Gunite Bubbles

[TrevorKane]

Has anybody tried building this type of thing in the islands yet?

http://www.rogerdean.com/architecture/ho...fe-ii.html

Home for Life: ROGER DEAN has designed a house for the new millennium: artistically beautiful, environmentally kind, but cheap and quick to build. It began as a college project to design a child's bed and grew into a radically new form of architecture for a world awakening to the damage done by post-war housing and office development.

[Radiopeg]

I like it. I remember those scary places from when I was a kid. And that was a long time ago...
Maybe we can get Peter, our gunite guy to make us houses, too. I like his sense of whimsy and artistry.

Edited for a second thought

[TrevorKane]

Yeah, I was just watching "Empire Strikes Back" and Yoda's hut triggered memories of the Dean architecture, and a connection with Peter's gunite tanks...

[Jay Bondesen]

Check at monolithic.com and look at the eco dome. It's interesting what you can do ith an inflatable and gunnite. I worked with these folks back in the 70's and we sprayed polyurethane on the bag and then gunnite on the foam but that was in cold country. I think that the gunnite dome will pretty much stand up to any ether or bug.

Jay

[Peter Epperson]

I really enjoyed the link to Roger Dean's work. I wholeheartedly agree that buildings should be designed to feel comfortable. All to often design comes down to economics and people end up living in boxes made of sticks and drywall. It may be a place to sleep but it's hard to call it a home. Or take a look at commercial buildings in Hilo. Most new commercial buildings are steel framed and clad and have zero character. Contrast that with the older stores downtown or the Iron Works building. We used to care about the world we created.

If you haven't seen it, get a copy of A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294000362&sr=8-1 . He has written a series of books about architecture that are all about making our world more comfortable. He worked with a team of designers worldwide. Whenever one of the team entered a building that had a special feel then they would get together and analyze why it worked. The result is this remarkable book that puts all of this work together into a guide to good design and construction. The book is broken down into 253 mini chapters. Each chapter begins with a premise such as this: #159 Light on Two Sides of Every Room "When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty" After they begin with a premise such as this the author will then go into a more detailed explanation, frequently including relevant studies to reinforce their ideas. Then the conclusion to the chapter comes with the solution such as "Locate each room so that it has an outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction."

Very simple stuff. and it doesn't necessarily mean more expensive. It's just conscious design. I love this book and have been referring to it for years. I have seen it on a number of shelves in architects offices. Some have told me that it's their bible.

#191 The Shape of Indoor Space is a chapter that speaks to Roger Dean's endorsement of organic architecture. In this chapter the author agrees that rigid crystalline squares and rectangles make no special sense in human terms. He then goes on to warn about going overboard with organic shapes that look more like wombs or caves and are just as irrational. A lengthy explanation then follows about blending the two ideas.

I'm building my outdoor kitchen right now. I've taken some ideas from A Pattern Language and I hope this place feels like the friendly, safe, sociable space that I imagine it will. It's going to blend ferrocement and wood. There are curves but it's mostly rectangular. I want to create a building that, as Christopher Alexander describes it, when you walk in you first reaction is to fell welcome and say "ahhhh".

[csgray]

Peter,
I love that book!

One argument for building rooms with rectilinear is that we stand and move at 90 degrees to the earth, and require level surfaces for sleeping and working. Unless well planned, curved spaces can have a lot of wasted space. I spent a few months house sitting a dome one winter and there was so much unusable space to heat that it was ridiculous! On the other hand I love vaulted spaces and the use of the barrel arch in living spaces is a nice compromise between the cube and the orb.

Carol

[Seeb]

when i get the money to do it. i'm planing on building a workshop out of a ferrocement barrel vault

[csgray]

This is a really amazing house:
http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com/archi...008/07/11/

Carol

[MarkP]

I know a guy who had built a dome house and lived in it. He said he really liked it although sealing the roof was a bear. He is now building a small cabin in Orchidland. It is a regular rectangular house so although he had nice things to say about his dome things were not so great that he is doing it again.

I think domes have something in common with Bigfoot and UFOs in that they are burdened with a mystique that overshadows everything else. People fall in love with the idea of a dome and then come up with reasons to justify that infatuation. Domes technically enclose the most volume with the least surface area but not all of that volume is usable and after cutting all the corners off sheets of plywood to get the necessary triangles they don't use the least materials. If we were termites who could form our houses into whatever organic shapes we wanted as easily as we could rectangular shapes, I'll bet we would still have a fair number of straight lines in our houses.

[csgray]

Seeb,
Look at what these folks built:

http://flashweb.com/blog/2010/12/tiny-co...years.html

If you scroll down there is a list of "favorite posts" that has links to all the postings about their barrel vaulted structure.

Carol