Underground Housing

"In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit.
Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell,
nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or eat:
it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."

Please see the page for Malcolm Wells for one architect's underground houses.

The $50 and Up Underground Housing Book (link is to a 115 page pdf file) by Mike Oehler of http://www.undergroundhousing.com/.

Underground homes have several advantages over homes built above the ground:

• There is no need to lay a foundation, which saves a huge amount of labour and material
• The walls are earth, so that saves a lot more building material
• The thermal mass effect of the earth stabilizes the temperature. Earth cools and heats more slowly than the surrounding air. If you dig 2m (6 foot 6 inches) into the ground, the temperature is always - day and night, summer and winter - steady at that climate's average. A well-designed underground home should need no energy for heating or cooling.
• They are easy to build.
• They are unaffected by wind.
• They require little maintenance
• They are soundproof

Because greenhouses must be kept warm, underground greenhouses make a lot of sense.

Pictures: [1], [2], Ziggurat-type

Concept for improving on Mike Oehler's design

If you build a house into a hillside, the wall that faces uphill has to be strong enough to resist the soil, which, like a slow, strong wave, is rolling downhill under the force of gravity. Much of The $50 and Up Underground Housing Book is devoted to ways to combat the 'lateral thrust' of the hillside.

It seems to me there is an easier way around this problem. Don't have a wall facing uphill at all. Instead, build that part of the house in a wedge-shape with the sharp end pointing uphill. Lateral thrust is going to happen no matter what, but if you don't present a broadside to it, it should slip around your house like waves around the prow of a boat. (Pictures to follow.)

Linkfest

• Performance Building Systems, Inc.
• Underground Homes
• SubsurfaceBuildings.com
• Bill Lishman's underground domes, also featured on Treehugger; built with ferrocement and then reburied.
• Wikipedia: Underground Living
• "Earth-Sheltered Housing", Washington Energy Extension Service (1984)