Hexayurt
Encyclopedia
Geodesic
In mathematics, a geodesic is a generalization of the notion of a "straight line" to "curved spaces". In the presence of a Riemannian metric, geodesics are defined to be the shortest path between points in the space...
geometry adapted to construction from standard 4x8 foot sheets of factory made construction material. It resembles a panel yurt
Yurt
A yurt is a portable, bent wood-framed dwelling structure traditionally used by Turkic nomads in the steppes of Central Asia. The structure comprises a crown or compression wheel usually steam bent, supported by roof ribs which are bent down at the end where they meet the lattice wall...
, hence the name.
Design
The hexayurt was designed to be constructed out of 4x8 foot sheet materials. This building's design is in the Buckminster FullerBuckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society....
lineage of using contiguous triangles to maximize the load-bearing ability of simple structures.
The basic construction principle is to use full sheets for the walls. Sheets cut from one corner to the opposite corner provide right triangles. Each pair of right triangles can be assembled into an isosceles triangle that is 8 feet wide and 8 feet in height, thus forming a roof panel.
For constructions made from light material the panels can be joined by tape. For heavier builds made out of OSB
OSB
OSB may stand for:* Oracle Service Bus, a software component* Order of Saint Benedict, a monastic order* Orthodox Study Bible, an Eastern Orthodox study Bible in English, including the Septuagint* Oregon State Bar...
or Plywood
Plywood
Plywood is a type of manufactured timber made from thin sheets of wood veneer. It is one of the most widely used wood products. It is flexible, inexpensive, workable, re-usable, and can usually be locally manufactured...
, metal brackets or wooden blocks can be used. The instructions are available on Appropedia (Appropedia
Appropedia
Appropedia is a website for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development, with a particular focus on appropriate technology. Appropedia is a wiki-based website like Wikipedia, a website where a large number of participants are allowed to create and...
is used as the wiki for the hexayurt project) and are released as public domain
Public domain
Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...
by the inventor Vinay Gupta.
For hexayurts fabricated from four-by-eight foot sheets of foam or hexacomb cardboard and duct tape, the cost has been estimated at $1,000 each (compared to $30,000 for a FEMA trailer). Hexayurts fabricated from OSB and wooden blocks can cost as little as $250-$300.
Plans are being developed to equip them with high-efficiency wood stoves, composting toilet
Composting toilet
A composting toilet is a dry toilet that using a predominantly aerobic processing system that treats excreta, typically with no water or small volumes of flush water, via composting or managed aerobic decomposition...
s and fluorescent lights.
Although construction is easy, plastic foam panels contain too much open space to fit many efficiently in a shipping container. The designer plans to use the expanding cardboard panels to solve that problem.
The model that sees frequent use at the Burning man
Burning Man
Burning Man is a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States. The event starts on the Monday before the American Labor Day holiday, and ends on the holiday itself. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening...
festival is 166 square feet (15.4 m²) in size and uses 12-18 sheets of foil-covered polyisocyanurate
Polyisocyanurate
Polyisocyanurate, also referred to as PIR, polyiso, or ISO, is essentially an improvement on polyurethane . The proportion of methylene diphenyl diisocyanate is higher than for PUR and instead of a polyether polyol, a polyester derived polyol is used in the reaction...
insulation, or hexacomb cardboard. Buildings are held together with half-foot-wide foil-surfaced duct tape
Duct tape
Duct tape, or duck tape, is cloth- or scrim-backed pressure sensitive tape often sealed with polyethylene. It is very similar to gaffer tape but differs in that gaffer tape was designed to be cleanly removed, while duct tape was not. It has a standard width of and is generally silver or black...
and anchored to the ground like tents. A plastic tarp provides a floor. Tape is used to make simple hinges on doors and windows. Window covers are hinged at the top to form window shades.
Hexayurt infrastructure package
The project makes suggestions for infrastructure:- For cooking and heat: Utilise a portable wood-gasifying stove with an AA- battery-powered fan. These burn ordinary materials like twigs and grass ten times more efficiently than an open fire, and three times more efficiently than the most efficient unpowered clay pot stoves.
- Use solarSolar cellA solar cell is a solid state electrical device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect....
recharging of AA-size batteriesBattery (electricity)An electrical battery is one or more electrochemical cells that convert stored chemical energy into electrical energy. Since the invention of the first battery in 1800 by Alessandro Volta and especially since the technically improved Daniell cell in 1836, batteries have become a common power...
to provide power for the stove, cold-cathode LEDLEdLEd is a TeX/LaTeX editing software working under Microsoft Windows. It is a freeware product....
flashlightFlashlightA flashlight is a hand-held electric-powered light source. Usually the light source is a small incandescent lightbulb or light-emitting diode...
s, and portable radioRadioRadio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...
s. - Provide water via solar water disinfectionSolar water disinfectionSolar water disinfection, also known as SODIS is a method of disinfecting water using only sunlight and plastic PET bottles. SODIS is a free and effective method for decentralized water treatment, usually applied at the household level and is recommended by the World Health Organization as a viable...
. - A portable composting toiletComposting toiletA composting toilet is a dry toilet that using a predominantly aerobic processing system that treats excreta, typically with no water or small volumes of flush water, via composting or managed aerobic decomposition...
sanitizes human waste. - The designer utilized a commercially-available inflatable satellite antenna for telecommunications.
Networked Domestic Disaster Response
The hexayurt is integral to the Networked Domestic Disaster Response project, which focuses on public coordination of disaster relief efforts, offloading the responsibility largely from the state or governmentGovernment
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
, which unites several cheap and readily available technologies to perform tasks that have been historically left to highly trained teams with expensive apparatus.
The plan outlines a system of cellphone-accessible databases which would collocate raw materials, displaced people, host families and volunteer building teams to rapidly provide temporary accommodations for people made homeless by a natural disaster
Natural disaster
A natural disaster is the effect of a natural hazard . It leads to financial, environmental or human losses...
or man-made circumstances. The plan has been positively reviewed by the American Red Cross
American Red Cross
The American Red Cross , also known as the American National Red Cross, is a volunteer-led, humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief and education inside the United States. It is the designated U.S...
and the Federal Emergency Management Agency
Federal Emergency Management Agency
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security, initially created by Presidential Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1978 and implemented by two Executive Orders...
.
The key feature to the use of hexayurts in the plan is that materials used for hexayurt construction are widely used in the American building industry. According to PIMA
Pima
The Pima are a group of American Indians living in an area consisting of what is now central and southern Arizona. The long name, "Akimel O'odham", means "river people". They are closely related to the Tohono O'odham and the Hia C-ed O'odham...
4 billion board feet of polyisocyanurate
Polyisocyanurate
Polyisocyanurate, also referred to as PIR, polyiso, or ISO, is essentially an improvement on polyurethane . The proportion of methylene diphenyl diisocyanate is higher than for PUR and instead of a polyether polyol, a polyester derived polyol is used in the reaction...
insulation boards are used annually, which is enough to shelter 600,000 people if one day's worth of boards were converted into hexayurts. However, polyisocyanurate is less used in building industry outside North America.
History
The hexayurt project has been running since 2003. It was featured in Design Like You Give a Damn (Metropolis, 2006), a book on shelters produced by Architecture for HumanityArchitecture for Humanity
Architecture for Humanity is a charitable organization that seeks architectural solutions to humanitarian crises and brings professional design services to communities in need...
. In August 2007 the project won the Participate award, which is run by Treehugger
TreeHugger
TreeHugger is a prominent sustainability website. It was rated the top sustainability blog of 2007 by Nielsen Netratings,and was included in Time Magazine's 2009 blog index as one of the top twenty-five blogs....
, Current.TV and the Burning Man
Burning Man
Burning Man is a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States. The event starts on the Monday before the American Labor Day holiday, and ends on the holiday itself. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy on Saturday evening...
festival.
External links
- Hexayurt.com - official site.
- Can we build a world with open source?, Victor Keegan, The Guardian, Thursday 5 March 2009.
- Article at MAKE
- Appropedia on the Hexayurt
- Networked Domestic Disaster Response website
- The Hexayurt: Efficient Emergency Shelter TreeHugger, March 18, 2007.
- This article contains content from the Appropedia article Hexayurt Project, licensed under Creative Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 (unported) License.