Underground homes come in all shapes and styles and budgets… Here is a very nice example designed by Scott Allen Architecture and built into the side of a cliff in the harbor…
This is not what most people think of when they hear “underground house”…
If the picture above doesn’t look much like an underground house, let’s try looking at it from the front. Imagine pulling up this driveway and just seeing this glass box instead of a house…
The “front door” of the Cliff house… The grass is above the living area below.
Here is another view showing access from the front yard down to the courtyard below…
This is a “sunken” courtyard, at least relative to the front yard.
You may need to go back to the first pic to see how these areas all fit together. My younger son couldn’t wrap his head around it. He kept saying, “so they are just pretending it is underground, but its not, right?” It is really beautiful home. If you want to see more, check out the architects site.
Even with all that glass, I bet the concrete structure and protection of the cliff keeps things relatively calm inside during a storm.
I am guessing they were not as focused on efficiency as I am, but still, it is a really cool example of the flexibility of earth sheltered homes.
Well it has been a while since I got on to the website. I had some work travel, a bit of a vacation, but mostly I was just really busy with work and school (MBA). However, I did find time to work on the house and things have not been standing still.
The engineer and architect have both moved forward. The new storm room design has finally made it into the plans and we had a meeting last week to resolve a number of the engineering issues including issues with the design of the the concrete sunshade and the roof structures for the entry and green house. We are still going thru the plans and cleaning up little details. The windows have not been updated in the drawings yet, but I expect that will be taken care of eventually. We are also adding some details like stone veneer to the design in key locations.
This is how the plans looked last week… You can see the new Storm Room, but the sunshade and rail are changing…
While on vacation, relaxing after a day on the beach, I solved the problem of the chord windows. These high windows were placed on a curved wall. each vault spans a 30 degree section of the vault and we knew that the chord deviation would be too large to span with one piece of glass. We broke the chord window into 3 partial chords as a solution, but when I got the quotes I found that actually tripled the cost to fill the same area. The cost was so high that we actually considered dropping the side windows and just having a 40″ wide arch top in the middle. The epiphany on the beach was that the windows were not spanning the full 30 degree segment of the wall, but rather a much narrower section near the top of the vault. I did some quick trigonometry back in the hotel room and worked out that the max deviation of full chord window from the curved wall would be less than 4 inches… That means it fits on the 6 inch thick wall (sort of) and I could go with one large chord instead of the more expensive 3 part window. Seems kind of obvious now…
This is a detail of the 3 part chord window that I had in the top of each vault… The yellow line represents where a straight window would lay…
You may recall that the “Storm Room” has a 6ft round hole in the floor. I had wanted to put in a glass floor, but that was very expensive (over $6K), so I was settling for a safety rail for now. I figured I could always replace it later if I found a good deal on the glass or struck oil. But then the “temporary” safety rail cost was estimated to be $2K, which sounds a bit high to me. The architect came up with the idea of putting down a steel grate. Sherri and I both liked the idea, although I think what is in our heads may be a bit different than the architect was thinking. Instead of an industrial steel grate, I will work on getting something a little more residential. Hopefully, I can find something to match the spiral stairs and ship ladder that lead up to the storm room, perhaps made by the same company…
Much of the rebar layouts have been done, and I already put together a spreadsheet to calculate the quantity and cost of rebar required… it is not too bad, but I will be looking for a bulk discount and a big truck to deliver it. I will also want to get a bulk deal with the concrete company. The engineer prescribed 3 ft wide footings to support the central tower of the house and there will be a lot of foundation in other areas also. There are also some larger steel beams in a few areas that cost a few hundred dollars each, but I convinced the engineer to remove the really expensive compound bending beam that had been in the design for the sunshade and replace it with a much simpler post and beam design. I am already getting quotes on the components that are fully designed, such as the precast concrete ribs. I am waiting on the architect to complete the detailed plans on all the steel arches.
I re-initiated the relationship with the building inspector and gave him a copy of the plans in progress. He decided to call my architect and reviewed the plans with him directly. I wish I had been in on that meeting because my architect isn’t good about sharing the details. I know he talked to him about stairs (not sure what about) and also told him to change the “Storm Room” label to “Light Well” so he could go a lot easier on the inspection. I thought that was a good sign that he plans to be more helpful than difficult.
Next I plan to meet with the likely builder and go over the plans with him one last time while the engineer and architect are still under a fixed price contract.
We have started the process of getting our current house ready to sell… Or I should say Sherri has started patching and painting over the past decade’s worth of kids vs. drywall damage. I helped by spilling some of the paint on the carpet while trying to help. I am sure my turn will come, there are lots of fun jobs to do. The good news is that the market is picking up a little around here and we may even be above water on our mortgage.
Even with over a month of no posts, the website is up to nearly 10,000 visits, but my views are down to 20 or so per day. Things should get much more interesting once we start building.
And now some eye candy…
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Here is an example of a house made with the same Steelmaster structure that I plan to use on my house… Thanks Houzz…
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This reminds me of our storm room idea… Including the square windows, copper roof and stucco walls. Of course, ours won’t look quite like this…
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This is an earth sheltered grocery story… there are actually a chain of them… http://www.goats-on-the-roof.com/
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This is to illustrate how you curve a kitchen. This was taken in a “Formworks” home.
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Our exterior walls will look something like this… Maybe a bit of a warmer color though.
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You can google Unikabeton to find out more about this concrete sunshade idea… Cool “topology optimization” software is used to figure out the minimum support structure necessary.
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This is a view of my mech room design that I did to show the architect where all the air handling equipment goes…
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Mech room components… The purple spiral is my air distribution. I also have a dehumidifier and an ERV. The vertical green tube is my solar chimney.
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The architect originally drew all the equipment in the middle of the room… I wanted to show a more reasonable layout.
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This was an idea for the ceiling of the rotunda under the storm room…
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These holes in the rotunda come out in the tops of the vaults and allow for circulation up the tower.
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Here is a quick and dirty computer model I sketched up to explain how my concrete arched sunshade would be supported… I didn’t even take the time to put the posts in the right places, but it was enough to convey they idea.
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Here is a little rough coloring over some plans that I made to show the architect a retaining wall and fence that I will need on the roof…
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This is a sketch I made to illustrate how I wanted the ICF wall shaped in profile… It doubles as a parapet to hold back the earth on the garage roof
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This is a 3D model I made to help the architect understand how I wanted the ICF walls attached to the front of the garage…
Soil Experiment
My soil temperature experiment is on going. I recently collected my 15th month of data and updated the charts on that page. Now that we have more than a years worth of data, it is clear that the deeper probes are in more a more thermally stable environment. Specifically, the 10 ft deep probe shows that soil temperatures at that depth peak (max or min temp) nearly 3 months behind the air temperature peak. In other words, the heat of June takes until September to reach that depth. The amplitude of the temperature variation at 10 ft depth is similar to the 9 month average air temperature, which is a small fraction of the air temperature variation.
Temp Profiles of all the probes… Notice the difference between the “dry” and “control” probes is slight and may actually be due to slight variations in the depth.
These results are interesting because they contradict a lot of the oversimplified and unsupported statements that you find in many earth sheltered home books.
The Storm Room Design
We just finished that fantastic period between semesters. That means that I am headed back to work on my MBA. I am just taking one course this semester, and will probably take off the rest of the year if construction starts in the spring. While I was off I did a few things around our current house, watched some movies, played with my kids, researched some house related stuff, started a non-house related book (1491), etc.
Meanwhile, my architects assistant also had time off and the house seemed to leap forward again. Without school to keep him busy, the architects assistant has played with rendering portions of the house in 3D. This lead to design questions in certain areas, which lead to me generating some new 3D models in response. This lead to the designs of the storm room, entry, green house and even my duct work taking a step forward.
As I expected, the architect has done the majority of his work in 2D. When looking for an architect, I actually counted this as a good thing. 3D models are fun, but my geometry is complicated/difficult by CAD standards (Shotcrete is very liberating when it come to actually building these shapes) and I didn’t want the architects either spending too much of their effort on the CAD (rather than the design) or dumbing down the design to make it easier to CAD. In the end, the homes are always built from 2D blueprints anyway.
We also had a fun collaborative session after trading some models back and forth. At least it was fun for me, I hope it was pleasant enough for the architects assistant ;). I think we pretty much figured out the storm room by the end of that.
While most people think of a “Storm Room” as a cellar where you hide from storms, the “Storm Room” in my design is a concrete room on the top of my house that gives me 360 degree views. I am looking forward to sitting up there and watching the storms roll by.
Now the assistant architect’s classes are starting back up, so we are not sure if this pace will continue or not, but I definitely feel like we have crossed a hump… Still no word from the engineer though. ;^(
Here are some renderings of some of the 3D models we passed back and forth…
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A faint scan of the storm room sketch I gave the architect. I also included sketches of the underlying structure…
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Here is an early version of the 3D model that I was sent… I had some rendering issues, but you can still see the architects version of my storm room… The architect cited structural reasons for the changes from my sketch.
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This is a 3D model of the underlying structure that I sent the architect to help him understand how it would be built.
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The architect took it further and found some issues with my design. We worked together to solve the geometry issues, reduced the size of the skylights, etc. almost there…
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This is a view from inside the architect’s 3D model. I needed some changes for the function of the solar chimney, but I think the change in proportion will also help the look of the outer surface.
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This incomplete rendering was just to show me the proportion and placement of the chimney coming out of the entry cottage…
The wall on the left should be arched, windows are missing, etc. but it is a good way to see how the chimney fits in…
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This is a rendering of the inside (living room)… It is missing windows, doors, wood stove, etc. but it may help some of you understand how the ribs and vaults come together. When I saw this, I told the architect that these structural features came from the need to carry the earth above in an efficient way and we didn’t want it to look too fancy… He just said “good luck with that”.
