Bolwoningen: Living in spherical homes | Hacker News Reader

Bolwoningen: Living in spherical homes

parametric-architecture.com

84 pointshochmartinez86 comments

A sphere’s minimized surface area per volume also means that temperature control is more efficient: there’s less surface area for heat to escape in the winter, or enter in the summer. So for the same (or similar) wall material cost & ongoing energy cost, you get more interior space.

Then the question is: can you actually use the extra interior space?

Yeah, the wastage of the "average" home bugs me, but there's got to be lower hanging fruit than somehow living in spheres. Even just a cylinder would give you some great improvement (and it would be mostly rectangles, with normal windows), but even better than that? On the other side of the wall I am typing this at, there's a heat engine removing heat from a freezing box, but then it has to drop all that heat into the space I am sitting in . . so then another box has to try and get the heat outside. Oh! But wait! There's another box that HEATS UP - a lot! - so I can put food in it. Another one dries my clothes, and makes hot water, both of them putting heat back in. Jiminy beeswax. Not even going to touch the way water is brutally wasted in the typical setup.

I have often thought of this. It may turn out that those inefficiencies are fairly small - the devices themselves small, well insulated, etc. One would have to do the maths. But I imagine that cooling all the air with AC (and letting it leak whenever you open a door or window) and then heating an outdoor pool is huge

I think we should start with dc power. Each house should have a 12/24 volt low voltage high efficiency power supply to eliminate the need for individual converters everywhere

48V would be a better choice. It is increasingly popular for off-grid applications because the higher voltage reduces heat and power loss, letting you use thinner wires, which are both cheaper and easier to install; but 48V is still considered "low voltage" and does not require any special safety precautions.

48 is fine but then it need a dc dc step down power supply

This analysis doesn't hold up when you consider that apartment buildings pack multiple cuboid spaces into a single larger cuboid building, sharing floors and ceilings with each other to lower heating and cooling costs.

This becomes obvious when you take it to the extreme. A cube of 10 × 10 × 10 meters can be divided into 1000 units of 1 cubic meter each, and has an external surface area equal to 6 × 10 x 10 = 600 square meters, or 0.6 square meters surface exposed per unit.

A solitary sphere with a volume of 1 cubic meter has a radius of 0.62 cm and a surface area of 4.836 square meters, which is over 8 times worse, even ignoring the fact that it's harder to utilize the space in the sphere.

Yes, the surface area ratio is only applicable to whole buildings. But, regardless of how the interior is divided, the whole space has to be heated. (Empty apartments notwithstanding, since that would change the shared-internal-walls calculations.) The savings you get from multi-unit buildings ultimately comes from the resource-sharing of the multiple tenants, rather than the shape of the whole building.

Now that I think about it, maybe the spherical or cylindrical shape is actually better suited to an apartment building. The inner units _would_ have typical rectangular angles. For units along the curved surface, some walls will be straight and some will be curved.

Plus, the curvature would be “wider” for a larger building, which would make it a little easier to design or arrange furniture.

The inner units also would have zero windows.

Even if that wouldn’t make them so undesirable as to be basically useless, that probably would be in conflict with building codes in large parts of the world.

the best you could do is a fairly small sphere with kitchens, bathrooms and storage spaces in the inside.

Spheres can't be stacked together like terraced houses though.

Furniture is rectangular with corners. Boxes are rectangular shaped. Windows that are rectangular can slide in ways that circular windows cannot. Look at the picture in the article showing a couch and chair at angles to one another.

This is a stupid idea.

Yep. It would make sense only if these were to be anchored below sea level or somewhere beyond the stratosphere, else it’s not space efficient.

Sure, spheres acting as a pressure vessel make 100% sense.

Even conceding they may be the only sensible choice for that environment - they are still not space efficient.

But its good to try something different, at least once, somewhere in the world? People live in yurts, and they are circular. Perhaps it was good to explore the idea that living spaces didn't need to be rectangles. Perhaps it feels different? Perhaps living in a space that doesn't easily fit rectangular furniture would lead to some new insights?

Cylinders and cones (and thus yurts) do have advantages. Spheres don’t. They are much more difficult to construct, and are unstable on a flat surface.

If we a giving credit for whimsy, full marks for the sphere houses. But scoring as a place to live? Failure.

Spheres minimize surface area per unit of volume. As heat loss in a building is proportional to its exposed surface area, this means they're potentially very thermally efficient. (Less good for collecting sunlight if you're going to cover them in PV panels, though.)

This is a great argument, except that the extra space that makes the building so efficient compared to a cube, is space that mostly can't be used.

Yurts typically do not have furniture of the kind one would have in a fixed home.

And even very primitive fixed huts are typically rectangular.

Even ignoring all existing human objects, circles don’t tile. It’s fundamentally impossible to efficiently pack solids this way.

People don't tile well either. Perhaps there's an advantage to unused space

People tile well in a circular tent. Fire in the middle, people lying around feet towards the fire, upper bodies and heads out. But almost nobody lives like that anymore.

Rhombic dodecahedral might be a better choice.

I think non-tiling isn't always a bad feature! For example, you can use the spaces for ventilation (If we're imagining houses with non-tiling shapes) and light to shine through. Strictly you can always find complementary shapes to make non-single tiling tiles of course.

But you can do the same in a space that does tile. You can simply choose to not fill some tiles.

You can make rounded furniture. I actually have a quarter circle couch in front of the fire place. it's nice.

Round furniture being nice =/= round rooms being nice.

And a round room might be a cylinder with a flat curved edge at least. A spherical room/wall is the absolute worst use of space case possible.

Round furniture exists too, like the fabled round table. Curved windows could totally slide along a spherical surface.

My kitchen table is not rectangular. My bathroom sink is not rectangular. My chest of drawers is not rectangular. Who cares what shape boxes are? Balloons are egg-shaped, or round or rectangular. Pipes tend to be cylindrical. Light bulbs have various shapes. What does that have to do with the shape of houses?

I have seen many curved walls with curved furniture fitted to the wall. I have seen many non-rectangular windows.

Relax. Different is not always stupid. Without different, progress is impossible.

Different is not always stupid, but sometimes it is. To my reading the article offered not a single advantage these homes had compared to alternatives.

Then you didn't read very well. They have inspired tourism in a way unmatched by any surrounding houses. Are there websites dedicated to your rectangular house?

I hope they inspired some among a generation of children who grew up there to think bravely.

> They have inspired tourism in a way unmatched by any surrounding houses.

lol you are joking right.

I'm pretty sure OP was arguing from the point of view of the inhabitants of the houses. Living in an oddity for the sake of its odness is not a boon.

Better is different (by definition), but different is worse, so better is worse.

I see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vidzkYnaf6Y

Humans are not rectangular.

They sit, shift, slouch, and more, into all kinds of non-linear, non-rectangular, and even non-polygonal positions.

Just had a live example of this last night at an impromptu music event that suddenly manifested at a cafe where I happened to be sitting.

yet sound waves are spherical. (oops)

It's modernism, a mental disability that because something looks futuristic, it must be better. One of the main symptoms is an obsession with measurement; a ball maximizes volume to surface, and because that number is more than another number, therefore it is better. Other symptoms of the condition are a complete lack of imagination; a near physical inability to imagine a thing or conjure an experience in your minds eye without it existing. Patients tend to eventually suffer from complete mental sclerosis. It's been an endemic illness since at least the 20th century.

Add to that a complete lack of empathy with regards to the people who will be supposed to live or work in the building. (the only people left living in the sphere homes are students and a few other young people with low income) This is why modernism is seen by some as related to narcissism and psychopathy.

To be fair, the architect did live in one of these homes.

The most amazing type of house, and one I'd like to live in, is the Heliodome, which apparently is heated by the sun even in winter while staying cool enough in summer: https://www.heliodome.com/ .

That's pretty cool. I imagine the parameters need to change with the latitude? Didn't seen anything about that on the site.

How does it stay cool in summer? Are the windows oriented in a way that winter sun gets in but summer sun doesn't?

Correct. In summer the main window façade is not in direct sunlight.

I would like to live in a toroidal house, preferably raised above the ground by standing on some pillars, and with trees around, both outside the torus and inside the torus.

I am lucky that even if I live in an apartment (a.k.a. flat), when I look through the windows I do not see some other ugly building, but I see the crowns of several beautiful trees, which are close, at a distance of about 5 meters.

I am working most of the time being seated in front of a computer, but whenever I have to think about something more difficult I prefer to stand up and walk, while thinking.

Doing this in an apartment, even when choosing the longest possible path, requires frequent direction reversals for walking.

In a toroidal house, it would be possible to walk for any duration, without paying attention to the environment while thinking and without being distracted by the necessity of doing reversals.

Interesting! There are also the Cube houses by Dutch architect Piet Blom:

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubuswoningen_(Rotterdam)

They do look quite similar to the "Futuro" or "Futuro pod" from the late 60s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuro

They also remind me of inflatable concrete buildings. Most use an inflatable dome as a mold, and then are spray coated with concrete and reinforced.

https://baptistedarboistexier.wordpress.com/2015/09/06/bubbl...

https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/craft/skill-infl...

My favorite utilitarian version is Concrete Canvas, which makes pre-impregnated concrete fabric shelters. You open the pallet, inflate, spray with water, and then give them 24 hours to cure. The finished structure is sterile, fire resistant, can be buried, and has good insulating properties.

https://www.concretecanvas.com/us/cc-shelters/

There's one on Airbnb near Joshua Tree NP, though I had a bad experience on Airbnb that customer service wasn't willing to attend to, and stopped using them.

https://zh-t.airbnb.com/rooms/33518282

Better pictures: https://unusualplaces.org/bolwoningen-neighborhood-of-spheri...

Better user experience too. No mailing list sign-up beg-screen after three seconds.

This architecture is just a hobby for a rich country. The vast majority of the population dreams of Dutch suburbia.

According to the media the housing market tanked. I sold a 1970s 200k family home with garden on the first day. A house from a time when they were still building homes for the lower middle class.

If you like that, you'll love the cube houses (mentionned in the article, built also in the Netherlands, around the same time)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_house

This is exactly what popped into my mind. I've been inside one of those, I wouldn't like to live there.

I get motion sick looking at the outside. The inside could barely stand looking at. Cool, but not for me, thanks.

Cube houses were radical back in the day and they are still there in Rotterdam more than 50 years later.

A more recent experiment in Amsterdam is also worth mentioning: http://www.tempohousing.com/projects/keetwonen/

This is basically a project where they built cheap student housing using pre-fabricated container sized units for a 1000+ students.

Apparently, the company behind this, Tempohousing, has been running projects around the world building temporary housing using shipping containers for refugees, homeless people, and other use cases, etc. There are a few more companies doing similar things at this point.

Spherical house are good for locations with extreme wind conditions. Other than that they foolishly waste half their potential square footage of floor for the sake of aesthetics.

I once worked in an office that was in a two story geodesic dome. It was kind of annoying on the second floor due to the slope of the outside wall making it hard to find a good use for space on that side of my office. More details here [1].

That said, those spherical homes look like they might work out OK. As I said about domes in the comment linked in the prior paragraph,

> They probably work better as houses than office buildings, because the designer of a house can better anticipate what each room will be used for and arrange it so that things you'd naturally want against outside walls are things that would be OK with the curves.

> An office building has a lot more variability from tenant to tenant, making it more likely that the tenant's things won't work well against the curved walls.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29301072

Check out earthships:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship

I have seen one, and met and talked briefly with the guy who built it.

He is Alex Leeor, a British guy living in the mountains in Tamil Nadu, South India.

He built one there with local help.

It is perched almost on the edge of a cliff that drops steeply 7000 feet (about 2000 meters) down to the plains.

There are multiple articles about him, which you can google.

Edit:

It was round, but not spherical in shape. Round in the horizontal dimension. With a lot of glass windows.

He said the overall design made it warm in winter and cool in summer, although summers are hardly hot there.

I was initially confused by the comment that it doesn't get hot in summers - Tamil Nadu during summers is one of the hotter regions of India. The actual earthship / community is built in Kodaikanal, a famous "hill station" in the Nilgiri mountain range.

>I was initially confused by the comment that it doesn't get hot in summers

NP.

I did say (knowing both that state (TN) and specific area well) "mountains" (not "hills") and "7000 feet".

That makes it a much more cold place than the plains of TN. You need a winter jacket in winter, and your ears and hands (and whole body, really) freeze like shit if exposed (not comparable to the northern areas of earth, like EU and US, but still). Moderate to heavy rain in many months of the year, including winter, makes it colder. The place gets both the south-west and north-east monsoons, since it is high up and near the Kerala border, so escapes the rain-shadow effect that the rest of Tamil Nadu has.

Minimum temperatures are in the range of 10 to 5 degrees Celsius or lower, indoors, and you sometimes see frost on grass outside.

>The actual earthship / community is built in Kodaikanal, a famous "hill station" in the Nilgiri mountain range.

A few kilometers outside Kodaikanal, only reachable by jeep or motorbike. And it is in the Palani Hills, not the Nilgiris. Both are part of the long Western Ghats mountain range, which extends down the western side of India, near the coast, from Maharashtra or Gujarat, down to Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

My family rented an Earthship for a long weekend in Taos. It was kinda cool. Pretty nice house, but they're very expensive to build.

Yes, they must be.

Alex said he built it over several years. And more so because it was high in the mountains.

This website is as unusable as the spherical houses the article is about.

amen.

Those are the best developed by architect and CalEarth founder Nader Khalili

https://www.calearth.org/intro-superadobe

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthbag_construction

The very first houses (stone age) where circular rather than square.

So you could say that our architectural fashions are going around in circles

Nice, these are located less than a mile from my home and nicely situated along a stream, just like a bunch of mushrooms in a forest.

They have been around for decades and were an innovation project from an alternative living cooperation in the city (Den Bosch).

I think they are now mostly occupied by students and 30-.

Imagine your window breaks, you try to diy cut round glass pane and it keeps breaking...

I live under an angled roof which is slightly annoying but I cannot imagine what it must be like not having straight walls

Surely you mean angled ceiling?

Both? The ceiling is angled because of the roof. I guess some houses might not have rooms that high so one doesn't mean the other.

Most roofs are angled, I wouldn't say the same of ceilings.

Here in the US anyways, it's pretty common to just have dead space separating the sloped roof from the interior horizontal ceiling. Maybe you have a usable attic in that space, but it's kind of unusual for it to be living space IME. It's wasteful, but it establishes a precedent of wasting interior volume.

The distinction matters in this discussion specifically since you can take the same approach to the dead space in the walls of a spherical exterior if you prefer a boxy interior living space... Put shelves and other infra/amenities in that area to achieve cosmetically orthonormal interior walls.

There's some advantage to a curved structural exterior... large flat surfaces aren't great structurally. But they don't have to result in curved interior walls. Just like our angled roofs don't always result in angled interior ceilings.

I like the fact that they are extremely cheap to manufacture and also to maintain.

With housing shortage in many parts of the world, could this be a solution for the poor?

You could even stack them on top of each other like marbles (assuming an edging so they don't roll off), and be able to use a very small space for hundreds if not thousands of dwellings.

Electricity and network could be done by using a meshing technology.

Something being individually cheap does not mean that it'd be cheaper to make and stack a bunch of them then say, a regular old apartment complex.

Also, "cheap housing for poor people" has a bad habit of becoming "projects".

How would you get to the doors?

there is absolutely nothing wrong with the commie blocks we have in Bulgaria other than the need to fix the facade. They are extremely cheap to mass manufacture, build and also they easily can last 100 years with enough living space for everyone. This already works, it's just not done due to regulations in many countries.

The shell of a house is not where most of the cost goes. Why would stacking spherical shells like marbles be cheap?

This particular form factor seems inefficient. But there is quite a bit of innovation in the area of building pre-fabricated homes for refugees. These are popping up in a lot of places. Including the Ukraine recently.

And of course there are also some high end options that are popular for building bespoke houses in e.g. the Scandinavian and North American markets.

Basically, pre-fabricated housing is a solved problem from a technical point of view. Cheap to manufacture, easy to deploy, and pretty comfortable to live in. If you think about it, there are numerous viable ways of providing people with some form of shelter to shield them from the elements.

Mostly the issue is not technical challenges but the fact that there's a lot of local push back against the deployment of any form of cheap housing projects in a lot of places. This has nothing to do with their pricing (cheap) or quality (pretty decent) but with the level of protectionism in place to guard prices of existing houses. Solving cheap housing would collapse prices.

That's why you don't find trailer parks in richer parts of the US. However, they are very popular as semi-permanent slums in less rich parts and have been so for many decades. Tens of millions of people live in those actually. Just mostly not anywhere near where the housing shortages are the most urgent.

There is a logical, sensible, cheap, commercially available form of housing that you can prefab, stack, transport: 40ft-housing-containers. Those are normal 40ft sea containers with a housing interior.

You can load them onto anything that can transport such a container, nothing exotic or problematic, just run-of-the-mill reach stackers, trucks, ships, etc. They are cheap because 40ft-containers are mass-produced, and you can make them either out of new cheap container parts or reuse an old one into a home. Electricity is usually a 32A-3phase-CEE-connector in every corner which can also be used to chain multiple containers. What is trickier is fresh/waste-water connections, but also not really a huge problem.

Biggest problem with those right now is that manufacturers are overwhelmed due to demand for refugee housing in Europe.

What about insulation? A steel box in a heatwave won't be much fun either. Are there solutions for heating/cooling container homes?

Same as for e.g. refrigerated containers (reefers), you add foam or glass wool cladding. Heating and cooling can be done with the usual heatpump/AC machines available.

Cutting doors and windows into a sea contain compromises it's strength.

I like the monolithic.com approach better - Not totally spherical, but a lot more options.

I wonder how the acoustics are?

Though not directly analogous, geodesic dome cabins are not unusual in the Sierras (I see them in some of the communities along highway 4) and they are notorious for allowing sounds to bounce all over the place, making privacy difficult. For listening to music/watching movies, maybe it would be awesome?

I read an article that said they're great for singing or music

Reply on news.ycombinator.com