Paper dwellings
June 23, 2009
Look beyond the rather showy name and the Universal World House is actually made of paper.
The house's inventor, designer-engineer Gerd Niemoeller, said the building's low weight - at about 400 kilograms (882 pounds) without its foundation block, it weighs less than the average car - and inexpensive price tag of 3,600 euros ($4,890) make it a breakthrough in the search for a cheap home.
Functional design
The cardboard house has been designed to replace mud huts or corrugated tin sheds which dominate shanty towns, especially in Africa.
"In these conditions, there is no public water supply and no public utilities,'' Niemoeller said. "People slaughter animals and cook outside at any rate."
The one-storey house with 36 square meters (388 square feet) of floor space is similar to a modest one-bedroom apartment. It can sleep several people, with eight built-in single and double beds. There's also a separate shower and toilet and a covered porch as well as a basic kitchen, some shelves, a table, and benches.
However, Niemoeller admits the cardboard house lack some amenities including heating and electricity.
"Our house is built to what we call passive housing standards," he said. "It makes no demands on the environment in terms of fuel or water resources."
Moreover, the prototype houses have resisted rain and cold weather in Germany.
The science behind the structure
The Universal World House is a prefabricated design built from cellulose from recycled paper that is soaked in polymer resin and formed into strong, slender panels that are subjected to extreme heat and pressure and formed into wafer-like honeycomb structural elements.
The honeycomb structure has been at the heart of aircraft and yacht designing but had long been regarded as to expensive to be used in housing because it is typically used to form metal and other heavier materials.
"Up to now, honeycomb structural construction elements have been produced primarily from aluminum,'' Niemoeller explained while accompanying reporters on a tour of prototype houses in the northern German city of Hamburg. "That, however, entails local industrial capacity, which is costly and very energy intensive."
But it's the honeycomb forms that add tensile strength to the building material.
"Each honeycomb is a mini-vacuum, and if you put a nail in the wall, you damage only a single honeycomb without damaging the vacuum properties of the surrounding honeycombs," Niemoeller said.
Demand for affordable housing
The revolutionary house was designed in collaboration with the German development agency GTZ by a team of German researchers and experts, including architect Dirk Donath from the Bauhaus University in Weimar, and structural engineer Greg Hardie, who was involved the all-paper Japanese Pavilion at the Hanover World Fair in 2000.
Niemoeller's company, The Wall, is registered in Switzerland and has a production facility in Kiel near Hamburg in northern Germany where some 50 people are involved in making the machines that go on to create the paper housing panels.
The idea is to build the prefab production machinery in Kiel and then ship it with the raw materials to clients around the world. The houses are to be assembled on the spot, which would reduce costs and create local jobs.
"Each machine can produce 1,500 houses," the 58-year-old Niemoeller said. "The world needs 100 million affordable houses so we will have our hands full."
Eco-friendly material
The cardboard house comes with an eco-friendly tag, paper and cardboard used in the structure are recycled and recyclable, according to Hardie.
"There are stronger and stiffer materials, but the rationale at Hanover was that we were using something that was recycled and could be recycled back into itself," he said. "If you can utilize post-consumer waste, there is a place for paper as a construction material."
Niemoeller said enquiries are pouring in from different corners of the world, including the African continent.
As enquiries for the house pour in from around the globe, Niemoeller said the structure will continue to be tested for durability and effectiveness in real-life conditions. Its performance and the amount of resources available will determine whether development agencies and those working in disaster and conflict zones find the Universal World Home an affordable option.
rb/dpa
Editor: Sean Sinico