2 Affordability

THE PROBLEM:  Construction of quality houses of any sizes has not benefitted from the considerable progress seen in commercial and industrial construction, transportation and technology. Often bogged down by building codes, consumer habits, builder traditions and labor unions, good housing or even good rental has been made unaffordable to many.  THE SOLUTION:  We have spent 40 years working  to find every conceivable way to do more housing for less money, trying out dozens of concepts in 7 countries. At the end of our careers, we formed the Archimede Institute to codify our best solutions. Thanks to crowdsourcing, our new non-profit with its members is now refining and promoting the winning solutions for all,  including the very poor and those affected by natural disasters. These pages and their individual slideshows will outline most of these solutions for you to comment freely. We are all in this problem-solving mode together, greatly adding to what a a few  retired construction professionals came up with. See the 'Owning a Home' tab for greater details, new cost-saving targets and fresh insights.

FULL-SCREEN STRONGLY SUGGESTED BY CLICKING BELOW SLIDESHOW ON THIS ICON

THE PROBLEM:  Hurricanes resilience to Force 2 is easy enough with storm shutters and good design. The problems appear exponentially with F3, F4 and F5 levels. The cost of resilience at those levels appears so high that owners choose to 'luck it out'.  Yet dozens of our very affordable beach condos have weathered Force 5 strength with little or no damage. These are still talked about years later in the Caribbeans.   THE SOLUTION: Wind destruction starts with vibrations forming around sharp surface changes. We avoid these systematically with our dodecahedral geometry first tested in a wind tunnel in 1980. All  panels in our rhombic dodecahedron shells meet with the same wide angle of 120 degrees. Wind delaminates when the surface changes get closer to 90 degrees.