They look as cozy as anything! I’m sure there’s plenty of practical problems with them (rot? ventilation? construction?), but what exactly are they? Also, does any of you have examples on people actually living like this?
Also, tree huts! I know those have become mildly popular in some cicrles (I think Sting has one, among others). I don’t have a proper question about tree huts yet, but I’d love to talk about them:)
oh, t’hell with all you normal people!
Living in holes is common, in certain areas of China.
Also, this has been slightly common at mining sites in Australia & the US, during the 19th Century.
Not exactly what you’re talking about but people do build bermed earth homes like this one which are completely or partially underground.
Have anyone ever built that thing ? I spent some minutes looking that the floorplan… you enter through the dining room ? No storage anywhere ? And you have to go through the kitchen in order to access the bedroom and the bathroom ? And all of this without windows ? Well well well…
No to mention the laughable cluser plan, where the central unit is crowded and the side units basically empty.
It’s estimated that over 6 million people in China live in caves, mostly in Shaanxi province. These caves dwellings are usually man-made holes built into the sides of cliffs.
Although not specifically cave-like, the people of Northern Cameroon will gladly incorporate any boulders or whatever into their stone and mud houses. The effect is often called hobbit-like. It is a strange and beautiful place.
From this site comes the following quote:
“However, it wouldn’t be fair to not mention the disadvantages, especially ones this sizable. Moisture is the number one and number two concern- such a huge problem that it is counted twice. If an underground home’s water defense system has even the slightest flaw, the moisture buildup will require extensive (and expensive) pumping and repair, if not complete abandoning of the site. The third problem is air circulation. In a conventional building, this is hardly a concern because air is constantly flowing through walls and attic intakes. Underground houses don’t have attics. The fourth and final (although, technically, the first) problem is the initial expense, which may be up to 20% higher than a conventional house of similar size (USDE 2).”
When I lived in Salt Lake City, there was house down in Sandy or one of those southern suburbs that was completely underground, in the middle of an otherwise normal bunch of suburban housing. If you drove up to the front, you saw a door. Just that – a normal door, as on the front of a house, only there was no house behind it. If you weren’t right in front of it, you could see a slanting enclosure go9ing down. The house consisted of nothing but a basement and that one anomalous above-ground door. Someone claimed that they started building the basement and never got any further, but I suspect there’s more to it.
I suspect the reason that there aren’t a lot of in-the-ground homes is that the walls would generally be damp and the ground would keep trying to invade. It’s be like living in your basement. If you didn’t have stone or brickwork around the outside it’d collapse, and if that stome- or brick-work wasn’t pretty waterproof your nice wood paneling would be perpetually damp, warping, and moldy. There are doubtless a few homes in pretty dry and solid rock, like Moab Utah’s Hole in the Rock:
http://www.theholeintherock.com/
(Utah again!), but that place is a tourist destination because it’s a rare and almost unique thing.
…
It’s not a full architectural drawing, more of an idea or concept drawing.
You have to go through the kitchen to get to my bedroom and bathroom, and I live in an above-ground buildings. It’s not that unusual a layout, though yes, there are some disadvantages to it. It’s not terrible though.
The south face does have windows. Also, some underground homes utilize skylights. A common solution is to have the house built around an open-air atrium, or have it about 2/3 underground, with windows above that line, then earth mounded on top for insulation which starts to look like a hill with windows on the sides.
The town of Coober Pedy, South Australia is semi-famous for having many of its homes, churches, and businesses built underground. Presumably moisture is not a concern, since the average rainfall there is about 6" (15 cm) per year.
Well, depending on where you are in the world, completely underground wouldn’t be a big option until 100 years ago, 50 years ago, or maybe 20 years from now, when reliable electric power will let you see anything down there. (Houses in my neighborhood usually have the first floor 2-3 feet off the ground. That’s so that the basement can have some windows, which was necessary to make the basements useful when these houses were built.).
I can only assume hobbits see in the dark much better than humans.
Underground can also be damp and unpleasant (if not actually wet during rainstorms or the wrong part of the year).
Apparently Uncle Owen and Aunt Beroo’s in-ground home on Tattoine is a real and traditional in-ground dwelling in northern Africa. But, again, that’s a pretty dry place. I couldn’t see you building and living in one of those here in Massachusetts. If nothing else, your central court would quickly turn into a sump.
Of course, there are the sod houses of the American Plains, as depicted in the Fort in Dances with Wolves. But they were notorious for falling apart, and dissolving bit by bit in the rain. “You couldn’t clean a sod house,” writes Dave Barry, “Because it would be gone.”
There is one fairly famous underground house in Las Vegas. Naturally, that’s another area which has little problem with soil moisture.
Detailed blog w/ photos:
Above-ground view: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/7680
Pfft. Hobbit holes!
What you want is an underground city! Of course, Cappadocia also has other, slightly more hobbit-like, underground villages.
One drawback of excavating soft material such as loess is the liability of collapse, resulting in the most deadly earthquake in history, c. 830,000 deaths, Shaanxi, 1556.
Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in an underground sod house in one of the Little House on the Prairie books - the previous resident had built it, and they lived in it until they could build a stick-built frame house.
There is/was a community in Bend, Oregon called The Shire which was made up of Hobbit-inspired residences. It seesm to have fallen on bad times since the housing market decline.
In the west, the construction industry isnt geared for cave homes. Its geared to build cheap wooden frame homes. So every cave would be an expensive custom job.
On top of that, there’s a lot of research that suggests a lack of natural light patterns can mess people up. It can cause mood disturbances, insomnia, hypersomnia, etc. Toss in how dank and depressing in general living in a basement is, this would be much worse. There’s probably a much bigger market for standard homes.
May I introduce you to Matmâta in Tunisia.
The founder of Avon built an underground house in Las Vegas :http://misty113.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=2284145&goto=nextoldest
The reason there aren’t more unusual houses in the US is probably because of the difficulty in getting a mortgage. Dome houses looked good for a while but mostly ended up as do it yourself projects because the banks were hesitant to loan money on houses with uncertain resale appeal.
My uncle built a house that was more-or-less underground out in California (near Atascadero). IIRC, it was about 200 feet long by 30 feet wide. The only part that was out of the dirt were the windows on the front. The house was roughly shaped like a trapezoid, with the long side being the back, directly into the side of a hill. The short side parallel to the back was the living room, dining room, and at least one guest bedroom and a bathroom, while the offset sides were the master bedroom suite at one end and the kitchen/breakfast nook at the other end.
(That is, say the living room looked west. The master bedroom faced northwest and the kitchen faced southwest.)
The whole back side that was directly into the hill was about 4-5 feet wide, and ran the length of the house, divided into separate areas about 8-10 feet long. These were storage/utility areas such as closets, pantries, and laundry area. The main hallway ran from one end to the other, alongside the doors to the storage/utility areas.
At one end, he had a garage for 2-3 cars, and at the other end, he had a garage that had higher doors and ceilings so he could store his backhoe and other construction vehicles during the winter. The garage at that end was tall enough to have a basketball net on the inside.
He built the house out of cinder blocks, with huge steel beams for roof support. The back walls and side walls consisted of a double set of cinder blocks with a moisture barrier between them, and the back walls may have even been a triple-set, but I could be wrong there.
The roof consisted of dirt and the whole house blended into the hillside beautifully.
I visited the house only once, about 2 years after it had been built, and went through the entire place in awe. Even in the storage areas, there was absolutely no smell of dirt or moisture. The area he lived in is not considered a desert area, and is pretty close to the Pacific ocean.
He was quite proud of his house. He said the reason most people who built houses into hillsides had problems is because they built a residential building underground, which was bound to cause problems. However, he solved the problem by building a commercial building underground. As far as I know, he never had problems with it.
It was quite a masterpiece.
