Halftogon House Concept

It all comes down to maintenance costs. Having a home is one thing, but making sure that it doesn’t cost you much if at all for years and decades is the goal. I have many examples of friends and family building or renovating houses only to realize that heating that place costs an arm or cooling it down is an issue or that material was great for the first five years but is now deteriorating fast etc.

I designed my home with all that in mind.

So, the best shape in terms of insulation is the circle.

You want to minimize external surface area and consequently heat loss and gain. It also keeps building costs to the minimum. Circles are the best for that. Obviously, circles are not practical to build with. 3D printing solves the issue I guess, but it’s still weird to have interiors that are rounded (and with angled furniture, that’s even weirder). Human evolution pushed my brain to feel suspicious of rounded interiors. So we build squares:

Square is the simplest and easiest shape to build with. One big problem is that it’s boring as hell. Kind of brutal. We see that with modern McMansions and those arrangements of cubes. Not that pretty, even with nice landscape. Bigger problem, when you add surface with a cube or two, it adds thermal bridges and surfaces really quickly. Let’s say you want a L-shape house (two rectangles), that’s six external surface areas with some sort of connection between them (thermal bridges).

It’s not bad per se, but it will have a non-negligible long term cost. What about octagons?

That’s the closest shape to a circle, right? You might be surprised to learn that the octagon is really great for houses: 20% more space than a square shape with the same perimeter. The space inside the house is real space and not hallways and corridors: less space waste.

There’s no big problem with that shape. It’s actually pretty awesome in many ways. But! You kind of need to build big to enjoy decent-sized rooms otherwise they’re small and it feels like you’re an ant moving from a small room to another all the time. I’d rather not build big and probably wouldn’t be able to anyway. Big houses are terrible for the environment and just plain bad financial investment: if you have kids, they’ll live around you, not in the room you specifically designed for them. Bet.

So I got the idea of cutting it in half (when in doubt designing something, just cut).

 

And then rotate it.

Ta-da! The bottom is full North (street side). The top, the longest line, is South with large windows all along. East on the left, West on the right. If you center around the bottom left corner, the shape is reminiscent of two hands joining at the wrists.

The shape is sheltering, protecting yet stays open on one side. The green roof will accentuate this idea. The 3D printed concrete technique means the house is uni-body. Zero thermal bridges, bitches. Open floor plan, obviously. Cross ventilation East/West with cool North, North/East facing the walls, cooling down the house passively. Sun on the South side for passive heating.

Concrete and glass on the outside pretty much guarantees that nothing will rot or need special attention, ever.

This way I think maintenance and costs would be kept at a minimum all year long while enjoying a serene place to live that regulates its temperature efficiently and naturally. LETS GO

*drops mic*

(next time I’ll show you the floor plan I designed; it’s dope af)