Open Architecture Network

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:
We have a problem

Australia is the driest continent on earth, yet Australian's are the highest water users in the world. Australia is one of the biggest exporters of water through its exporting of meat, particularly beef. Each kilogram of beef requires up to 50,000 litres of water to produce. We have no black water recycling even though numerous other 1st world countries have been recycling black water for decades. Grey water recycling is considered a relatively new idea in Australia and has been implemented infrequently. In Australia, we are very unwise with our water and it is running out. It may not be long before Australia is virtually uninhabitable and Australian's may soon become a burden on our South pacific neighbours as we increasingly become environmental refugees.

Stanford University

In the early 1990's, for only a brief period, Stanford University began exploring water structures. By pumping water into polypropylene bags the designers could create surprisingly efficient, gothic like structures. As water also provides a lot of thermal mass, these structures were also extremely thermally efficient. The polypropylene bags could be formed in a huge variety of organic shape and sizes. They could be rolled up and easily transported to anywhere in the world where, on adequate footings, they could be pumped full of water. They were some of the quickest and easiest structures to be built.

Poop house

No matter which way you look at it, building a house is never green. It takes vast quantities of materials with high levels of embodied energy and water and it creates a lot of waste. Even houses constructed from recycled materials often have an incredibly high embodied energy to implement. So we at Andrew Maynard Architects asked ourselves "what's the greenest building" and we concluded that the answer was "no building at all". But rather than be nihilistic about it we decided that a house should build itself through a lengthy period of assembling house hold waste. Through adopting similar structural logic employed at Stanford University the Poop house is a water structure that, over time, takes all household bio-waste, including human excrement and food, and slowly constructs the walls and roof.

Timeline

[diagram 01] - 0 years
The inner layer has been filled to create an efficient water structure. The outer lay is empty, waiting for household waste to fill it.

[diagram 02] - 10 years
The inner layer is partially full of frequently recycled water. Some water has been lost over time however the structure remains solid as the external layer, full of compacted solid waste, applies pressure to the internal layer.

[diagram 03] - 20 years
The majority of the water has been used. The water had been recycled countless times, however evaporation and human activity has gradually removed the water from the home. A solid, dry structural layer of solid household waste remains.

Materials

The polypropylene forms can be fabricated to a variety of shapes and sizes and are rolled to a relatively small size making them highly transportable.

The internal layer is clear polypropylene.This layer holds the fresh water. The outer layer is a solid colour. This layer contains the household waste that will eventually become the structure of the house.

Process

Once the polypropylene forms are on-site they simply need to be positioned on a structural slab and pumped full of water. You would purchase the water required to fill your home, as you would with any other building product. The water remains part of a closed system therefore an average sized house would have around 20 years worth of water.

Solid waste is delivered directly to the outer layer where the water is filtered out of the solids. Here the solids form a dense structural layer over time [diagram 02].

A closed system has been formed so that minimal water is lost during usage and the recycling process. No closed system is perfect though, therefore water is lost through evaporation, spillage, human activity etc. Hence over a long period of time (around 20 years) the majority of the water will be lost, however a thick thermally efficient structural wall will remain, constructed of solid household waste. The house has been erected for almost no cost. The internal skin can either be refilled or reclaimed as extra internal space [diagram 03].