Shelter is one of the most basic of human needs, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that we continually come up with new ways to build homes. Most building systems are open source to an extent, and the WikiHouse project tries to update the process for the internet age.
WikiHouse is a modular building system similar to structural insulated panels (SIPs) but designed to be made on a CNC and insulated in the shop before heading to the site. Using this system, you can get the advantages of a manufactured home, but in a more distributed manner. Plywood or oriented strand board (OSB) can be used to make up the chassis of the blocks which can then be assembled very quickly on site versus traditional wooden construction.
One of the more interesting aspects of WikiHouse is that it takes design for disassembly seriously. How many houses have parts that are still good when they’re demolished to make way for something new? In most places, the good is hauled to the dump along with the bad because it isn’t economical to separate the two. Building with end of life in mind makes it so much easier to recover those materials and not waste them. There are certainly examples of careful material recovery, but they’re few and far between.
If you’re looking for some other ways to quickly build a house from wood, checkout the PlyPad or Brikawood.
I’ve seen this before, and it’s quite a waste of materials.
Just the idea of first making plywood from tree trunks and then then converting it to “beams” and then building something from that again, Why not saw beams directly out of tree trunks? “Beams” made from plywood are also quite weak for two reasons. First plywood is quite thin (yes you can stack it and use more materials) and in plywood, half the kerf is going in the wrong direction, and that does not doe anything for the strength. A lot of plywood is also not very water resistant. It would be quite silly if your house collapses because you leaked a bit of water while watering your plants.
Also, here in The Netherlands, not much wood is used for houses anyway. We just pull some clay out of the ground, heat it up to make some bricks and make a stack of those. Very cheap, durable and comfortable if you add a bit of insulation in between. It also does not get eaten by animals or fungus nor bacteria.
Also, for a “house”, around 60% or more is paid just for the bare ground. The other 40% is for all the building materials, labor, taxes and profit margin for the construction company. A stack of plywood is not going to change much about that.
Tell me you live in Europe without telling me you live in Europe. In the US, all of our houses are built with wood. Laminated beams are much stronger than solid wood beams. https://canterburytimbers.com.au/blog/lvl-vs-solid-wood-in-construction-which-is-superior/
A little bit of water isn’t going to hurt wood in general.
And yet I’m bewildered by the idea of houses being “hauled to the dump”. We build stuff to last.
(We being Europeans)
Office blocks and stuff get torn down, but residential houses extremely rarely. And bricks recycle perfectly well.
Laura Kampf has a whole series on a house she bought in Germany that has timber frames and clay. The whole house was shot to hell (ant damage in the wood, sagging foundation, etc.) and it would have been much more cost effective to tear it down. However, she gets sponsorships to show off the “renewable materials” used to build it back up. She sent TONS of material to the dump though.
Point is, you build houses out of wood and tear them down and send them to the dump too.
Yeah, and you spend more renovating an existing house from 1960 to get it up to modern specifications (heating, insulation, electrical) than it would cost to build a new house of comparable size. My wife (German) and I (American) built new (in Germany) because we couldn’t afford to buy existing and renovate (in Germany.)
I love it when people who know nothing about a country want to tell you how everything done there is wrong. That goes for Americans telling Europeans how to solve their problems as well as for Europeans telling Americans how to solve their problems.
Same in the US….
business (especially big business) properties want to move in asap, and will use brute force demolition to get the job done. good for profits, bad for the environment. in residential structures its often more profitable to flip old properties, either do the bare minimum to bring them up to code (and there might be loopholes in the regs where you don’t have to for structures built before a certain date) or go all out and upscale the property to sell to a more wealthy family.
wood structures are also a way to sequester carbon, and tend to be easier to repair. it also depends on what materials are locally available. building with bricks while living in a well forested area (se alaska here) seems like a whole lot of unnecessary shipping costs. down in the southwest you see a lot of adobe and stucco, which would totally not survive the climate here. i know one project we ended up using canadian torx screws instead of the usual phillips heads we americans tend to use because they are cheaper to ship and thus less expensive. our drywall was also canadian. the lumber was cut locally.
@Dubious.
Laura Kampf bought a derelict house. You’re absolutely right. She should have torn it down. She was buying on a budget. Ignored the risks. The area she bought it in is also a very wet area. Wood + Water = not good.
Nevertheless. Traditional wooden houses, build correctly, will last hundreds, literally HUNDREDS of year. There are whole villages and cities in Europe attest to the durability. The doorways are like 5″ high. That’s how tall the people were back then.
I prefer to learn from the past. Use what works well and combine with modern materials and techniques. I also like the idea of a natural house rotting at end of life. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that.
my house dates from 1757 :D
Considering he said he lives in Netherlands, he *did* tell you he lives in Europe..
> Laminated beams are much stronger than solid wood beams.
For how many years, under which conditions? Do we know yet?
Don’t know. We’ve only really been making them since 1901.
I mean, we’ve been using them for over a century now.
And laminates in general are way older than that.
That also tend not to twist or bend after initial forming. Grab a 2×4 and look down the length. Unless the whole tree was kiln dried before cutting its not going to all be straight.
Laminated beams are definitely much stronger than solid wood beams. They’re also very different from plywood.
ah… except they *did* tell you they were in Europe. 🤦🏻♀️
Bricks aren’t real great over decades (they shift in position as foundations settle) and they’re really nor great in places where the ground moves.
They have tons and tons of brick building in Europe that are hundreds of years old.
They have stuff made of bricks constructed by the freaking Romans..
Yeah, but they aren’t located near any fault lines or where ground subsidence is common.
There are places in the US where you can build residential housing with brick and mortar or concrete, and places where you can’t/shouldn’t. Just like there are places where basements are effectively mandatory, and places where they aren’t feasible.
It’s all about using the right tools and methods for the right job. No approach is universal, because the Earth has different conditions in different regions that you need to adapt to.
Houses are all built locally, something they people on the Internet and people trying to “reinvent residential construction” always seem to forget about.
Houses are built from material that’s available where you are, to specs that will work where you are.
Everyone seems to think there should be a one size fits all model, where materials that are expensive in one part of the world but cheap somewhere else should be used, or that no one should bother with a basement cause they just flood… Meanwhile if you skip the basement where I live frost heavs will crack your slab in a couple of years.
And it’s not even across big distances, my house doesn’t have a sump pump don’t need one, never floods here, 5 miles west they have sumps, they have the pumps on battery back up and it’s a given that they will run regularly during the spring…
Very good points.
A pretty illustrative example of this is the Spanish building on top of Inca structures. The Spanish used standard rectangular solid bricks, but the Inca used massive stones that had matching irregular faces. Unsurprisingly for anyone who isn’t a white European who can’t imagine that another method might actually be better, the Inca structures stood resolute in the face of repeated major earthquakes (even after the Spanish drained the gold that dampened shaking) while the Spanish structures simply crumbled, repeatedly.
I’m very much in favor of sharing the benefits of technology and of using the resources we are each given to better humanity, but the view that We Know Better (that seems especially well known among those of us with European cultural backgrounds) could sure be put to rest and humanity would be better for it.
quarter sawn or rift sawn beams are going to waste much more wood and require more mature trees than engineered beams from plain sawn. A good quality plywood will be more dimensionally stable than even a rift sawn plank or beam.
Plywood of sufficient quality makes excellent aircraft. It is very strong and resilient, known as aircraft grade plywood for obvious reasons. Folks around here manage to keep 50 year old sea planes in working order without them just dissolving the first time they touch water. And of course marine grade plywood exists specifically for boats, pretty much every sailboat I’ve seen had plywood flooring.
Clay is very expensive here in the US. There aren’t enough clay pits to support the number of buildings we have in the US. One of the many reasons we make so much stuff out of concrete and wood here.
The housing market here in the US is more complicated. You can sometimes get a plot of land to build on for about half to a quarter of the cost of a typical house (where my Mom used to live). Other places the land costs 5 times more than the house (like where I live). But honestly the prices work like that in Mexico and Canada too, and I imagine many places outside of Europe have very diverse values for habitable property.
Unfortunately concrete brings it’s own kind of problems. Some unforeseen.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sand-mafias-are-plundering-the-earth/
I bought my house last year for $385,000 – the plot itself was $37,000. This is in Tucson, Arizona. Land value really varies dramatically based on location.
Actually nowadays houses are made of concrete slabs with fake brick-resembling cladding on it.
You should take a peek during contstruction and not after.
Houses in the Netherlands are not with clay bricks. They haven’t been for the last 80 years at least. Most houses and buildings are built from concrete with fascias made of fake bricks.
You bring a great point! The solution doesn’t have to be one material fit all. More models should be developed taking advantage of the locally sourced sustainable materials (e.g. open source clay brick structure with interlocking bricks).
I’m adding this comment to let you know I may have inadvertently hit the “report comment” button and the button that’s opposite the “cancel” button next to your comment. I’m not sure how I managed to do that,
or if in fact I actually did. At any rate, please accept my apology.
Plywood is more stable and much stronger than heavy timber or beams of equivalent size. LVLs can span great distances that solid wood simply cannot cover. Fewer defects, and the list goes on. That being said the concept looks interesting but the connections look weak.
Here in British Columbia, Canada we cut down a weak, full of knots, unusable tree, convert it into a usable material
( plywood, MFD, OSB ) and make a house out of it.
Go Google the word “kerf”, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.
Brick isn’t even as impermeable as concrete, and can be damaged by water, salt and ice. I believe some ways of insulating it can be problematic in that they retard water vapor, and you really need to let that escape if it becomes a problem. I didn’t have trouble when I lived in a brick home, but it also predated passivhaus standards and was very inefficient. Plus it still needed a stick frame for the drywall and fixtures and such. In favorable climates, even simple wooden farmhouses may last hundreds of years, though they may be drafty and warped by then, since to an extent anything works if you use enough heat. But what I currently find attractive as an idea is to build a stick frame interior into a metal structure which has been sprayed with closed-cell foam and well sealed. That seems likely to stay in good working order for awhile without being terribly difficult to accomplish.
Great idea for non-environmentally conscious wealthy people who live in places without building regulations.
wood structures sequester carbon and composite wood products use wood wastes that would otherwise be burned or landfilled. you could build homes for the homeless and kill two birds with one stone. so long as you don’t clear cut entire forests you will be fine. logging can be very sustainable with the right regs and practices.
The already fabricated paneling using the waste wood products was ready to use as-is. Doing further CNC work to make glorified LEGO blocks adds extra energy requirements, extra transpo, extra labor, and extra cost.
Not that I personally care what other people choose… but if I am building a home, one extra fabrication process is one extra cost.
One could argue having machines do extra work in a factory is more cost effective than having more people do more work on site
“One of the more interesting aspects of WikiHouse is that it takes design for disassembly seriously.”
With inflation being so high and my being forced out of a job, I might have to seriously consider “design for disassembly” as well.
Climate change will certainly up on the “disassembly” part.
These will be gone long before climate is an issue considering how they attract tornadoes.
Where I live in Canada, concrete foundations commonly fail. The ground heaves, glacial clay etc. and building code is only 3 pieces of rebar, top middle bottom. It’s inadequate and every home gets cracked foundation walls. Friend had her old 1919 house lifted up and new foundation poured about $100,000 project to replace (brick foundation) where the mortar disintegrated. Of course the interior walls cracked and new foundation cracked too, not enough rebar. A useless project to save an old house. Get out the bulldozer!
Also look at the people doing 3D printed concrete houses those look promising, much lower labour costs.
Sounds like she should have requested more rebar then. Where I live that does not commonly happen. But building code is a minimum bar not the target. Too many people forget that and it’s all a race to the bottom to save a few $$$
Ironically, this is missing the forest for the trees. It’s fairly cheap and easy to build your own house the normal way (2x4s and sheeting); the reason people don’t is that the government won’t let you, unless you pay them exorbitant bribes and let them violate your privacy during the build process. House-building is a cartel. Unlike every other animal on earth, we are not permitted to build our own shelter. Until this problem is solved, none of these high-tech solutions matter.
regulations tend to be written by bureaucrats who have never hammered in a nail their entire lives. logging regulations too, written by people who never logged in states that clearcut their forests, yet still think they have a right to tell everyone else how to do their job. still baffles me how hard it is to get a logging permit in a place where evergreen trees pop up like dandelions and have to be plucked from people’s yards en masse every spring.
I submit that if we were to have the people who DO do the actual logging write their own regulations, profit motives and self-interest would fail to produce better rules, so…
The entire point of regulation is for outsiders to place constraints on an industry that can’t be trusted to self-regulate. (Which is all of them.)
Agreed. Also, for tens of millenia, when humans were hungry they could kill an animal, cook it an eat it. In the US you can still do that, as long as you pay the government for the privilege to do so, use the proper weapon during the time they say you can use it, and only take the amount they allow.
Yeah for some reason people got super pissed at the stuffed bottle nose dolphin I have over my fireplace. I don’t get it I caught and landed it with the gaff myself. He fought like hell but I won. And I’d keep doing it too if it wasn’t for those pesky government toolbags.
How did it taste?
yes the old “I don’t like the social contract” argument.
At least we don’t have to deal with starving while the “King’s deer” frolic in the “King’s forest”. Back in a time and place where poaching was a life or death struggle.
Contracts have to be signed to be legitimate, so your “social contract” is just an imaginative euphemism for the weaponized force of law. Likewise in your example, the king is the problem, not the poachers.
A common myth, but then most aren’t schooled in contract law.
https://www.bennettlawga.com/myth-busting-common-myths-about-contracts
The enlightenment philosophers who came up with the idea of a “social contract” at best referred to emergent orders where people looked around and choose to behave as others did or expected. It was never a literal contract, just an analogy. Today, almost everyone throwing around the phrase means “duty to obey government dictates”, which denigrates not just those philosophers, but the whole enlightenment.
Ratified by continuing to live within the enforced territory of the entrenched society. In other words, “get along or get out.”
There’s a reason that banishment existed as a punishment in antiquity.
It’s basically a EULA. You don’t have to sign those but if you don’t agree you have to abandon it entirely.
“You will own nothing and be happy.”
Amen brother
I can even overbuild (strength and insulation) my house in europe, but if I dont have the right paperwork I must tear it down.
My land. GTF.
For decades I’ve researched all kinds of alternative home construction methods and have come to the conclusion that you can’t beat standard stick frame construction for a great cost to benefit ratio across the board. Any alternative methods seem to degrade into higher cost or lesser quality; ie tents or increased labor with specialty methods required.
The IRC (building codes) tell you how to build a house. Its not a secret. It might not be easy to understand, but it is there. Making modular panels and connecting them might be a more bite sized way of doing it, but SIPs are not new. This website might go into more detail about how achieve specific designs. Product manufactures want their products to be installed right so people are happy with them, so there is plenty of support for that.
That’s all it is, keeping up with the code.
Meanwhile buildings that are 300 years+ old and still standing if built today would not be considered safe enough to be strong enough according “to the codes”.
It’s an utter joke.
Yeah… Trying to do something like this in any populated area (city/suberbs) and you’ll either have to pay out the ass for land or be HOA deed restricted if they’ll even allow you to build your own at all. So why don’t we all just not buy houses in HOA areas… When buying a house a while ago… I took the whole list that Realtor gave me and wrote a simple ugly script to scrape ISP providers for the address. Holy hell the result was ugly. Anything DSL was scrapped almost immediately. ATT fiber was still using bandwidth caps. DOCSIS was 10-20 mbit upload. Spectrum does horrid things with their bandwidth plans. On the east coast I had cable that was 300/100 mbit down/up. Move to somewhere else fastest was 200/20. Then Google fiber came to my house… And spectrum said they had gigabit speeds and they could upgrade me that day. Previously they wanted a “professional installation” aka measure signal levels for $250. Wouldn’t waive the fee at all until GFiber came and was “oh we have a promo rate for our gigabit. No fees. Cancel anytime.” I had my fiber installed for about a week then and only kept spectrum if there were any glitches for the first month or so. Because new installs were going up everywhere around me. Only had one blip that took about an hour to fix.
Buying a house or lot to build on is way too much of a pain on the ass. I’m just glad my HOA isn’t a complete shit show.
Here’s the problem as I see it…look at the illustrations of the plywood sheets. Look at how much of the sheets are not used in making the parts. Machining wood is quite wasteful. There is not much you can do with scraps of manufactured wood products at this time. There are no widely available recycling programs. They cannot be used for mulch or firewood since they can contain adhesives that are harmful to plants or humans if burned.
It is true that standard construction methods also have waste. However manufactured wood is wasted in far less quantities (cut pieces are mostly rectangular used on the job site) and stick lumber biodegrades just like the dead trees it comes from, without the chemical residue.
I disassemble 100 year old buildings that have 30 – 50 year old plywood modifications and patches. With a little surfacing to remove oxidation, wood from those building that was not exposed to weathering can be used again in new construction or woodworking projects, whereas the plywood generally cannot be due to the adhesives that hold the layers together and the thin layers themselves degrading. Once the surface of a piece of plywood degrades, the whole piece is useless, whereas regular wood can be sanded or planed and reused again.
As it is open sourced, feel free to modify the utilization yourself. And you don’t HAVE to build with this system. If it dosen’t suit your needs, don’t use it.