Posts Tagged ‘house’
Simple houses made from straw
Pierre Eloy believes straw is the ideal alternative to wood in China, a country that lacks timber resources in relation to the size of its population and has therefore been importing vast quantities as its economy has grown rapidly. The chief executive officer of NOVOFIBRE Panel Board Holding, China, Ltd, a wholly-owned company of Germany’s Mayfair Group, said he hopes his company’s straw-made panel board will become a replacement for wood-based panels, helping China’s interior decoration and construction industries to be more environmentally friendly.
10 Amazing Tree Houses: Plans, Pictures, Designs & Building Ideas
The TreeHouse Workshop is a Seattle-based company that takes the art of constructing tree houses extremely seriously. They build an average of one tree house per month and hire extremely able builders and carpenters to construct their projects. Their finished works vary in luxury but some even include (counterintuitive!) fireplaces.
Natural Homes
This is the Natural Homes map. It displays over 400 homes around the world from straw bale homes in England to cob homes in South Africa and bamboo homes in Indonesia. Click on an icon on the map and you will see a picture of the home with a short description and links to the owner’s or the builders website. You can configure the map to display one type of home like straw bale or a collection of natural homes by builder or at an ecoVillage like Cae Mabon in Wales.
Natural Homes publishes every day on facebook. We have about 80 galleries for you to enjoy. Every picture in every gallery has a description and links to other websites where you can find out more. Here are just a few of the albums you will find on our page and one of our videos in our Youtube channel. Click on the pictures to go to the gallery.
The Chinese Modular House
Home prices in many of the world’s most famous cities run to well over $1,000 per square foot. By contrast, MIT architects have produced a decidedly more affordable alternative: the first prototype from the Institute’s “1K House” project, an effort to see if low-cost homes for the poor can be constructed for $1,000, total.
The prototype, called Pinwheel House, was designed by Ying chee Chui, MArch, a graduate of MIT’s Department of Architecture, and has been constructed in Mianyang, in Sichuan Province, China.
Chui first designed Pinwheel House in 2009 as part of the design studio — essentially a class — that launched the 1K House effort. The project is particularly focused on affordable housing for areas hit by natural disasters, such as the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. This prototype turned out to be more costly, at $5,925, but is still very inexpensive in relative terms.
Read also: $1,000 house a step closer for world’s poor
