Year of the Build Environment

November 23, 2004 3:02 PM

Houses of the Future - houses made of cardboard, steel and clay.
posted by cmonkey (22 comments total)

I've got your houses of the future right here, pal!
posted by Smart Dalek at 3:17 PM on November 23, 2004

That stuff is swanky indeed -- but this seems a little, erm, unlikely.

This kind of thing reminds me a little of the 1970's fascination with homes made of tires and beer cans. Whatever happened to that whole movement? At any rate, seems similar to this and of course, this. Interesting stuff -- but somehow I think most people will be living between slabs of thin drywall for some time to come.
posted by undule at 3:20 PM on November 23, 2004

houses made of cardboard, steel and clay

Subject to Big Bad Wolf ISO 9002 testing.
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:33 PM on November 23, 2004

At first I said "wow, a cardboard house!"

Then I said "holy crap, a $35,000 cardboard house?"

Then I said "Oh, you tricky aussies, that's only $28,000 USD."

Then I said, "holy crap, a $28,000 cardboard house?"
posted by u.n. owen at 3:34 PM on November 23, 2004

undule, I got very excited when I was first exposed to the whole earthship housing movement however long ago that was—ten years or something. A fair number were built up around Taos, Dennis Weaver's most famously. Seems like I heard recently that they've had problems with these houses. I dunno, I don't want to spread false information 'cause the concept is really great and I like the idea and hope the houses have aged well.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:05 PM on November 23, 2004

This kind of thing reminds me a little of the 1970's fascination with homes made of tires and beer cans.

There are at least two tire homes in my part of the Okanagan, both built within the past decade. FWIW.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:10 PM on November 23, 2004

I always like looking at these kind of things but I don't see them coming to a development near me anytime soon. Architects have been designing the home of the future for a hundred years now and no one's bought them yet. The vast majority of new houses in the US in 21st century look like they could have been build a hundred or even two hundred years ago. I'm sitting in a townhouse right now built about thirty years ago that's not much different in style from the townhouse my grandmother lived in that dated back to the late 18th century.
posted by octothorpe at 5:14 PM on November 23, 2004

yeah I think this kind of alt-housing is great -- at least pleasing to the eye, anyway; it all seems to imply a desire to stop with the theorizing and get on with incorporating the future in the now. I'm kind of prone to that sort of thing, as goofy as it may sound. For instance, I use laser pistols to light my cigarettes. That said, have you heard of arcosanti? Seems like a similar concept -- on a grander, near-metaphysical scale.

Anyhoodle, this thread got me thinking -- when I was living in Sulphur Springs -- a Tampa suburb -- there was a UFO- shaped house down the street, completely abandoned and filled with empty beer bottles and urine stained cardboard. It was awesome, if a little tragic.

I always wanted to buy it -- have anyone buy it for that matter. It was just rotting there under the spanish moss, accumulating garbage and roach nests. As cool as it was in concept, living inside would have been absurd; the space was little more than a small studio and had all kinds of places to smack your head.

on preview, five fresh fish, awesome! I was looking for photos via google for a tire-house with no results.
posted by undule at 5:17 PM on November 23, 2004

Thanks fandango, now I'll be able to sleep. I wonder why all this stuff goes down in NM? I've always heard that it's where all the 60's Furthur-styled buses ran out of gas, so everyone just hopped out and settled. Land of enchantment, indeed.
posted by undule at 5:25 PM on November 23, 2004

How about a house made of this stuff?

As an additional environmental benefit, it takes only 4 months to grow the raw material for a house.
posted by Wolof at 5:32 PM on November 23, 2004

I'm a skeptic and an empiricist and, strictly speaking, I staunchly disbelieve in any supernatural forces or whatnot. But as a native New Mexican, and as one who has observed other people's reactions to NM, there does seem to be something to the mystique surrounding northern New Mexico. I'm not sure what it is. But people seem to be encouraged to be more "connected" with the "land", so to speak.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:32 PM on November 23, 2004

I know somebody that built one of those tire houses and they just hated it. More expensive (and harder!) to build than anybody told them and it wasn't as structurally sound as they expected.

I'm a little concerned that these cardboard houses are going to squash the gingerbread house market.
posted by HifiToaster at 5:39 PM on November 23, 2004

Gimme a wood house
and use LED's to light it
Alan has a very nice cordwood house.
a straw house is efficient for heating,
just be careful using the Corncob fireplace!

posted by samlam at 5:49 PM on November 23, 2004

oops -
I meant THIS link for the "heaters"
I want 1 of these in the lounge
and one of these in the kitchen.
They look safe.
- cept the guy by the oven looks a little dangerous.
posted by samlam at 5:59 PM on November 23, 2004

not just houses of the future, but also lifestyles
Is this Ranting or geeking????
I'll stop now...
posted by samlam at 6:23 PM on November 23, 2004

But the greatest bottle building of all is on the shores of a lake near a little mountain hamlet called Boswell. David brown was an undertaker living in Red Deer, Alberta who contracted sleeping sickness because of the stress of his business. When his doctor advised him to quit brown loaded his trailer and headed west until he reached Kootenay Lake. Soon bored with retirement, Brown got a job selling embalming fluid and kept the empty bottles. He built his extraordinary house using 600,000 of them. Before he was half-finished, he was deluged with visitors.
posted by five fresh fish at 6:37 PM on November 23, 2004

"...or closed to create a feeling of warmth and enclosure that only the thick massing of concrete can provide"

That just doesn't sound right somehow. Sort of threatening really.

I sometimes dream about building a house out of recycled materials that's 'off the grid' out in the Canadian wilderness. We waste so much these days that there would be plenty to work with.
This usually morphs into a dream of my own compound, compleat with devoted followers and an arsenal.
posted by towerbrave at 6:56 PM on November 23, 2004

Straw Bale Housing Construction is growing in popularity here in Nebraska. I work in the housing industry, and at the housing conferences here straw bale non-profits are always trying to convince affordable housing groups to adopt these building materials and methods. It seems like these projects are energy efficient. But I wouldn't feel secure living in something made out of straw in rural Nebraska.
posted by sophie at 9:51 PM on November 23, 2004

Sorry, I screwed up a couple of the links:
Straw Bale Housing Construction and energy efficient. My bad.
posted by sophie at 9:59 PM on November 23, 2004

The Australians behind the cardboard house project are Brucey-Come-Latelys to this concept.

The Japanese, Germans, and Americans all had the jump on this idea years ago...
posted by fairmettle at 5:17 AM on November 24, 2004

Whatever happened to the Dymaxion House? Why does everyone want to claim the future when Bucky already lives there?
posted by OmieWise at 1:15 PM on November 24, 2004

Just wanted to point out ...

just be careful using the Corncob fireplace!

That's cob, not corncob. Cob is a clay/sand/straw mixture, used for building. It's hundreds of years old, and buildings built with it last for, well, hundreds of years. The name "cob" comes, probably, from the shape of the clay as it's hoisted to the developing walls. It's sent up in little loafs, which look like a "cob loaf" of bread.

... not that anyone's still reading this thread.
posted by Alt F4 at 11:06 PM on November 27, 2004