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If you go to 300house.com you can learn about a fascinating project/contest whose goal is to design a $300 house for the world’s two billion poorest inhabitants: We started with five simple questions: * How can organic, self-built slums be turned into livable housing? * What might a house-for-the-poor look like? * How can world-class [...]
What if you are a little worried about a possible apocalypse, nuclear nightmare scenario, terrorist attack or food crisis? What is you want a house with a lot of well-protected square feet, preferably underground and easily defended? Then what you may be looking for is a missile base home, as seen here: You can learn [...]
Imagine fitting your whole living space – kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc. – into 90 square feet. That’s a 9 x 10 foot room. Or 7 x 13 feet. It’s an extremely small footprint for an apartment. But as seen in this video, it can work: This sounds extreme in the U.S., but it is not [...]
Back in September, a challenge was issued on Treehugger’s web site to create a 420 square foot living space that can do everything a space twice that big would normally do: Help Design, Build an Ultra-Low Footprint Apartment: The LifeEdited Project Specifically: One reason New Yorkers use less energy per capita is that they live [...]
Cross Laminated Timber panels (also known as CLT and X-LAM) are a relatively new building material. They have been used to build everything from houses to multi-story apartment buildings: The building is made from prefabricated cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels, made in Austria from sustainably harvested lumber. They are strong; Craig says they can go up [...]
An extreme makeover for your garage – Creating the transcendent garage
by Marshall Brain | December 9, 2010
It is interesting to look at the garages in suburban neighborhoods. As a general rule there seem to be three common types of garages found in the wild. At one end of the spectrum there is the “garage used as mini storage”, easily identified because the cars are always parked in the driveway instead of [...]
A different way to build a house #61 – Building a house for $3,500
by Marshall Brain | December 8, 2010
This video describes a very interesting project – it is a house built for less than $3,500. Obviously such a house will be relatively small (128 square feet). Not so obviously it is built on a trailer frame so it can legally be that small. And a great deal of the material used to build [...]
How to build your own automatic Star Trek door for your home
by Marshall Brain | December 7, 2010
Arguably one of the coolest features of the Star Trek universe is the automatic doors that open and close automatically. The doors also had a manual feature, as shown in this short clip from the series: What if you would like to add doors like these to your home? Here is one quick demonstration of [...]
Home construction is one of those things that really has not changed a whole lot for hundreds of years. For example, if you look at the houses in Colonial Williamsburg, they have pitched roofs with shingles, walls with siding or brick on the outside and plaster on the inside, wooden floors, casement windows and so [...]
Imagine a house that is 27 stories tall. And six of those stories are for the parking garage for 160 cars. Imagine a house that covers 37,000 square meters (nearly 400,000 square feet)(as big as 160 “normal houses” (2,500 square feet each) in the United States). It’s that big in part because it has a [...]
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