MIT's $1,000 House Challenge Yields Results 203
An anonymous reader writes "MIT's $1k House Project is an extraordinary challenge to provide safe and healthy homes for the world's burgeoning population. The Pinwheel House (PDF), a student project which helped serve as a catalyst for the challenge, has been completed in China by architect Ying chee Chui. Students have come up with a dozen or so designs to meet the challenge and improve living conditions for not just emerging economies but larger nations as well."
Re:What is the point (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the article you'd see that one of the points of this project is to rebuild houses after disasters, so in that case the people already own the land.
Compared to some UK houses its luxurious (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What is the point (Score:4, Informative)
Nevermind that. Permitting, one-time taxes, environmental reviews, and various other government fees will kill you. Worse yet, you have no idea how much all that will cost because the government agencies bill for professional services by the hour. You think AT and T would be bad as a monopoly again? At least your phone bill had a stated rate. The permitting and inspection process has no such animal. It will "cost a lot", but you have no idea how much.
That kills the project right there. A lot of us would love to do a project like that. We can predetermine the cost of the land. We can predetermine the cost of a pre-fab structure. We can even get reasonable estimates for foundations if we know the dimension of the structure; but that's as far as you can go. After that, it's anybody's guess. Unless you have money to burn, or are willing to risk not being able to complete the project within a reasonable budget, you have to say "no".
I have actually seen uncompleted projects for sale by desperate sellers. It's a sad state of affairs.
This is in California, BTW so it might not be so bad elsewhere; but something tells me it's not much better.
Huh. Second time I get to reference the Earthship guys. They've put up a map of what they call Pockets of Freedom [earthship.net] which are places in the US that don't have building codes or allow for "experimental architecture". Too bad none of them are in my area. :-(