assumptions that those standards are universal.
As an open-source initiative it should certainly have a broader perspective than being purely UK-centric, but replacing that with a US-centric one isn't the solution.
Everything structural gets built with 2x4's or prefab trusses (which are also made of 2x4's)
Neither of these statements are true. 2x6's are commonly used for a variety of reasons in vertical placement. 2x8/2x10 and even 2x12 are still common for floor joists where manufactured beams (e.g. I-beams) are not used. Trusses are not always built with 2x4s either.
I'd also mention (as a recently certified firefighter) that the use of trusses in modern construction causes real headaches for the fire service: a minor failure in one part of one truss can lead the entire roof surface to become a collapse hazard. They are efficient uses of lumber but have few other merits as a construction technique.
They are registered in England and Wales and they write about millimeters. I guess that they don't have 2x4 and 2x6 frames. Maybe houses there are built in a totally different way.
Yes, houses in England are not made from frames almost ever. They are made of solid brick. It was always so confusing to hear about Americans punching through walls. You can't do that here. There's no wood.
People talk about punching through /interior/ walls, which is typically drywall in the US.
Houses in England are generally made from clay bricks, not wood
The last time wikihouse showed up on HN (September '23) I did a deep dive on the process I still haven't come out of. 20 years ago as a grad student getting my masters in architecture, I definitely would have had similar comments to most of what's on this page. But I don't feel that way any more and I'm actually disappointed by the negativity toward this project – not because it's not warranted, but if this were a software project I feel like the criticism would be more constructive rather than so dismissive.
WH is not a perfect system, but the approach is commendable for its comprehensive take on building systems. And building systems are broken. For the past two years I've been trying to build my own house (using a contractor), and even as a trained architect the process is ridiculously opaque, costs are exorbitant, and quality control is difficult to manage.
I applaud the fact that WH has tried to tackle the entire structure (and for that matter the entire building process – their parent organization has additional projects [0] for design, local building codes, and innovative financing structures). Yes, in the US 2x framing is cheap and relatively inexpensive, but is still complex in its own ways. Floor systems are different from wall systems are different from roof systems. I like that WH has tried to make one unit type (plywood boxes) work for the different systems. Is it the most efficient way? Probably not, but it affords other opportunities.
From an ideological perspective I also like that they prioritize sustainability, low energy use, and accessibility of design information to laypeople. On top of that, they've organized their building information like a programmer – they use GitHub to track versions and even have the start of a components database. They are an API short of making this really something the HN community could easily play with.
That said they have a long way to go. Framing a house is the easy part. I think if they could standardize the interface for cladding and interior finishes they would be in a better position to disrupt the building industry, but for now contractors will still be a requirement – so there goes your budget and quality.
That's really interesting about Github-based versioning. My company (bldrs.ai) makes a webapp that views IFC (soon STEP) and has github integration, so any *.ifc path on GH can be pasted into our search for viz.
I'm not seeing any IFC files on Wikihouse repos, but they look old (https://github.com/wikihouse). Do you know where they're hosting?
Oh wow, you just sent me down a really intriguing path. I was not familiar with IFC, but looking more into that now. No, it does not look like their repo [0] has IFC files, but I don't imagine it would be that difficult to export the additional needed file information.
[0] https://github.com/wikihouseproject/Skylark/tree/main/SKYLAR...
Their site does have IFC for that project tho and I've loaded it in Bldrs, so seems fine there.
Yeah, IFC is neat. It's actually a dialect of STEP, so able to carry the geometry and tons of BIM metadata. We've estimated the spec is ~7k pages printed. It's like an abstract toolkit for working with building codes
Happy to chat more too. We have our project Discord and DMs on Twitter
I think it's about this solution being easy to make with CNC routers. Traditional framing is not made for automation, so they went to precut sheets of plywood. It's similar to 3D printing: You could make a doorstop in 30 seconds from a block of wood and a saw, or you could print it in 1 hour from plastic. The second option is better if you have no saw and a printer.
It seems like it would be much, much slower to CNC all the plywood and insulation and assemble the boxes and then put the boxes together than it would be to just frame a wall, sheet it and put insulation batts in. Having access to and operating a CNC also seems harder than learning to use a skill saw and hammer a nail. It feels like they're trying to apply abstraction to construction where you just have one unit that can be adapted to work for everything but they don't realize that already exists and it's called dimensional lumber.
It feels like they're trying to apply abstraction to construction [...]
As is tradition :)
All good points, especially about the risk of leaks on the material. I've also heard anecdotally that framing is the cheapest part of the house.
It looks like framing usually takes two weeks to a month. Whole house takes 8 months. The lumber is a good chunk of money, but comparable to wallboard.
wait until you learn about 'engineered beams'
I shudder thinking about all the structures built with those things that're one undetected bathtub drain leak away from serious structural failure.
I'm confused. Do you have evidence that an engineered beam will fail faster due to water damage than a beam made from 2x4s?
Weatherproof LVLs are actually much more water resistant than a regular solid piece of pine. Even indoor engineered beams are quite water resistant.
what about A frame housing? Is that easier? Don't know much about building house. Just heard it is an easy way to build house with friends and some help.
And what about recycled foamed PVC boards instead of plywood? They have decent mechanical properties (12-15MPa)
Marine plywood is a thing that obviates the problem somewhat. Admittedly though, a very very expensive thing.
When that's factored in, you may as well build with straw bales. (really, it is great, and much cheaper)
It's funny how every country thinks their approach to building is good and everything else has huge problems. For example Germans tend to think wooden houses will not last.
The approach taken here is similar to what people are commonly doing in Scandinavia. Most generally almost all houses are pre fabricated in factories and assembled on site. The actual blocks vary quite a bit, mostly they are large wall sections, but there are approaches using blocks like this. There is also a manufacturer that makes all sections out of plywood. With all of the approaches I have never heard of issues with leakage. In fact they tend to be much more tight then houses build on site (often meeting passive house standards).
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.
It is great, however, if your approach to construction was formed by playing Minecraft.
Or perhaps if you're prioritizing things other than maximally efficient use of materials? It seems like they're prioritizing standardization, especially of methods, more than almost anything else.
AFAICT we have far more excess material than excess labor, so it doesn't seem particularly crazy to me?
“It is freezing honey” “I know dear, but the house was built efficiently”
Is that so? Materials went crazy expensive during Covid and didn’t come back down.
Not sure where you got that from, but their product page states:
"WikiHouse Skylark blocks include a cavity for 250mm insulation in the walls, and 350mm insulation in the roof, giving exceptional levels of thermal insulation."
In my country, central a/c is rare and heating only occupied rooms using individual a/c units is the norm. I think heavy insulation on interior walls would be great here.
Not so. If you want high thermal performance in a building, insulation (therefore thickness) is crucial in the entire building envelope. As the beardier building retrofit types say, your house needs a hat (loft insulation) boots (floor insulation) and jacket (wall insulation).
Consider this: if you're raising the temperature of your floor to say, 25C, that won't do much if you're doing so on an uninsulated floor where the temperature of the ground beneath is 10C or so. UFH at that temperature is very efficient and thermally comfortable.
Consider further that you might then have walls which let all that lovely heat out even if your ceiling and floor are well insulated. It makes sense for them to be just as good, not least because your windows will in all likelihood be the worst part of the room in terms of insulation. Having as uniform a u-value across the room (and building) makes for uniform temperatures throughout. It lends itself to using heat pumps, further raising the efficiency of the building.
Further, lifetime emissions of the building are increasingly front loaded in construction as operational emissions drop. Standardising will presumably cut down on costs as well as emissions at that stage.
Building physics is an entire subject of its own and is worth studying. I'd suggest looking at the Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders and their CarbonLite course to learn more.
It’s a pop-up so I can’t link to it, but their bit about interior walls shows them as thinner.
Note that it is an open source project and you are free to adjust the parameters to your liking
Does efficient use of materials matter compared to efficient use of labour/financing to get homes built?
Electron is regularly considered a horrible waste of "materials" in the tech world. It is still sensible to use as RAM is far more abundant than tech labour.
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).
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.
A lot of basic structural building materials (bricks, framing timber, roof tiles, etc.) are already fairly reusable to an extent. It's just labour-intensive to do so, therefore we often don't. I'm not optimistic that prefabbed structural components would be much better.
Yeah as soon as someone gets a demolition bill as high as the construction bill, the desire to reuse everything will disappear quick.
This also presumes in 40-100 years when a house presumably makes sense to demolish, the same standard design is still considered good and the new owner has heard of your weird bespoke construction style.
Consider that currently the age of a house maybe worthy of demolition is 1978 and earlier at this point, and many many people refurbish and renovate houses significantly older than that.
Reclaimed building materials are in high demand. Homes from the 1970s and older usually have excellent lumber, more often than not sourced from old-growth timber. My former home from 1949 sat on a 40-foot 12x12 solid cedar beam, for instance.
The only other stuff in the walls is either in demand (copper, plumbing metals) or we just throw it out (drywall, insulation).
So if these engineered materials are sturdy enough, I would give favorable odds to them being reclaimed.
A big reason reclaimed lumber is interesting is because it's generally plain straight high quality boards and can be used in things with an intentional weathered look. Wooden LEGOs will not have that sort of value, because unlike your 12x12 solid beam, these will be hacked up pieces of plywood.
Houses are already built from prefab modules (Wall panels, roof trusses, floor beams or even floor cassettes) in many markets, especially in Europe. The US lags somewhat but it's definitely the trend that a house arrives on a truck as a set of components that are lifted in place, rather than stick built.
I intend to build something like it someday (in the US, so it might be harder to find a manufacturer).
Its seems like every episode of Grand Design does include an almost spiritual journey to a glue-lam pre-fabricated wood factory in Germany. I’m not sure that stuff is as easy to get over here.
how would you reuse it in a different project?
The blocks are standard sizes so you can reuse them like legos.
Its seems like every episode of Grand Design does include an almost spiritual journey to a glue-lam pre-fabricated wood factory in Germany.
This is really weird to me because nobody builds like that here. Brick and concrete rule supreme and people living in wooden houses are seen as old hippies who cuddle with termites.
There's a misunderstanding here.
Glue-lams are not used for walls, they are used for floor support. While a lot of multi-unit concrete residential construction in Germany uses concrete for the floor without supports), for single family houses there it is still relatively common to span rooms with beams to create floor support.
This is also true for earthen buildings, which are remarkably popular (on a per-capita basis) in Germany. I say this as a US resident in New Mexico, where it is hard to imagine a place (Germany) less likely to use variants on the same best-practices as housing we build here.
My guess is by "reusable" the mean "reconfigurable", as you can presumably reuse at least some of the blocks when rebuilding or changing your house.
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/sell/rent ADUs on your property. You'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 "open-source permit" to construct one of these very quickly).
required to approve or required to decide, and they can reject? is the approval criteria checking mechanistic? (ie. every criteria is quantified and "objective"?)
ADUs subject to State ADU Law must be considered, approved, and permitted ministerially, without discretionary action.
https://www.hcd.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2022-07/ADUHandbo...
So their work is to check if it's conforms to state ADU law?
Plus things like site suitability, setback requirements, etc.
I would think that a pre-built manufactured home delivered pre-assembled would make more sense. Pour a slab, hookups for water, and electricity, done.
These do not make sense if you are looming for similar build quality to match your home. If you have been inside of a pre manufactured home (a “mobile home”) then you’ll know how everything has to be made of oddly hollowed plastic in order to keep shipping weight down.
The frame is the cheapest part of a permanent structure, and a 300-500sqft ADU is not going to have much in the way of plumbing, electrical, and hvac. Paying a plumber, electrician, and hvac tech for new construction on a tiny building is not going to represent a significant chunk of your budget for what amounts to 1-3 days work maximum.
Surprisingly enough, Los Angeles is actually ahead of this timeline and rolled out a program more than a year ago to develop pre-approved ADU plans with private architecture firms. As of now, there are about 65 standardized plans that have been approved, ranging from ~300 ft^2 (28 m^2) to 1,200 ft^2 (110 m^2).
https://www.ladbs.org/adu/standard-plan-program/approved-sta...
Hm I’d like a house where everything is as easy to assemble / repair / replace as IKEA furniture, and where you can run cables, and install builtins
Modern glulam buildings (or if you are in EU gablok could work) or masonry, pluggable plumbing and electrical (see Swedish prefabs, they use a pluggable electrical so you plug one wall into the other, wiring is embedded at factory), metal SIPs roofing. You can get pretty close to this with current materials.
pluggable plumbing and electrical
That's pretty interesting and while I sincerely hope it works as advertised, what is the repair process when (not if) the connections inside the wall fail? As the owner of multiple homes, a part of me is very skeptical that those connections will last for decades untouched.
In the US, code does not allow for splices and connections inside walls, period. In a pre-fab, I would like to see all of the cabling run inside tubes so that I can fix/add/replace easily myself in many years down the road. This is prohibitively expensive for residential mains wiring but not terribly unusual for low-voltage stuff like coax and ethernet that the homeowner can do herself.
All cabling is in conduit, so if it fails you either fix the gang box if that is where it failed normally as you do in US. If the wire fails you replace it by pulling it through the conduit and fishing in a new one. It's actually a fairly decent setup compared to our standards. They also typically use a installation layer, which is a furring wall where they run these cables, meaning you don't need to mess with vapour barrier.
how is pluggable electric in conduit is going to work in prefabbed walls? you pull all wires through preinstalled conduit during wall placement?
Furniture could be: https://playatech.com/
Alternatively https://www.opendesk.cc, as used by google, wework, etc. Files available here https://github.com/timrolls/Opendesk
ooh cute thanks!
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.
There is at least some reason to believe we should make some types of buildings less robust. While there are many beautiful old homes, there is a bit of a bias when we think of older homes towards ones that have been kept up to date or remodeled many times in their lives. A large percentage of homes don’t go through this process and become blight.
Japanese houses depreciate over a ~30 year cycle where, at the end of that cycle, the only value left is in the land and the home is demolished and rebuilt.
If you can use highly recyclable materials, this would encourage more adaptable cities where the housing is more easily adjusted for the needs of the people at the time. Density can go up or down over the course of these long cycles.
The other approach is to build simplified floor plans which are highly robust but adaptable to maximize reusability - like the two column, three row warehouse layout which can be be adapted for almost any use case.
This is my issue with builders like Icon, who are making 3d printed cement walled homes. Homes that last a long time get adapted many times in their life span, and these structures don’t really enable the growth and adaptation we see from buildings that are useful for many decades.
I agree, and buildings need to be easily reconfigurable too.
I love the idea of modular buildings, but this doesn't quite seem to fit. The materials don't seem ideal for the wet climate, the manufacturing process seems expensive; either you buy or rent a cnc, or have panels manufactured 'locally' then trucked. And the fact that it's precision cnc suggests this is really not modular at all, but custom designed.
Steel frame, and panels in standard sizes, eg steel sip, or home-poured foam-concrete, would be cheap, reusable/recycleable, modular etc. Maybe ugly too, but then mount a nice wood, stone-veneer, or enamel rain screen/siding, and interior paneling.
They also need to be beautiful enough and stylistically timeless enough to be worth maintaining and remodeling.
Japanese houses depreciate over a ~30 year cycle where, at the end of that cycle, the only value left is in the land and the home is demolished and rebuilt.
The rejoinder to that being that most housing I've seen in Japan is of scandalously low quality.
Brad Pitt, New Orleans. $20m settlement. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
That said, Japan treats 1 storey dwellings as single-lifetime and have a different view on the ephemeral value of a house.
The walls are the least expensive part of building a house.
What is the most expensive?
The land?
Permits?
Appliances?
Land is only worth what you can build on it. The buildable site was 7% of new single-family costs in 2022 in the U.S., including permits, inspections, design, etc.
Construction costs (labor + materials) were 61%, with interior finishes 24% of construction costs, framing 20%, and major systems 18%.
Appliances were under 2%. Margin was 10%.
https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/news-and-economics/docs/ho...
engineering and how you lay them
So, $1M USD for a 1200 sqft DIY house? No, thanks.
The most expensive configuration I can find for that size (111 sq m) is 327,000 GBP on the cost estimator: https://www.wikihouse.cc/cost
Maybe you put in 1200 sq m instead of converting from sq ft?
did you maybe type 1200 square meters? i'm not getting that price at https://www.wikihouse.cc/cost
Where are you getting that number from?
Where I live people build houses mostly with brics and mortar, autoclaved aerated concrete or concrete. Wikihouse system won't help.
Where do you live? (I'm guessing it's humid?)
AFAIK this construction is the standard in much of Europe and for certain in Germany.
Romania. Not especially humid.
There is a pretty cool project for a complete open source village: -https://www.opensourceecology.org/
Supposed to be all the machines you need to supply a whole village, made from low cost basic materials.
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.
TIL about The Liberator: The world's first open source compressed earth brick press. https://www.opensourceecology.org/back-to-compressed-earth-b...
A multiple-CEB unit that makes interlocking blocks that don't require mortar could build on work from this project.
Add'l notes on CEB, Algae, Sargassum, Hemp in the 2024 International and US Residential Building Code, LEGO-like Hempcrete block: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37693225
FWIU Round homes fare best in windstorms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37175721#37188180
And curvy half walls one brick wide don't fall down
[CEB] "Crinkle crankle wall" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crinkle_crankle_wall
Round homes fare best in windstorms
Yes, it's about 4x less drag. That's why nomads have round yurts.
Can I build a 6-story, multi-family, point access block apartment building with this system?
No. But you can build something that is somehow both more expensive and worse than a trailer.
I lold))
Just like yesterday [1] I’m confused by that name: what’s the "wiki" part in Wikihouse? Anybody can modify your house?
Anybody can modify your house?
I think that would be more fun as an art installation than a home. Comments from the neighbours on the edit page would be wild!
But seriously, it looks like they're open sourcing their block designs to allow people to modify them, and any third-party with suitable CNC machining equipment to create them. Whether that's a Wiki is another question...
1. (stative) hasten, speed up. 2. (stative) be swift, speedy, quick.
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.
Nonetheless wood houses are frowned upon in Europe. Except in the UK where housing is low quality overall anyway.
The most expensive part of house is the land it’s built on
No, not where I live.
Remote work alleviates that.
Remote work doesn't change where I want to live, because I want to live where there are things to do, regardless of where I work.
Remote work doesn't change where I want to live
I dont care where you want to live. Those who want to live where land is affordable should be given the option.
Given that land is expensive where you want to live this type of house build wont solve your issue - might make it worse since people have said it’s more expensive to build.
If more people would be allowed to work where they can afford property then demand in your area may drop.
Meaning you could afford buying where you enjoy. But most human farm advocates demand others to work from farms, and there is the issue. It drives land prices up in such places.
Building technologies do need to evolve, but this ain't it.
Starting with the tagline "Simple, beautiful zero-carbon building for everyone". 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'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't say it looks like it was built in 2023.
And then just all the stuff that doesn't matter. The problem of making a building isn't putting up walls and a roof. That's usually the part that goes the fastest. Who cares that it's 'precision engineered' (spoiler alert, if it'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 'I wish I could put a car on my roof'?
Why wouldn't raw timber be carbon neutral?
Demand on timber causes manufacturers to go buy it from areas like Amazonia or Siberia, in both deforestation is now a serious problem. And it still requires a lot of energy to be spent on cutting and transportation.
Hopefully the roof of Wikihouse doesn't get any Wikileaks.
You have a Wiki'd sense of humor.
Do they include any countermeasures to guided bombs?
There'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.
Here's the full episode: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6hsxwd
It's pretty cool to see, but in the end it seemed like way more effort than nailing some 2x4's together.
There was also episode related to https://u-build.org from Studio Bark: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7sqcy5 (Grand Designs: The Streets - Box House) which is another option
However, any modifications you make must be re-shared under the same licence. By everyone, for everyone.
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.
I am all for the idea of an open building system, but get real.
The important part is at the beginning of the paragraph: "The blueprints of WikiHouse are open source." (emphasis mine)
They aren't telling you what you can and can't do with the house itself.
Houses aren't expensive because of the houses, they're expensive because of the spaces where you build the houses.
No, or maybe, depends on where you live. You can build the plot of land from the city where I live for the equivalent of USD60.000, maybe 75.000. This is in a nice suburb, close to the highway (but not to close), there a busses, railroad is close and you have easy access to an airport, daycare, schools and shopping. Building an average home is at least USD200.000 and most would probably spend closer to 300.000. Houses are expensive because materials are expensive and labor is crazy expensive.
Unless you want to build in very specific spots the house is almost always going to be more expensive than the land it sits on.
There are many companies offering such small prefab houses. This one [1] offers a system of container-sized blocks that are assembled in the factory, carried by truck and joined together on site. (Initially the blocks were container-size, and carried whole. Current designs are > 3m wide.)
The biggest problem with container-based buildings is that the standard road size of 2600 mm is very narrow. Subtract 150 cm on each side for insulation and walls material, and you're left with 2300 (ISO container is 2350 mm wide inside.) (Standard bed is ~2100 mm long, so you can't put it laterally -- I tried, and discovered you can't walk normally in 20 cm isle.)
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's where the most pleasing houses are. We forgot how to build nice houses. Sad.
I think it is not only about worse, better. Standardize the process, like a talking in engineering language, building/improving debates. Also open projects as for me have own style, feels like Ikea really.
I'd like a better idea of what the "basic, medium, high" fit and finish options mean. Clicking around various links on the site didn't seem to talk about it anywhere else besides the cost estimator.
I don't think fit and finish is provided by them, I think it's a general estimate.
Hi, architect here. Wikihouse has been chasing many of the dragons we'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't adequately addressed by WH.
In the US nothing is EVER going to beat light gauge wood framing on cost. That's why you see even large (but not tall) complexes build from it.[1] It's been reduced to the 0th degree of expense because of the profit motive. That said, this is only when the "unskilled" labor of rough framing is cheap. But this doesn't necessarily hold for other economies.
The early WH work seemed cartoonishly idealistic (they were literal kids so I don'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'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.
Other competitors[3] actually have online configurators that work well to arrange these kinds of elements. But they've realized that's where the value is and are holding their systems closer so they can maintain quality and monetize the expertise they brought to bear.
And yet other systems have been using industrial scale and logics to great effect for a long, long time.[4]
TBH the "open source" 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's not structure and insulation? Not to mention approvals. In the end you'd need an architect to do all this for you. And... doesn't that defeat the point? It's very generous that they'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.
I really do appreciate what they're -trying- to do. But again, I just think it's a solution in search of a problem.
[0] Architecture, Engineering, and Construction [1] https://lamag.com/urbandevelopment/geoff-palmers-faux-italia... [2] https://architecturefoundation.org.uk/programme/2015/walter%... [3] https://automatedarchitecture.io/ [4] https://www.ithouseinc.com/
Forgot to add - Wikihouse has been at it since like 2011. In that time, we've seen the rise of engineered wood to the point that CLT (Cross-Lamianted Timber) is discussed as a steel replacement in large and tall building construction. What WH was doing back when was quaint and very precious. But their whole thing is kind of a relic of a simpler time. What they say they're about hits on a lot of different levels for me - as an advocate for FOSS and Open Source more generally, a NERD for modular building systems, someone actually working in the advanced fabrication and automated construction spaces, and more I WISH I could go to bat for them. But there's just no "there there" in terms of meeting the goals they claim.
Big Lincoln logs. Cool.
This costs about twice as much as an existing modular home even if you count the labor as free.
Not sure if I would trust a UK initiative for housing. My experience of the build quality here isn't great
I hope the site uses metric
The best form of open source houses are free and complete framing plans with material and cut lists and detailed instructions that don'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'd have something genuinely useful for everyone.
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!
The video doesn'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.
This is fantastic!
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.
So I'm the hexayurt guy -- http://hexayurt.com and http://appropedia.org/hexayurt
We've been at this FOSS housing thing for 20 years, aiming for upgradable shelters for climate refugees rather than middle class housing. I've known the wikihouse folks from before the beginning and (frankly) I'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.
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.
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's why it looks this way.
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.
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 somewhere.
No harm in it as long as nobody expects it to be buildable and fortunately that mistake was not made: theory stayed theory.
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 ton 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.
What it isn't yet is a refugee shelter. To turn the "well proven at Burning Man" 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 somebody 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.
https://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt_project/Master_List_of_D...
Donor driven aid is a huge problem. Lack of testing regimes for new shelter technology is a huge problem.
There is a total revolution in open source architecture coming but nobody seems to know how best to get it started. Neither one of these projects is it.
Not yet. Roll on the day.
Only for subtropical climate? is this also suitable for tropics? like 0-15 degree N and S? How about termite?
They should have start with standard sizes and publish their standards for all sub components ( and to matching existing pipe and electrical standards)
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.
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.
One thing caught my attention. Cost: £2,540 - £2,950 per m².
This is cool, but it's not carbon free if you have to drive to it.
Also, it would be nice to see this technique for multifamily, would be a big improvement to how they build apartments in the US.
This is some kind of Cory Doctorow dream come true
Cease building dwellings using unsealed wood.
When I choose a concrete slab foundation, their price estimate tool gives me a range of £NaN - £NaN. Representing currency as a floating-point value strikes again.
There's a lesson here:
Lay your foundation with strong types.
What type are you supposed to use to represent total cost when spending infinite money for 0 days?
It seems the Romans took their concrete type secrets to the grave.
Modern concrete with superplasticizers is far superior to Roman concrete.
The greatest limiting factor is not the concrete itself, but rebar. It will eventually rust, causing the concrete to spall and crack. So in most cases it makes no sense to really optimize the concrete lifetime, because why bother?
If you're willing to build structures that rely only on compression and gravity, then we can totally do stuff that the Romans never dreamt of. Just look at any modern concrete gravity dam as an example.
https://www.archdaily.com/875212/scientists-uncover-the-chem... :)
In Javascript? probably a different type than if you took 0 days to spend infinite money.
You need refinement types. Psuedocode:
your program can then be proven by the compiler not to NaN.The area defaults to zero, and recalculates when you change any of the parameters, resulting in a divide by zero and NaN being displayed
Typical Javascript strikes again?
My rough estimate is around $4.75/sf for a high performance wall (drywall+2x6+osb+exterior foam ~ R31). They show £230/m2, so this product would be almost 7x more expensive.
It's the UK, so everything is twice as expensive anyway.
Not the Bourbon Creams at Waitrose. 90p? What a steal.
Custard Creams are 65p at Tesco, bargain of the decade
In a stick built house you're paying a lot of labor. Material prices are not that much.
For example, the material list for a 3 bedroom house is 130k. https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi...
Say the land is 130k in your region. You won't find 3b houses for less than 360k. If you're looking at not so cheap builders, it will be 500k.
I think there's a revolution coming in the way we build houses, it must be - because costs are through the roof. It could be either in the form of prefabricated walls, like we have now trusses, or lego bricks like the OP, or something.
For stick frame houses, around 10-15% of the cost is framing. Finishes account for the bulk of the cost.
Margin.
If they save time and provide convenience or reassurance, then they'll provide value for some people.
It remains to be seen what the demand will look like, especially given the heavily regulated market.
edit: the "Fit out & finishes" drop down really brings the costs up. I'm not so sure about this product after all.
Frankly there is zero way to bet a stud wall with a bunch of CNC'd plywood. The key is most of the wall is not made of the stud, plywood requires the entire sqft or m2 to consist of plywood.
Since it’s a UK company/project they will be primarily comparing to brick costs since that’s what the vast majority of UK houses are (still) built with. They claim comparable cost as brick/block construction. £230/sqm.
They also seem to be touting their accuracy and since plywood is dimensionally stable (well, more so that 2x4s anyway) that’s probably why ply.
Is double brick still built in the UK, or is wooden framing with brick cladding more common?
Breeze block for the inner skin and red brick for the outer skin is still the standard as far as I see from local housing developments and friends doing extension. Internal dividing walls may now all be stud partitions but wooden structures are pretty uncommon.
That seems quite unappealing for something with a certified life of 60 years (even if it lasts longer in practice, mortgage brokers won't be keen)
It's cut on a cnc router table, which does not handle regular wood very well. The dimensional stability and anisotropic nature of plywood is a better fit for most automated cutting methods. If you try to CNC route most regular dimensional lumber it has pretty bad tearout and splitting unless you use a really fine cutter and go slowly (which takes forever).
Isn't plywood cheaper than solid wood?
A 1x6 which is probably thicker is usually around $4-5 a 3/4 plywood at 4x8 is $51 ish, so 8*1x6 ($4.5 at 8ft length) = $36, and $51 for plywood. So no, plywood is not cheaper at apples to apples comparison. If you chop the thickness down you can get it to be comparable or cheaper. But plywood is stronger then a bunch of 1x6.
A 1x6 is .75 x 5.5 inches.
Plywood is still more expensive with your numbers. OSB may cost a little less than the plywood though.
That would depend on the mill, you can get nominal and actual sized wood. At least I can in Canada get true 1 inch x 6 inch wood.
I think it has been for at least 30 years - perhaps longer. Structural beams were cheaper to make of solid wood when they were still lots of big trees to be had. That's no longer the case.
In a stick frame building, everything still gets clad with sheathing (plywood) and subfloor (thicker tongue and groove plywood).
Structural insulated panels (plywood/foam sandwiches) have been around since the 70s. They're a useful building technology.
There's no way they can provide an equivalent amount of product to a SIP cheaper. They're operating at small scale, and CNC machining everything which is expensive. The math ain't mathin'.
You're correct - but wait until you meet their other friend "milling the panels." Doing it out of plywood is one increased level of expense and difficulty - machine and operator time is an exponential multiplier. Think about it - you're taking a system that could be a guy with a table saw ripping a piece of ply in a minute tops and turning it in to a guy standing and watching a mill run through a piece of ply in who knows how many passes... it just doesn't make any sense.