Qubelle Proprietary Limited

ABN 21 010 975 354.

AFFORDABLE

Mailing address:

Qubelle Group

PO Box 378 Kelmscott WA 6991

Australia

Phone: +61 412 092 345

E-mail: info(AT)qubelle(DOT)com

Building Technology

Materials

According to the above the world changed from hand-made to machine made. In the end we have finished up with high cost machine enhanced products that require skilled professionals to install. All is not lost because emerging economies are producing quality products at a low price and new technology is emerging that reduces the overall cost.

High Technology

Over the years some technology was not used for various reasons including unwilling to change; too difficult to implement; appearance and so on.  Examples: It took a long time to change from rubber insulated electric cables to plastic insulation; foamed concrete invented over 30 years ago has not been adopted despite its valuable contribution to affordability.

Various materials used by others to date.

These include the following.

Adobe, aerated concrete [also known as foamed concrete], aerospace materials, aluminium, aluminium cans, animal hides, aquatecture, Asbestos cement products [Dangerous and replaced by fibre cement], bamboo, bamboo plywood, bamboo flooring , banana trash, (tree) bark, biocement, bioconcrete, bio-bricks, bioplastic, biotecture, bricks [handmade] , BubbleCrete, bush rock, cable net structures, cane, canvas, carbon, cardboard, car tyres, cellulose, cement, cement blocks, Cement tiles, China Crete porcelain like material with superior building qualities], clay, Clay tiles, cob, Composite panels of various materials, compressed earth bricks, Concrete, copper, earth, ferrous cement, fibre cement, fibreglass, fibre-reinforced thermoplastics, flax (and linseed), foam, Galvanised iron, geodesic domes, geotecture, glass, glass bricks, 'granite, grasses, gyprock, gypsum, hemp, Hessian, [Hessian bags coated with lime/cement mixture], iron, Jarrah, Karri and other local timbers, Lightweight concrete, lime, limestone, magnetite, metals, mud, natural concretes & clay pans, paper, Paper Crete [paper and concrete], perlite, pise, plant fibre, plaster, Plywood, polycarbonate, poured earth, Pressed metal sheets in fancy patterns, rammed earth, rock, Reinforced concrete, Rock wool, rubber, rubble, sand, sawdust, sawment (sawdust, sand and cement) , seagrass [seaweed] , sewerage sludge, slag, sod, soil cement, solar-electric roofing, soy beans, steel [in sheet form plain or shaped or profiles], stone, straw, strawboard, straw bales , syndecrete, tents, tipis, timber [rough or in logs] tin cans, tyres, underground, vegetable fibre, wattle & daub, wheat straw,

 

Types of alternative construction [not in order of preference]

 

The Use of Forms

Air-filled forms

Balloon built to finished shape of house

Earth piled into rough shape of the structure [removed later through openings]

Formwork that becomes part of the building [Insulated Forms; Monolithic dome form either left in place or re-usable; Steel reinforcement attached to polystyrene foam (ICS 3-D Panel system)]

Wood or steel forms with or without patterns [Rammed earth; Tilt-up Panels; Lightweight concrete [foamed concrete]

 

Formless construction

Hand-made bricks

Post and beam [Simple structure for strength and gaps filled with second-hand bricks or non-structural materials.]

Steel Systems

Stick built [common name for timber structures using ‘sticks’ of timber]

Structural insulated panels

Use pine with polystyrene foam panels

Engineered components with plywood or steel or other material with an insulated core. [Used now for cold-stores]

Geodesic domes [triangles of plantation pine, plywood and insulation bolted together]

 

Modular Construction

Usually ‘basic’ starter home with modules being added from time to time as finances become available.

 

Factory built construction.

Factory built homes for assembly on site within days.

Complete ‘units’ such as a complete bathroom, complete kitchens with these placed on site and only requiring connections to services.

 

 

Eric Hunting wrote [The Nature of Form]

"The sudden realisation that natural resources were not endless and that technology alone could not solve every problem came as a slap in the face to the western world and forced architects to face up to three critical errors in judgement over the past century; First, they had encouraged a dependency upon high-energy non-sustainable products of industry without regard for their impact on the environment or the long term viability of the resources required.
Suddenly faced with the seemingly imminent depletion of those resources, architects had no viable alternatives to offer.
The initial attempts to accommodate a public and political demand for energy conservation involved increasing the energy efficiency of homes by sealing them up and this exposed the second great blunder.
Increasing numbers of people began to get ill because the air in their homes was being polluted by the chemical-laden industrial materials used to build and maintain them.
Some analysts today have suggested that as much as 50% of all illness in western countries can be linked in some way to indoor air pollution.
The "...machine for living in" has become a Frankenstein's monster because architects and builders had simply assumed high-tech industrial materials were better without taking full account of their potential impact on people's health.
The third great blunder of the contemporary architects was to embrace and standardise building technologies, which the common man could not use by himself.
The delusion was that the use of higher-tech automatically afforded a higher quality of life for the common man but instead it only took away his ability, his right, to shelter himself and handed it to corporations and their factories.
By turning the homeowner into a dependent consumer, architects had unwittingly led a whole generation into indentured servitude.
Based on industrial materials made with non-renewable resources the cost of homes can only increase without end as those resources are diminished.
The houses of our ancestors cost little more than their own labor.
Homelessness existed chiefly as a product of war, famine, and natural disaster.
Today homelessness is the direct product of an increasingly impractical housing industry which has destroyed vernacular architecture, made it impossible to shelter people at a realistic individual and environmental cost, and taken away the individual's right to shelter himself through his own skills and labor.
In response to the emerging realisation of these three great blunders a new movement in architecture began, one which is only now beginning to achieve some kind of critical mass."