Light building Methods:
Typical wall thickness a few millimeters, 3-5mm, the “make and feel” of structures performed with this method group is very similar to glassfiber built structures. These structures work with different fiber components, and different filler components, as well as different application methods as cast methods are ruled out for few millimeter skins.
In the picture, a extreme light concrete honeycomb platform that is comparable to glassfiber build in structural toughness and weight, but much more economic to perform as no expensive resin is involved.
A typical light shell development in freeforming technology - vision by Matias Volco | oceanic•business•alliance ™ | Ramform Cluster |
A small piece of light honeycomb shell floating - any shape is possible - no form is required the building process is “freeforming”.
Cartagena Colombia
.
.
The platform is as light as glassfiber building a structure like the why yacht is in the range of feasibility. We have tested this building method in extensive pilot projects and the outcome money input versus real estate squaremeter output is 166 USD / squaremeter.
Light building methods can adopt any shape. In general it is applied in honeycomb shell projects.
Futurist architecture is “within technology reach” for the light honeycomb shells - far beyond what we are normally seeing in concrete engineering. Land based concrete engineering is locked into a set of “building codes” that obligate the engineers to repeate a basic model of cast colums, walls and slabs, over and over again everywhere. Oceanic concrete building can allow to step out of this “monopolized lock” and do really surprising and creative things in concrete construction. ( - read more here: http://concretesubmarine.activeboard.com/t58980714/land-space-is-locked-oceanic-space-is-free-mobilis-in-mobili/ )
In its nature concrete is a composite material, with binder (cement) fiber component (rebar) and fillers (aggregates) - the concrete canoe competiton was invented to showcase that you can build literally any type of structure if you use the combination of those 3 base components creativly. Things as small and light as this canoe can be built in concrete, far beyond the slabs and blocks we are normally used to see.
One of the tests of the concrete canoe competition is that the canoe will be filled with water and must still float.
The light methods are based on techniques as used by concrete sculpture artists - bonder fiber and filler components are quite different to the general concrete engineering branch. Shell thickness of a few millimeter are usual, the application methods of the bonder and the fiber are more tending to glassfiber building method, lamination methods etc…
The honeycomb structure of the WHY yacht.
It is designed to be 58x38m and hold 3000 squarmeter real estate space.
Price tag is 70.million USD
Which means 23.000 USD / real estate squaremeter
So the WHY yacht is a factor 138 Times more expensive than a build along the lines of our method. Nevertheless Wally / Hermes is obviously expecting to have customers at that real estate price.
Poor Man`s Floating Island
Poor man’s floating island. This pilot project was born from a study for the Colombian government to solve the issue of periodical flooding of houses in the Magdalena River banks. The key question was : What is the lowest cost possible to create a floating platform for a floating house. We took the base idea of Richi Sowas bottle island and bonded it together with something tougher than “mangrove roots”. What we came up with is to take a pile of floating stuff like bottles,styrofoam break, and bond those “loose elements” together with a fiber cement matrix. The project was geared to use the less neccesary amount of cement bonder (which is the expensive element) and bond a maximum of cheap light low cost filler (bottles, styrofoam, and similar) together, to get a still solid island that would not soak up water. The fiber component consisted in agriculture bags, cocos fiber, bamboo fiber, and similar.The baseline was that things come bonded together in a way that even if you broke the island in the middle non of “loose trash stuff” would fall out.
Outcome: The island is sufficient solid to build a light 2 story house on it, it will not soak water, it resists all attacks of barnacles and toredo worms in the bay of Cartagena and the target of building something in a order of $50 per squaremeter can be achieved and even be pushed further…https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PlYla1leaMg
The light and ultralight building methods allow to explore the concepts of freeforming and forming on the fly.
. 
. 
.