Digital Wood Joints Wood Joints are fascinating! They embellish old furniture and wood constructions of ancient Japanese temples alike. Everytime we come across them, we are filled with admiration: Admiration for the skill of the master craftsman, as their creator, but also admiration for the balance between function and beauty, which turns the furniture or temple into a work of art. With the onset of industrialisation, the traditional wood joints have been banned more and more to the background. Manufacturing has to be above all efficient, so there is no more room for traditional wood joints. Or is there?
Tiny House In The Outback Once upon a time, I lived in Australia for a while, the thing that remember so clearly is how big the country is and how much space is available. The country is the size of the US, with a population well under 25 million, where 80% of that population lives within 50 miles of the coast, this means that the interior of the continent is very very empty. There is a strong sense of quasi cowboy feel to being in the outback, where I lived while I was there. This house not only captures that sense of the rough and tumble of the bush, but is sustainable too. In an odd way this prefab structure has a turret feel, almost medieval.
Pallet House Build In the summer of 2011, volunteers from all over the country came together to build a house of pallets for a family on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The powerful experiences of living and working on the reservation were transformational for every participant of the build. Here in The U.S.A. there are so many places with codes and restrictions.
Port-a-Bach: A Container Getaway Port-a-Bach is a holiday home made from a shipping container. It’s portable, secure, stylish, and can comfortably accommodate two adults and two children. How wonderful it is to just lay there, on the top bunk bed, read a book and enjoy the perfect indoor/outdoor flow. This prefab getaway allows you to use your land without investing in a permanent housing solution; it can be connected to available services or used off the grid; and it has a minimal impact on site and can be easily transported and installed. This portable vacation home is based on a fully enclosed steel shell, positioned on six stable concrete footings. Traditional Style House Plan - 2 Beds 1.5 Baths 1216 Sq/Ft Plan #49-121 Some of our plans are also available on other websites and in printed catalogs. We are committed to selling these plans at or below the lowest price available elsewhere. If you find a regularly priced plan (not “on-sale”) for a lower price, we'll beat the advertised price by 5%.
Global Village Construction Set by Marcin Jakubowski Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters building the Global Village Construction Set - a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The aim of the GVCS is to lower the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. Its a life-size lego set that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, or in the developing world. So Far we’ve prototyped 8 of the 50 Machines and we’ve been expanding rapidly. We are 100% crowd-funded. We have 400 True Fans that support our work monthly.
Steel Clad 350 Sq. Ft. Modern Cabin on Stilts with Shutters on August 15, 2014 Check out this 350 sq. ft. low-maintenance and virtually indestructible modern cabin on stilts with steel shutters. The owner’s hired Olson Kundig Architects to build a weekend cabin that could provide them with a rural retreat during their get-aways to Washington’s Olympic National Park. Since the cabin would be left uninhabited for weeks at a time steel shutters were used to completely enclose and secure the cabin when the owners are away. As you walk up the stairs to the front door and through a small entry way you will see the bathroom on the left and straight ahead the main living space. The living room is very spacious and open with a dining area and compact kitchen.
Bulletproof & Fireproof House Made From Used Plastic Bottles This 2 bedroom house built from recycled plastic bottles is bulletproof and fireproof and can withstand earthquakes. Oh, and it also reportedly holds a comfy year-round temperature of 64 degrees F. The bottles were filled with sand and are held together by mud and cement to form a solid wall that supposedly is stronger than cinder clocks. A man builds a wall with plastic bottles in the village of Sabon Yelwa. A group of activists have come up with a plan to build a house using bottles, providing what they say is an environmentally smart way to tackle the housing shortage problem in Nigeria.
Touchscreen Landscapes [Image: Screen grab via military.com]. This new, partly digital sand table interface developed for military planning would seem to have some pretty awesome uses in an architecture or landscape design studio. Using 3D terrain data—in the military's case, gathered in real-time from its planetary network of satellites—and a repurposed Kinect sensor, the system can adapt to hand-sculpted transformations in the sand by projecting new landforms and elevations down onto those newly molded forms. You can thus carve a river in real-time through the center of the sandbox, and watch as projected water flows in— [Image: Screen grabs via military.com].
Craftsman Style House Plan - 3 Beds 2 Baths 1831 Sq/Ft Plan #417-155 Some of our plans are also available on other websites and in printed catalogs. We are committed to selling these plans at or below the lowest price available elsewhere. If you find a regularly priced plan (not “on-sale”) for a lower price, we'll beat the advertised price by 5%.
CNC Panel Joinery Notebook I’ve been collecting clever ways of slotting flat stock together since I first read Nomadic Furniture back in 1999, well before the advent of the accessible hobby-class CNC tools that, today, make manufacturing parts like these pretty easy. Now, the world is full of people designing models, project enclosures, sculpture, furniture, and all kinds of other cool stuff to be assembled from parts made on laser cutters and CNC routers, and I keep expecting a definitive book or website to emerge that covers the “bag of tricks” in an organized way. So far, I haven’t found it. I may have missed it. Or maybe this article can serve as a jumping-off point.
Small Modern Polygon Cabin with Loft I think you will find this modern polygon cabin interesting. And quite possibly a cool place to live. Built on a concrete foundation this small cabin serves two purposes for the owners. Used as a sculpture studio and to accommodate guests this small space was designed by Jeffrey S. Poss, Architect and WORKUS Studio.