all true.


The more i look at this building the more it looks like housing and less like a hydroponics tower.

A hydroponics tower would be square-ish, with the length facing the sun.

hmmm

I agree, less width allows for more natural light to enter farther back as well. Maybe rectangular is the best shape for this.

I have a dome structure i am working on now leading off due to Nanos. It occured to me that i hadn't actually done a geodesic dome, but rather basically A- frame domes.

So i started one up.

After that i will do a new treatment for a grow tower.

Thats if you don't come up with a new draw request for version 3 of the earth ship before then, since thats the priority project.


In preparation for this, I'm thinking no deeper than 20 meters, and maybe 100 meters long, with maybe 10 meters of open shelf and ten meters of enclosed space. And three versions, one 10 stories, one 30 stories, and one 100 stories tall.

any more thoughts?

in reality i cant imagine us going higher than 30 feet for agriculture

but i am interested in seeing these designs

> with the length facing the sun.

Perhaps you could have a rotating building so its always facing the best direction. (One whose bearings was perhaps water, maybe a floating building. (That might make it easier to mass produce them in a factory and float them down into position.)


> Building down is also much more expensive in digging and materials

From what little I've read about the subject, overall building below ground works out a little cheaper than above ground once you factor in such things as insulation the ground gives you, bad weather resistance, maintence costs/etc.


> Once the geothermal power station comes on line, internal artificial
> light won't be an issue either.

Even geothermal produced power costs to produce, whilst sunlight is free

geothermal is more accessible and higher yield and cheaper and smaller in ecological footprint, in each case by orders of magnitude.

From what little I've read about the subject, overall building below ground works out a little cheaper than above ground once you factor in such things as insulation the ground gives you, bad weather resistance, maintence costs/etc.

This is true plus you get extra building material.

Honestly the hard issue is convincing people to become mole-ish.

in reality i cant imagine us going higher than 30 feet for agriculture

Your mind is stuck in seed village.

In reality, it makes perfect sense to go 300 or 500 stories tall,
once we can afford it and have the experience to do it well.

> Honestly the hard issue is convincing people to become mole-ish.

Agreed.

Having looked into underground buildings a little, I notice that some when you are inside them, you don't realise you are underground, as when you are looking out the windows, things look the same as if you are looking out of an ordinary above ground building.

And at night of course, its even harder to tell if your underground or not as its dark outside

I did this very poor quality video which shows this point, towards the end of the video you can see from looking out of the window that the angle of the walls outside mean you cannot see them and thus don't necessarly spot that your underground.

sure, its a simple fake, You frost the window, put a heat lamp behind it,
and unless somebody opens the door into that crawl space, they would never know they were underground.

Another cheap fake I saw used well was a broadscreen TV with a closed circuit
video facing into a back yard.

This guy had three basements and an elevator and you would be fooled in each case because you know that the front yard is higher than the back yard, so you think you have dropped only that one story.

Unless you really look closely you don't realize its a giant TV screen.

The serious give away i guess is that in all four levels you seem to have the exact same view.

Alternatively, you can just pipe the light down or have an open pit central area, like an inverted inside out sky scraper. If its a wide pit and the windows are frosted, you wouldn't be able to tell you are below ground, it would be natural light that would vary with outside conditions.

Personally i favor underground arcologies using a 100 meter in diameter pit
with a very large spiral ramp, so you can go down like 100 stories, and have rooms adjacent to that which all seem to have normal above ground frosted windows.

Things like underground buildings and too many skyscrapers are not what I think of when I see this city. It would be the same feeling I get when I'm in New York City, cluttered and trapped. This is part of the reason I didn't want the homes to be more than 3 stories as well, and make the internal and external design very open and with a lot of transparency. I hate being in buildings that don't have adequate windows or too many internal walls.

The rotating building, like the walls, sounds interesting. Is there any validity to us being able to do this? Will it help enough to be worth it?

The good thing is we are making a lot of progress on the residential and agricultural buildings. This likely makes up about 85% of the buildings we will need. After a few other specialized buildings we will be near ready to start placement, utility lines, etc.

well, tall buildings isn't a bad thing if they have large yards and large internal spaces.

New york buildings are tall and claustrophobic.

I don't think it makes so much sense to have rotating walls or so forth, its a very large feature with a high cost and not a lot of benefit.

Its an interesting idea to play with, like a rotating skyscraper... but when you get down to brass tacks its a novelty, not a pragmatic feature.

> I hate being in buildings that don't have adequate windows or too
> many internal walls.

Likewise, its one of the things I like about domes, they can be very large and open, and without those annoying support pillars you often find in normal buildings.


> It would be the same feeling I get when I'm in New York City, cluttered
> and trapped.

That is why I favour underground buildings so much of the topside can be set aside for nature, for people to spend time in and enjoy, even working using laptops outside!


> tall buildings isn't a bad thing if they have large yards and
> large internal spaces

Generally agreed.


> I don't think it makes so much sense to have rotating walls

One of the benefical aspects to rotating walls is if they are also window shutters, they double up for bad weather protection and also protection against attack/burglary.

Nanos, I'd really appreciate it if you would sketch me some thoughts for those domes.

I'm practicing domes. Darnit if donuts just don't make it over to sketchup;
all of my floors vanished. (drat)


I am a big fan of domes, maybe you could start some threads about dome structures of different sizes and uses in the architecture section.?