ARCHIMEDE NO-WASTE APPROACH

From the start we chose the rhomboid geometry that is made up of identical parallelograms. Just like with squares and rectangles, parallelograms can be made up of rectangular sheathing without wasting any of it.
Here is a demonstration: typically, our standard roof panels can be made up of two 4x8 sheets with no waste, one being cut diagonally , as shown in diagram below. This represent the roof of one 180 ft2 hexagonal module.



This stronger 'vaulted' surface is made up of three planes, each one made up of of-the-shelf building materials. You need to love that since it also applies to walls and underside panels (in the case of stilt houses )

RIGID INSULATION IS EMINENTLY SUSTAINABLE

Rigid urethane insulation has been used in the building and construction industries since the 1950’s. Over the past 40 years, in excess of 500 million square metres of insulated panels have been manufactured by the continuous lamination process and have been successfully used in roof and wall cladding applications worldwide.

The superior long term performance of metal faced insulated panels with rigid urethane cores is now widely recognised by building investors and designers when compared with site assembled, multi-part, built-up cladding systems. This has resulted in significant growth for this type of construction system.

The main reasons for this growth are:

• Increasingly stringent building regulations, which in many countries require the use of insulation to comply with energy efficiency and CO₂ emission targets.
• The rising cost of fuel and energy. Effective thermal insulation can reduce HVAC / heating costs by up to 40% wherever it is installed.
• The environmental cost of energy production is also a factor which now needs to be considered. The burning of fossil fuels for energy production is estimated to contribute 80% of the world’s CO₂emissions. These green-house gases contribute to the problem of global warming, and so the conservation of energy is the most direct and cheap way to reduce CO₂ emissions and thus control global warming.
• Industry experts estimate that worldwide insulation of buildings to optimum standards could reduce global energy requirements by more than 10%.
• Rapid site assembly and early completion of a building project is demanded by investors and insulated sandwich panels provide ‘single fix’ fast on-site installation.
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  Investors require superior specification, low maintenance and long-term product performance.

The New Mexico Technical Developments

The Los Alamos factory was built to develop three new technologies relating to foam injected paneling systems and other aspect of the Archimede construction techniques. All achieved complete proof of our starting hypothesis:

• Extra-large panels from a new 'crossover platen press' ,
• Built-in metal cladding system with concealed edges and hidden connectors,
• Passive solar for commercial structures
• Steel structural frames requiring little or no post-finishing.

One of the original partner in these ventures is Eric Treisman, a Santa Fe attorney still very active with the Institute. His long-standing involvement with North American native tribes and with Tibet has been a source of enlightment for all of us.

The Rhombic Dodecahedral Geometry

(text from Wikipedia) The rhombic dodecahedra honeycomb is a space-filling tessellation (or honeycomb) in Euclidean 3-space. It is the Voronoi diagram of the face-centered cubic sphere-packing, which is believed to be the densest possible packing of equal spheres in ordinary space (see Kepler conjecture).

It consists of copies of a single cell, the rhombic dodecahedron. All faces are rhombs, with diagonals in the ratio 1:√2. Three cells meet at each edge. The honeycomb is thus cell-transitive, face-transitive and edge-transitive; but it is not vertex-transitive, as it has two kinds of vertex. The vertices with the obtuse rhombic face angles have 4 cells. The vertices with the acute rhombic face angles have 6 cells.

The rhombic dodecahedron can be twisted on one of its hexagonal cross-sections to form a trapezo-rhombic dodecahedron, which is the cell of a somewhat similar tessellation, the Voronoi diagram of hexagonal close-packing.

In plain English: If you took a can of peas, drained it and packed some of the peas tightly between your two cupped hands, you would obtain:

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• a bunch of peas each with twelve identical flat faces, parallellogram shaped
• no void between each peas until you separate them
• very messy hands.
• The resulting shape is the strongest thing next to a sphere
• It is arguably the strongest object you can create using flat surfaces

Hundred of houses built this way have been trhough terrible hurricanes and earthquakes,

SOLID GEOMETRICAL CHOICES FOR STRENGTH

This acrylic scale model built in 1979 was the inspiration for a 30 year effort in building stronger better prefabricated homes. The configuration variety provided by these identical panels, their angles of intersection providing 3 axis of resistance to lateral forces instead of 2, the multiple orientations of the views provided gave Poirier a rush he could not resist to build them for all these years. Since 1979, a few changes were brought about, the actual rhombic dodecahedron was actually squashed vertically, then some roofs were transformed into 6-side pyramids, but the essential merit of the shape remained intact as the panels and the shells were proven to be equal or more resistive than planned.
This merit is firstly the unusually high resistance to side loads. This diagram makes it easy to understand what makes this possible. Whatever the direction

HIGHER DENSITY GROUPINGS

The Domus system can me maximized for higher densities quite easily. It's remarquable soundproofing allows for such economy of land and resources.

TYPICAL CONSTRUCTION STEPS FOR STILT HOUSING

ELEVATED WITH A PURPOSE

Shown at trade shows where sometimes there is only one day to put it up, the basic Archimede houses attracted crowds of up to 75,000 people in one weekend thorughout the early 80's. No one appeared to be surprised when it was hailed as 'Tomorrow's House', even though the actual purposes of sitting it high were:

• To profit from small lots by parking the auto below it
• To better resist floods and earthquakes
  
• to create a higher space that would leave cold air below, along with boots, skis and snow covered clothing.
• for the added security from robbery where only one door needs to be protected
• And basically to profit from the views and the breezes afforded by elevated living.

It needs to be said that the speed of assembly reflects the speed of fabrication. Uniform repeatable parts allowed Archimede houses to be fully made 'from scratch'; all windows where of the same design and sizes, all were fixed with an insulated panel below for ventilation. And of course all panels were of the same size as explained elsewhere in this site.