I’m just imagining how much stronger it’d be if I used glue and screws…
4 Likes
Material costs are higher since you have more wood, but labour costs are lower because you have no need to fasten each piece of wood. The company claims that it’s less expensive to build one of their walls than to build a traditional wood frame wall (see my link upthread).
And this makes sense - just about every single innovation in home building in the past century has been focused around paying more for special manufactured materials which require less labour to assemble, from drywall replacing lathe and plaster, to this company’s wooden blocks that don’t need nails, glue, or screws.
Labour isn’t just expensive, it’s also time. The fewer days you spend building, the less you have to deal with budget busting delays caused by scheduling conflicts or weather or what have you.
ETA re insulation:
Wood is a pretty good insulator, r value 1.41 per inch for softwood like they’re using. And the video shows that the exterior walls get cellulose poured in, so it’ll be the same r-value as your standard insulated exterior wall. However, air leaks are probably be much less than for a standard wall, since everything is tightly interlocked with no gaps. The company website has a page about how their buildings qualify as passive homes.
3 Likes
Did you notice how long it took to drive each one of those dovetail joints?
1 Like
I don’t know about that - have you ever seen a guy with a speed nailer go to town? Wood frame houses go together really quickly with a good crew, while this system just seems like a lot more pieces and parts to be hammered carefully in to position. I’d bet with the same general design and footprint, a wood frame house would be quicker, though maybe the laborers would have to be a little more skilled.
2 Likes
Well, a whole ham deteriorates much slower than a pound of mince or even a ham slice. As for those Japanese temples, don’t they tear them down periodically and rebuild them from scratch? Or is that just specific ones?
2 Likes
6 days to roof on, interior walls in place, and fully enclosed. Much better than that?
4 Likes
The size of the crew is probably smaller, though - no need for measuring, cutting, or manhandling large pieces into place. It’s basically a masonry job, only without the need for mortar and with bricks that are much lighter, prettier, and far better insulators.
It’s just one shine in particular, Ise Jingu. There are two parallel sites for it; on one site is the current shrine, on the other is the grounds for the one being built. Every 20 years, they tear down the current shrine, at which time the one being built is done and becomes the current shrine.
There are other shrines and temples in Japan that are 1000 years old; I’m sure they’ve been maintained, but they haven’t been ritually torn down and rebuilt either.
2 Likes
Because there are so many earthquakes. Not because the wood has rotted.
4 Likes
I imagine octopus is french for wiring harness, as in prefab electrical runs?
eta: oh hai, you looked that up, thanks!
1 Like
Another post on that reddit thread basically explained why they do this; it’s for building a passive house. The lack of nails, screws, etc, as well as being essentially draft-free, makes the house SUPER efficient. It’s basically just about a space station in terms of air-tightness. You can heat the whole house in a very cold winter with VERY little fuel/energy, and cool the whole place in the summer similarly. Obviously, the cost of construction will be higher than a standard house, but the selling point is that it pays for itself very quickly.
There’s not really a lot of difficulty in running electrical, HVAC, plumbing because what you are seeing is just the shell. In standard stud construction the exterior is the exterior, and the interior is the interior, but the interior walls in this house will probably be firred out using standard construction methods, so you don’t have pipes or wires running through your (heavily) insulated walls. Yes, having 1’ thick exterior walls does eat up some square footage relative to the constructed size, but again, it’s a trade-off.
9 Likes
well, this house is in metric, so that should help. 
6 Likes
I grew up in what is now a 350 year old house built without glue and using wooden pegs to hold the frame together. I was just in a 400 year old Chinese house which survived a trip across the Pacific and then cross country, was reconstructed in snow country, and is doing just fine.
Wood stands up, if you can keep the water and the decomposers away.
11 Likes
120 square meters is not tiny.
I would be interested in seeing this construction technique applied to a 120 square foot house.
Beautiful structure. I agree with other comments about the wood material not being as durable, cost effective, strong, not offering same R value, or being as strong as brick.
= about 1300 square feet, that’s a nice sized bungalow (bigger than mine). If they have an option to build a second floor, you’ve got a full size house there.
2 Likes
Wood tends to have a better R value than brick at similar thicknesses, so a bit less than common brick construction given the usual differences in the thicknesses of the two materials, but more than face bricks (.65 vs .44 for 3/4" hardwood vs 4" face brick, for instance).
In this case, for a climate like the one I live in, it might be wiser to use a different material than wood chips for the insulation between the walls, but for France, wood chips would work very well indeed.
I don’t see that strength is likely to be a problem - if this meets code in France, it almost undoubtedly does in the USA. France tends to be more dirigiste about regulations. The company claims earthquake resistance to about 8.5 on the Richter scale. I don’t know if that’s exaggeration or not, but I’m inclined to believe the gist of it: something that can flex at different rates in a large number of small joints is going to resist the kinds of fractures that would beset more rigid structures, and is much less likely to get into a “Galloping Gertie” resonance with seismic waves.
5 Likes
A: "Is it Finnish yet?"
B: “Goddammit I told you to stop making that stupid joke!”
9 Likes
Is bound to be the very next phase!
3 Likes
Ah, so what you’re saying is that this is actually not finished on the interior because there is still a layer of stud/wall to put up, between which runs the plumbing and electrical?
1 Like
