Would it be cheaper to print 3 houses with 2D printing and then rotate them into a single 3D house?
Maybe you would need 6. I'm not an architect.
There was a house near my parents that they called "the Star Wars house". It was three intersecting concrete domes. There were no flat walls. When it went up for sale, the whole neighborhood went to the open house.
We drove past this a lot when we were living down on the peninsula.
It looks like that futurama character.
Now I'm looking at the characters and it doesn't seem to be any of them. I guess I meant Bender in orange like Fry.
Looks a lot more like a gaggle of amonguses to me.
The dome house I mentioned in 3 was supposed to be close to tornado proof.
1: careful with that. You might end up with a 4D house by accident. https://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/CrookedHouse.pdf
Personally, I don't see why they don't 3D print with cob. Maybe because you can only go up so high without waiting for it to dry?
All houses are 3D. What am I missing here?
Maybe some of them have non-Euclidean basements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGTEOrX_I08
"3D" modifies "printing" not "houses".
WE SHALL FIGHT IN THE HOUSES, WE SHALL FIGHT IN THE BARNS, WE SHALL FIGHT IN THE SHEDS.
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL2KoMNzGTo
I'm not not-cute, don't write in the newspaper that I'm not-cute.
These were featured on Apple TV's "Home" first season, episode 9. It was very start-up-tastic, good and bad. Here's a writeup in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/business/3D-printing-homes.html
I was wondering when they were going to start rolling out the optimized version for $$$.
The new way of making shoes won't last.
From the link in 4:
Built on a concrete slab foundation, the residence was constructed by spraying shotcrete onto steel rebar and wire mesh frames over inflated aeronautical balloons. . . . By the mid-1980s the house had fallen into disrepair, as water runoff from higher on the mountainside damaged the foundation, causing the walls to crack. After failed attempts at sealing the cracks, it was extensively restored in 1987.
Do you fix cracked shotcrete by shooting more shotcrete over it? If you had, say, a steep hill shellacked with a horrendously cracked and damaged shotcrete retaining wall in your backyard, with an embedded construction date of 1972 spelled out in little pebbles, are there repair options to stop the outflow of underlying soil through the cracks every time it rains? I know this question seems very specific, but really it's a more general concern about society and the built environment.
How high is society's retaining wall?
Because sprayed on concrete won't hold back any good amount of earth. You need something with deadman going back into the hill.
31, 33: Yes, you could dig out the crumbling shotcrete, verify that the reinforcing hasn't rusted away, replace the rusted parts, and shoot fresh concrete onto the existing and supplemented rebar.
As Moby suggests, installing tiebacks into the hillside is a good way to distribute the stresses and keep the forces in the shotcrete wall low. Similarly, installing counterforts can stiffen the shotcrete wall, and gives you a different way to install deep footings without undermining the existing wall.
A well installed shotcrete wall doesn't have to crumble; most swimming pools are shotcrete, and successfully retain water and resist soil heaving loads when emptied. You'll want a good contractor and may need a special inspector to make sure that they're set up correctly when they begin shooting.
Society's retaining wall is maybe 8 feet high? It starts behind a raised bed and goes up to rooftop level. I don't know how much actual retaining it's doing as it more or less follows the original slope of the hill, but dirt outflow through cracks when it rains is definitely a thing. How do you find out if there are dead men in the hill?
You have a wall behind your house as high as your house and dirt is coming through it. You need a professional to look at your wall.
35, 36: Moby is right; an 8' high retaining wall (that likely continues below the planter) should be professionally investigated.
Deadmen are cables that extend into the hillside, then get grouted in place. When the wall wants to flop back into your yard, the concrete at the end of the deadman is held by the dirt in the hillside and that steel cable holds the wall in place (straining under tension). At the backside of the wall [your yard side], there would be anchor points for the deadmen, though they might be concealed under a finish layer of concrete or stucco since they are not appealing. (They'd look like a grid of often circular splotches, if the hardware is embedded within the wall.)
Here's a simple image: https://foundation1.net/foundation-repair/dead-man-tie-backs/
If it follows the slope of the hill, that's probably reassuring. Unless the hill was steep.
The hill is rather steep, but the wall only covers the part of it directly behind the house, and the uncovered hillside has a similar slope and isn't eroding. No repair is possible without professionals for sure, but I don't think it's an actual emergency. I also don't think the shotcrete landscaping of 1972 is popular these days, so I bet the actual cost-effective fix would be to jackhammer out all the concrete and replace it with something more reasonable. That said, I'm kind of fond of the ridiculous wall, which has a bunch of interesting inset rocks and looks a little like a climbing wall: fun for 7-year-olds who don't mind skinned knees or narrowly avoiding rosebushes. I appreciate all the structural information, thank you!
In other news, our cracked garage door panel is an actual emergency, but still no word on the replacement estimate or timeline.
That you can fix with screws and scrap lumber. Unless you want to ever open the garage again.
Apparently the middle school lights - literally all of them - started strobing today during last period and didn't stop. Ace and Pokey were rather freaked out. After a few minutes, the teachers were like, "I guess everyone put their heads down? You might not know if you have epilepsy? There's no protocol for this."
They just waited out the school day and were dismissed to strobe lights, and then I think they turned the power off to the school.
I heard the noise when I read that.
Those corrugations on the walls are nightmare dust traps.
Society's retaining wall is very stable because it is builtl on unnumbered dead men.
All houses are 3D. What am I missing here?
If they were 2D they wouldn't be houses, they'd be flats.
OT: I'm not even American and this kind of story makes me proud to be American. (And it's happening in a swing state which isn't bad either...)
https://apnews.com/article/us-army-ukraine-russia-ammunition-war-e753d12f76ad3974184fc6aa2ed5125b#
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html
"...Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others are already within our own gates. Your government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out. Their secret emissaries are active in our own and in neighboring countries. They seek to stir up suspicion and dissension, to cause internal strife. They try to turn capital against labor, and vice versa. They try to reawaken long slumbering racial and religious enmities which should have no place in this country. They are active in every group that promotes intolerance. They exploit for their own ends our own natural abhorrence of war. These trouble-breeders have but one purpose. It is to divide our people, to divide them into hostile groups and to destroy our unity and shatter our will to defend ourselves.
There are also American citizens, many of them in high places, who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents. I do not charge these American citizens with being foreign agents. But I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States. These people not only believe that we can save our own skins by shutting our eyes to the fate of other nations. Some of them go much further than that. They say that we can and should become the friends and even the partners of the Axis powers. Some of them even suggest that we should imitate the methods of the dictatorships. But Americans never can and never will do that..."
Maeterlinck says the God of the bees is the future. At the Ministry of Munitions we were the bees of Hell, and we stored our hives with the pure essence of slaughter.
It's good to see people in Scranton happy.
Mobes, have you seen the Grand Designs cob house episode(s)? If you ignore the divorce/remarriage and kids moving out over time, I think it's sort of a success. And I swear it's only the success part that made me think of you.
I had seen that, but honestly that a very much bigger house that what I was thinking of. And the kid did move out, or at least go to college.
Yes, your dreams seem much more reasonable!
Most realistic is buying a state forest cabin.
You own the cabin and lease the land from the state. You're supposed to shoot deer, but that's not actually required and my objections to shooting deer and practical, not moral.
Does that mean you can rebuild the cabin?
Not easily. At least not if the changes are visible from the exterior.
You certainly can't rebuild in cob.
You can't trap deer in mud-straw either.
I took a tour of two Frank Lloyd Wright houses over in Manchester today. One of the houses was of the "Usonian Automatic" style. "Automatic" because it was made of cement blocks that an owner was supposed to cast and assemble themselves. Of course the system was all too complicated and it never worked out like that. Of the seven examples built, arguably one was assembled by an owner. Also, it had a flat roof, which is a really stupid idea for New England, so a fair amount of water damage.
Unless it snows in New England, it's fine.
Apparently they were using an experimental new waterproof membrane that basically failed immediately.
If concrete is printable surely cob is too.
Being America, surely it would be cheaper and more flammable to print chipboard instead?
They could call it "non dimensional lumber."
Rammed earth is what I think of as printable cob, but you need formwork, so ... not printable.
Cob doesn't have anything that makes it stronger like cement curing, afaik. You pack it down as you go and that's what you get (don't build your bricks without straw!)
having now read the article on the bewilderingly large cob house --
To meet stringent regulations, walls were insulated with polystyrene - 100% recyclable and A+ rated for sustainability - and rendered with lime.
Squinty eye suspicion. Is it recyclable when you haven't scraped all the cob off? And how does a polystyrene layer affect the humidity management of cob?
Aesthetically, it just kills me how badly the modern windows interrupt the curving cob walls. Either use little castle-like windowslits, or stick bottles in like a proper hippie, or get curved glass. There's a hardware store in SF that sells window squeegees in a set of curvatures to match the proper bay and turret windows with curved glass.
This is one of those embarrassing things that I probably shouldn't admit outloud or online, but until recently I thought Moby was talking about building houses out of corn cobs. I see now that cob is basically adobe? My understanding is that adobe cures slowly in warm, arid conditions, which makes it a useful building material in the southwestern United States, but how does it work in other parts of the world? How do mudbrick houses not fall apart in the northeast, where the soil is damp for much of the year?
Until slightly less recently I too thought Moby was talking about building houses out of corn cobs.
You need boots (a foundation that extends above the ground my a foot or more) and a hat (a roof with big eaves).
Anyway, corn cobs are toilet paper, not housing.
So a cob house basically is a raincoat made of mud.
It's a house made of mud in a raincoat and rain boots. The boots are important for the reason given in 70.last. Rain can hit the walls for a bit, but nothing can stay wet for long.
So I've read. I've not seen a cob house. I've seen adobe, which is similar, but only in very dry places.
So I guess my plan to combine two hobbyhorses of this blog and build an ekranoplan out of cob is doomed to failure.
Exactly. You could build it but landing it on water would be unwise.
You could say the same about that organ. I can announce that it is now out of the apartment and on its way to a new life in Cote d'Ivoire.
Congratulations on being an organ donor.
Shipping a church organ from Paris to the Ivory Coast has a very Goon Show quality to it. No doubt part of a complex scam by Hercules Grytpype-Thynne and Count Jim Moriarty.
https://youtu.be/8I6wbUticic?si=bm9uUc8I1GYfudFT
38 was me being helpful. Or trying.
70: That's what I thought for a while too.
Cob works partly from "hat and boots" (don't put the cob part in standing water) and largely because you use the clay fraction of the soil. Once that's pounded solid and dried, it takes quite a lot to soften it again.
AIUI, if you discover someplace you let it erode a bit, you (forcefully) slap some more cob on it. And fix the eaves.
82: we've been doing that joke a fair bit.
83: oh, you bet. The vaguely colonial feel to the project adds to it. I am wondering what adventures the thing will encounter - obviously it will be packed in a shipping container, trucked to, say, Marseille or Le Havre, craned by efficient robots and even more efficient operatives onto a huge ship, and then offloaded in much the same way in Abidjan. But what happens after that? A gaily decorated truck crammed with coffee sacks and cheerful passengers? A monster Berliet roadtrain out of the fifties? As I understand it even a boringly normal approach would see it getting a trip on the Chemin de fer Abidjan-Niger, which surely rumbles through the forests and the savannahs putting wild beasts to flight even if it uses some pretty modern looking diesel electric locos. Can we get it precariously balanced on a traditional water craft up one of the rivers, perhaps towed by a paddle steamer? The geography doesn't admit of it being hauled over the mountains by main force and unnecessary suffering but an airlift in a giant ex-Soviet helicopter manned by sinister mercenary aircrew can't be ruled out.
AND THEN the sequel does a virtuoso leap between genres and is devoted to joyous musical syncretism
(but seriously, congratulations on having found a place for a wonderful thing)
90: oh, you bet. Forgive me for stereotyping but where it's going I bet they have a choir that'll take you to church.
is there even the faintest hope of an ekranoplan somewhere? haven't we earned an ekky?
At the Ministry of Munitions we were the bees of Hell, and we stored our hives with the pure essence of slaughter.
Lines like this make me wonder whether Churchill was even capable of asking someone to pass the mustard without making it sound like the fates of nations hung in the balance.
I can't help imagining him delivering it in a job interview to some hapless HR bod who has just asked him "so, can you give me an example of a previous post in which you believe you handled important responsibilities?"
Also Hell's Bees sounds like one of the candidates that got dropped during workshopping the name for the Hell's Angels. ("Bees?" "Nah." "Pigeons?" "Nah."Whales?" "Am I, like, a comedian to you?")
Oh, the Whales of Hell go
mmmmmmggggggggrrrrrrrrrroooooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggghhhhhhhh
For you but not for me....
Actually the real question about the "bees of Hell" line is: which 'Yes Minister' character would be best to deliver it? The obvious one is Hacker, because there's the running joke of him getting more and more Churchillian when he's talking about some great policy he wants to introduce, but I think Bernard would be funnier just because of the "appalled silence + eyebrow" response from Sir Humphrey.
I'm listening to my wife explain to her father the difference between an email's text and the attachment. If the Buddhists are right, she did something really evil in her last life.
Or, she'll have a Porsche in her next.
I don't have a very deep understanding of Buddhism, but I'm not sure that's how it works.
The Buddha may not have mentioned Porsche by name, but only because his acolytes wouldn't have understood.
I thought you were supposed become less attached to the material world as you get promoted.
Also, I look forward to 3D printed ice palaces.
No, it's like Menshevik Marxism. You have to max out each level before you can progress to the next.
I don't really understand Marxism either.
That's the cue to cross this with the BSW thread, but I'm not sober enough right now.
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OMG
https://x.com/3yearletterman/status/1831360944175513895?s=46&t=nbIfRG4OrIZbaPkDOwkgxQ
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Not so much an architectural style as hanging a lampshade on their inability to print flat walls or tight corners.
I walked by a crew pouring a foundation using forms and a hose the other day. I'm going to guess these guys have a background in 3d printing and not construction.
It's supposed to be stronger than a foundation made of block.
I don't have a background in construction or 3d printing. I also didn't rtfa. I'm just annoyed that what if printer but big is an idea that gets funding.
The house-sized dot matrix printer failed, because the edges with the little spoke-holes in the houses made a mess when you pulled them off.
Just going to refer to as many processes as I can as "printing". Using massive rollers to extrude steel girders? 3-D offset printing. 100 ton industrial press for car parts? 3-D movable-type printing.
Drop-forging mighty billets of steel using a colossal steam-powered trip hammer, or, as I call it, "a 3-D typewriter".
Samsung Heavy Industry's Busan shipyard assembled over sixty thousand tonnes of steel into the MV Maersk Normandia in a process nicknamed "3D bookbinding". On 4 August 2012, senior Maersk and Samsung executives watched as the construction dock was flooded and the fully bound and proofread container ship was 3D published.
On 15 December 2019, after an engine failure in the Strait of Malacca, the Maersk Normandia drifted on to a submerged reef and suffered severe 3D editing below the waterline.
Four years later, on 2 January 2024, the vessel was mildly 3D criticised by Houthi rebels in Yemen, using an Iranian-supplied anti-ship ballistic missile.