Documenting a personal quest for non-toxic housing.
Thursday, March 25, 2004Hawaii and 'Light' Concrete
I've been corresponding recently with members of a mailing list for a planned eco-village project in Hawaii. I'm hoping my assistance with their project may earn some help in gathering information or construction volunteers for my own needs. Hawaii may seem like an unlikely place for someone in my situation to consider. We tend to think of 'vacation havens' as being utterly impractical for affordable relocation. And it's true that the state has a fairly high cost of living, though in practice no worse than the Northeast states. But, in fact, Hawaii does present one of the cheaper options for non-toxic relocation by virtue of the fact that there are still some inland places where land goes for around $3000 an acre, the trade winds and low pollution -at least on the windward sides of the islands- reduce the amount of land one may need as a buffer against neighbors pollution, and the climate allows for the use of one of the few low cost off-the-shelf non-toxic kit home products available; the Bali-T from Tony's T-Houses in Bali. (designed for the Bali environment, the lack of insulation makes these homes unsuitable in other climates without some kind of separate environment enclosure) So Hawaii's a realistic contender. Furthermore, this kit housing product is pretty-much a turnkey form of eco-village architecture that is aesthetically ideal for the location. Maybe something good will develop.
I've also learned recently of a very interesting new building product called LiTraCon. It's a light transmitting concrete using a dense matrix of integral optical fibers. This is an interesting material that combines the translucence of fabric screens with the massiveness and strength of concrete. It currently appears limited to prefabricated blocks and cost is unknown.
This offers some validation for an idea I suggested long ago to approximate the old and technically impractical Science Fiction cliche of transparent domed habitats on other planets. The need for heavy radiation and meteor shielding of such structures makes using transparent materials unlikely. Ideas have been proposed for the use of water-filled multi-membrane domes but the technology for that is complex. So I suggested that one could make a dome of some regolith based cement that was virtually transparent by integrating an array of fiber optic cables linked to collector and emitter panels on the dome surface. These would communicate light and, if image corrected, views to the outside as if the dome were transparent while allowing the structure to be as thick as necessary to provide necessary shielding and structural integrity. The technique could even be combined with the SuperAdobe style regolith filled earth-bag techniques studied by NASA. Obviously, this approach is not cost-effective for applications other than tourism with the use of simpler heliostats linked to fiber optic cable lighting systems being much more practical for simple use of natural light. (and for compensating for differing light intensities for farming applications) But with tourism a growing area for space development it's a compelling idea. And it's a kind of structure that could be readily simulated with projection screen domes.
