🌬️Shifting the Housing Paradigm🛖
By Kyle Glenn, Unsplash
Summary:
Buckminster Fuller once condensed the mission for mankind into the following:
“To make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
In a time of growing population, increasingly unaffordable housing and ecological destruction, providing shelter for 100% of humanity is big design challenge.
Using geometry, biomaterials and innovative manufacturing, Geoship are looking to provide one key ingredient in the ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth’.
The Problem(s)
The housing crisis is global
To meet housing demands, it is estimated that 96,000 new homes need to be built every single day until 2030. That 1.6 billion people currently lack adequate housing, a figure that could rise to 3 billion by 2030, is both a matter of justice and social stability.
Affordability is evaporating
The ratio of house prices to income is worsening, with the average home costing 9.1 times the typical full-time salary in the UK. Historically, affordability is considered manageable when this ratio is around 3-4. Again, those with the smallest wallets will be hit hardest.
The environment will bare the biggest cost
Meeting these housing needs, if achieved via the conventional route, will surely have mass ecological impact. The construction sector is responsible for approximately 38% of global CO2 emissions. In the UK context, housing demands could affect 250,000 hectares of land by 2050.
The Scape
Imagine in the not-so-distant future, a housing revolution is underway. It is being termed a revolution because it has achieved three seemingly opposing goals: ultra-affordability, scalability and sustainability.
Inspired by the visionary dreams and designs of Buckminster Fuller, Geoship was the company to instigate and catalyse this revolution.
You have been saving for seven years to put down a deposit on your first house. Luckily a friend mentioned Geoship as worth checking out. Now you’ve put down a tiny deposit to explore what your home might look like. You’ve decided upon the Lake District as a perfect place to raise a family and, thanks to the virtual design space, you can experiment with how your new home might best synergise with the ecological landscape. Amazingly, the platform also encourages bringing others who’d love to live in community and nature with you into the design process.
Having been able to just afford a small two-bed, you’re suddenly purchasing an expansive four-bed, designed to your taste, in one of your favourite places on earth, and in community with those you love.
What does this new home look like?
Each are Geodesic Domes. The most efficient design for structural strength, energy efficiency and materials efficiency, they are the pinnacle of sustainable architecture. Differing in size and function, Geoship offers a range of Domes: you may need a studio, a two bed, or the four bedroom family home built across two large domes.
They are built from bioceramics, a novel composite material made up of hemp fibres and other elements such as phosphate and calcium, mimicking the chemical composition of bone. Water-activated at room temperature, the bioceramic composite is carbon-neutral unlike normal material composites. Furthermore, in the geodesic structure, the bioceramics ensure incredible durability and security against all natural disasters from fires to earthquakes.
To this synthesis of geometry and materials, Geoship’s approach to manufacturing is the third key that has unlocked this revolutionary combination of affordability, scalability and sustainability.
Using injection moulding and the moulds from geodesic design blueprint, the modular manufacturing process is both cheap and easily scalable – micro-manufacturing facilities can be erected at minimal cost. At scale, the build cost decreases to just $80 per sq foot. For the family of four, building their 100 sq foot 4 bedroom home is possible on a budget of just $8k.
But housing is not simply the home, it is also the lifestyle.
Aware of the changing context facing home-owners in the 21st Century, Geoship has developed two distinct approaches to lifestyle.
Firstly, their homes are designed to allow for an off-grid lifestyle in synergy with your natural surroundings. Offering a 70% reduction in energy costs, and easily equipped with solar panelling, water filtering and reuse systems, aquaponic gardens, and waterless toilets, the Geodome is designed for waste-free natural living.
More radically, their housing platform is designed to be leveraged by communities not just individuals. First emerging on the edge of society, the desire to live in a community that reflects ones values has grown. By offering potential communities the online design space to create, envision and explore how their community could look, Geoship allows for a more measured approach to community-building: test the village ‘viability’ in a virtual space, then make the decision to implement or not.
Ultimately, the vision is to build regenerative villages, not simply regenerative homes.
Downstream Value Creation
Affordable homes at scale
Using innovative manufacturing techniques and materials, the geodesic domes are both easy to scale and cheap to build.
Sustainable homes at scale
Combining these low-carbon materials and geometric designs with a whole-systems approach to village-building and lifestyle affordances, Geoship’s model allows for minimal impact builds and waste-free living.
A new paradigm in community-building and -living
Looking to inspire new ways of living, Geoship has enabled people to come together and virtually explore how a new community might look before having to build one. This provides the opportunity to spot the mistakes that might emerge beforehand.
For Digging Deeper…
The inspiration for this week’s scape.
The Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth
The real inspiration behind the whole project, this Buckminster Fuller text provides a useful synthesis of his worldview – a window into the mind of one of our favourite visionaries.
Buckminster Fuller’s vision today
A podcast in which Geoship Co-Founder explores what Buckminster Fuller’s vision can mean for us today.
