Wow. I scanned through this entire thread, and haven't seen an automatic house plan generator. I saw one comment with a request, and no responses.
The architecture industry is enormous. Real estate is enormous. There's no automatic drawing, electrical, plumbing, insulation, ect... generators given specifications? I'm kind of amazed no one's trying to disrupt that. "Hi Stable Diffusion, please draw me blueprints for a 2000 sq. ft. house, with two stories, given this landscape. Thanks Stable Diffusion."
I work in construction management and I think you’re underestimating the complexity of generating a set of construction plans that meets code, passes inspection, and has coherent aesthetics.
There isn’t just one set of building codes for every jurisdiction, different jurisdictions adopt various sets of code.
Different geographic regions require various things that other areas don’t require. My state doesn’t have earthquakes or hurricanes, but we do have to have stronger roofs for handling snow load. Buildings in Florida need specific methods to handle hurricane force winds. Buildings in California need specific methods to handle earthquakes. And so on. How a building is designed is highly dependent on where it is located geographically.
You’re also underestimating just how many different materials/fixtures/fittings get installed in a house. Plumbing fixtures and light fixtures, electrical wiring devices, floor/wall/ceiling finishes, doors and door hardware, siding (type, color, trim color), windows, woodwork, cabinet, cabinet hardware, countertops, bathroom vanities, appliances, rain gutters, garage door, driveway/sidewalk material and color, deck material and color, etc.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that designing and building a building is far more complex than it seems.
Why is that surprising? It's like why AI art is a running joke to real artists, and LLMs are a joke to good software engineers etc.
Random text/image generators have no intelligence, no knowledge of design, building regulations, engineering, physics. A fun little tool to set up boilerplate is its peak usefulness.
That's been the Holy Grail since I was a kid (AutoCAD jock, mid '80s). I think the best we'll achieve is some themed parametric models. For stuff like massing, space planning, budgeting, and presentations.
Or an app with some dials and checkboxes for a constrained design space. Like for micro homes. Or vertically integrated companies like Lindal Cedar Homes. Kind of like buying a customized airplane or RV.
But for general purpose construction documents? I'd bet no. So many different construction codes. Site planning. Construction tech and products are constantly changing. Customers are psychotic. Etc, etc.
Disclaimer: I was just a drafter working misc A/E/C jobs. And I wrote add-ons for arch and civil engr. But mosdef am not an architect. Would like to be proven wrong.
Probably commercial BIM plugins for something like AutoCAD are doing stuff like this, although it's probably more like classic constraint solving than stable diffusion. Anyway BIM has been around for years, so that's the training set you'd want for doing other things.
I built a house (or more correctly I paid a company to build one for me).
The initial design could be done using an interactive tool that you can use. This is not different from web tools used to design a kitchen. I also think IKEA uses one.
I live in Scandinavia so it is probably different from what you know.
The company designing the house took our drawings and ideas and created drawings and an excel sheet they used to calculate the price of the project. A tool to do this would be valuable and same the customer some time ad I would be able to do most of the work designing the layout.
After the contract is signed the company would make proper plans used for building the house etc..
The complexity of the whole project is enormous but the initial planning would be a good fit for an interactive tool.
Its best to take and use the principles of it in another house. I personally don't want a bunch of tires breaking down and leaking chemicals and fumes into my house over a couple decades. Also much of the savings are from using your labor or volunteer/intern labor rather than paying someone else.
I think it's worth noting that the inventor of the earthship plans does not himself live in an earthship. I have seen a lot of anecdotal accounts of people living in earthships developing health issues because of off-gassing from the tires. Also they are really optimized for desert environments, they don't preform as well in high humidity.
Here's the thing: The idea of planning a house without taking into account the site where it will sit will never produce a good house.
Would a pre-existing plan account for the sun exposure of your land? Would it have a roof that makes sense for how much it rains or snows? Would getting sunlight in the bedroom also mean facing traffic? Would it take advantage of elevation for views or make sure to block a nearby neighbour? Would it deal well with moisture, or fires, or access roads? Would you build a porch where you can laze away late summer afternoons and feel everything's just right with the world, or a place to dry laundry where nobody goes?
If you really want to design your own house (a great idea), look up materials around A Pattern Language instead. Learn what makes a great house, then design a plan incorporating those ideas but customised towards your plot and your needs.
> The idea of planning a house without taking into account the site where it will sit will never produce a good house.
There's a free software tool from National Renewable Energy Labs that lets you make a rough sketch of your house, including orientation and try alternate features to determine if adding more insulation would be worth it. Or a more efficient furnace. Each airport (at least in the US) measures weather (temp, wind speed/direction, humidity, cloudiness, etc) every hour. Local climate files will have the past 20 years of weather so you can evaluate the costs/benefits of different systems with your actual records.
Love BEopt! It’s definitely a favorite in the “construction nerd” community (such as https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/). I used it quite a bit in making design choices for an extensive renovation on my own home.
Thanks for sharing! While the original query was in regards to building a new home, this seems like a great tool (and is advertised as such) for checking out existing homes (especially older homes) as well.
This gets said a lot - but in practice, very little housing is built that way.
The mega builders that build big developments certainly don't match up house plans with the way lots are oriented, and that's where most houses are built.
I'm not trying to argue we shouldn't work on that, but to just dismiss off the shelf house plans entirely because "you have to build for the site" is rejecting the reality of how things are done.
At the very least, a repository of plans that was categorized simply by the orientation it was optimized for would be a step ahead of how most housing is planned and built today.
Anyone who has driven through a bunch of tract homes knows this to be true. The homes are built to maximize the number of homes in the available space and nothing else.
If you really don't believe me just survey home owners in those now 2-year old tract homes. Even if the actual houses have excellent construction you'll discover the builder completely declined to take into account things like drainage of the lot or how maintenance can be performed.
I duno if I agree with this. They might not go lot to lot but a big developer also is the one who orientates the lots and selects the designs ... I think it is all relative to how they do business / organize lots.
It's more general than lot to lot, but still seems to take into account the general lay of the land, the city's codes and etc.
They just want to sell a bunch of houses quickly, not to create perfect houses. Good enough is quite literally good enough for them.
There will be compromises because they build for average buyer, not for you.
And people that are looking for a house usually want to move there as soon as possible, doing custom not only means you need to pay more but that you also have to wait longer and pay for the place you're currently living extra year or two.
Ideally all would start from some common plans then architect would customize it based on the future home owner input but that's frankly expensive.
The entire purpose of designing your own house is to take these things into account. If you're looking for a cookie-cutter generic design, just let a mega builder use one of their templates and they'll get what you're talking about here.
I’ve worked in construction, maybe this was true for post-and-beam and perhaps some other methods where you are using what is available from nature.
Historically, for example, log cabins are popular in the woods because logs are plentiful and adobe was used in desert environments because of the abundance of sand, lime, binders, etc. I would not build a solid wood home in the desert of New Mexico for the same reason why I wouldn’t build a masonry house in the forests.
Today, we have all but perfected the manufacturing of, developed logistics for, and codified laws governing building standards focused on raw building materials that you can order from a lumber yard or even Home Depot.
Modern building construction, at least in North America, is based around the “balloon framing” idea that the walls support subsequent floors and the roof, maybe with a load bearing wall in the middle somewhere. With 2x6 framing members, you can go up to 3 floors in some jurisdictions without additional engineering sign off. As long as there is a flat platform to build the first floor, you can build up.
The foundation is the only thing that would require custom construction, with a pier and beam, you need to drive your pier 1-3ft below the frost line and with a slab or basement foundation, you also need to reach below the frost line, but requirements differ between codes.
Drainage is another area that needs special attention and is 100% custom for each project.
One nit, what we do today is platform framing. Balloon framing fell out of favor for probably two reasons, one it is not very fire safe (vertical channels in the walls), and two it's cheaper to build with shorter lumber.
> Modern building construction, at least in North America, is based around the “balloon framing” idea that the walls support subsequent floors and the roof, maybe with a load bearing wall in the middle somewhere.
I think you're getting balloon and platform framing mixed up.
> Historically, for example, log cabins are popular in the woods because logs are plentiful [...] I wouldn’t build a masonry house in the forests.
Why not? Perhaps the US is different, but in mainland Europe you'll find plenty of brick houses in the forest.
Yes, historically you'd build a log cabin out of materials found on-site, but is anyone doing that anymore? Presumably you'd want logs shipped from elsewhere, if only to get ones that have dried out already.
At that point, why would it be prohibitively expensive to choose other building materials?
> Would a pre-existing plan account for the sun exposure of your land? Would it have a roof that makes sense for how much it rains or snows? Would getting sunlight in the bedroom also mean facing traffic? Would it take advantage of elevation for views or make sure to block a nearby neighbour? Would it deal well with moisture, or fires, or access roads? Would you build a porch where you can laze away late summer afternoons and feel everything's just right with the world, or a place to dry laundry where nobody goes?
Would you, the first-time-house designer be able to accommodate for all those issues? Or even know they exist in the first place?
> If you really want to design your own house (a great idea), look up materials around A Pattern Language instead. Learn what makes a great house, then design a plan incorporating those ideas but customised towards your plot and your needs.
Horrible idea. By all means be the input in the process, but pick someone that actually knows how building works and that can instantly point out any misunderstanding or lacks of knowledge you have.
Reading "A Pattern Language" is, frankly, a waste of time for anyone looking to design and build a house where people can actually live on a reasonable budget. A few of the patterns are decent, but most are outdated for modern lifestyles or appear to have been contrived to push the authors' biased opinions on how people ought to live. Many of them would be ridiculously expensive and consume an unreasonable amount of space for minimal utility. If you were to actually design a house the way they seem to recommend it would end up being 8000 ft² (including outbuildings) and looking like some weird cross between an ancient Roman villa, a Victorian mansion, and a Hobbit hole. The market for rich eccentrics who want that sort of thing is pretty small. There is a reason that book is held in higher regard by software architects than by real residential architects.
I think it's hyperbolic to call it a waste of time. I think the book (and the related books and principles) deserve a critical reading. In the first section titled "Using This Book" he mentions several important details that I think you are missing in your critique.
One, it is meant to be read alongside The Timeless Way of Building. It is not simply a how-to manual.
Two, it comes from experience gleaned in the field working as an architect and builder. It is not simply highbrow art, mysticism, or eccentricity.
Three, the patterns are separate from implementation: "[You] can use the solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice." He goes on to distinguish patterns in which he believes an invariant property has been established from those in which more research is needed. He even states that some patterns are just a guess and shows how to identify those in the description of each pattern.
Lastly, he states there is a danger that people will assume that this one pattern language should stand for all time: "Is it not true that there is a danger that people might come to rely on this one printed language, instead of developing their own languages, in their own minds? The fact is, we have written this book as a first step in the society-wide process by which people will gradually become conscious of their own pattern languages, and work to improve them."
The purpose of the book and its principles is not to recreate an aesthetic through pastiche. You are meant to use the principles in the book to create your own language that works for your context. A pattern that works for me in my environment may not work for you. That fact doesn't nullify the value of the pattern. The purpose of the two books together is to acknowledge that humans have deep feelings about the environments they inhabit. Whether those feelings can be explained or not is beside the point. The point is that we have them. These feelings happen across cultures and time. When we apply those feelings about our environments to the built world, several patterns seem to emerge. Hence, you get the concept of pattern languages.
Alexander takes the bold step of not only acknowledging human feelings but centering them in the discussion about how the world should be built. This point should interest those who are sympathetic to the Agile Manifesto, or to principles of user-centered design, or to product design and product management. This fact is also likely why certain interests are uncomfortable with his work. Powerful interests do not, in general, like to lose power, and change is expensive.
Later works, including his series on The Nature of Order go deeper into his exploration of these principles, even the possibility of an objective evaluation of beauty. And yes, there is a bit of woo going on which can make some people feel uncomfortable. We are all capable thinkers. You can decide for yourself which ideas resonate and which do not.
Personally, I found that his ideas changed the way I experience the world, including giving me the ability to evaluate the kind of home I want to live in and how to optimize that home to increase my own happiness. I may not ever get the chance to build my own home. But I have a voice. I participate in society. I believe the world could and should do better than optimize itself for money. I believe I am not unique in finding the books useful.
> If you really want to design your own house (a great idea), look up materials around A Pattern Language instead. Learn what makes a great house, then design a plan incorporating those ideas but customised towards your plot and your needs.
I get this is hn where diy ethos runs deep, but please don't do this. Hire someone to design it and oversee construction for you.
Nearly every new home that has been developed in my town for the last 5 years looks exactly the same, with the exact same floor plan. These new houses replace old houses that also looked exactly the same with same floor plan. It's a fugly two-family townhouse. Good houses don't matter to buyers in a seller's market. Poor architecture, poor execution, poor everything and yet they're selling.
It's very rare to be in the position to build your own home, as you'll never do it cheaper than a mass market/spec builder. It's almost always cheaper to just sell your property and buy something already existing.
If you do end up building custom, it's almost a waste to find free plans, as you'll want to customize to your liking as much as possible.
Pretty much. Even if custom costed exactly same money, it still means someone would need to wait 1-2 years before it is built vs just moving in to new house within a month
Also, don't forget local building codes. They vary a lot from location to location. You might theoretically be able to spec out a house that complies with most building codes, but it would probably look really funny and be hilariously expensive.
A roof pitched for heavy snow with storm shutters for hurricanes would stand out like a sore thumb in Arizona.
While you are not wrong, those requirements are the same for all houses.
Your typical signal family neighborhood has the following requirements: There will be room to store at least 3 cars, and at least 2 of them will be indoors. The path from the street to where the cars are stored will avoid hitting things with the car. All this means that every house will have a 3 car garage up front with a straight driveway to the road. A 3 car garage defines how wide your lot will be. All houses look the same because the car defines so much about how the house must look.
It rains everywhere, so you will account for that in all houses so you can take any plan knowing rain is accounted for. Views are the only thing that might be different, and most people don't live where the views are worth worrying about - unless you live in a rural area your view is the other houses in your neighborhood.
My house has no garage, but a semi-circular driveway plus a spur that means that we could park 9-10 full sized vehicles. There are basically no houses here with a 3 car garage, and rather few with a 2 car garage. Houses without garages are fairly common.
It rains here, but it also snows here -- so a roof that can shed water but not hold the weight of 3 feet of snow is not suitable. Putting our roof on a house in Georgia would just be a waste of money.
Some ground can deal with basements. Most of Florida can't, so they build on slabs. Then they need to put the HVAC and plumbing somewhere that isn't the basement.
A house in Florida should be designed to withstand hurricanes and floods. A house in California should expect frequent minor earthquakes.
My backyard view is great. My front view is of a road. Planning for those in the wrong direction would be bad.
> While you are not wrong, those requirements are the same for all houses.
Not every house needs triple-pane windows and R25 insulation in the walls, sitting on a 8-ft deep basement, with a steep roof pitch for snow to slide off of. Generally, you want to cut corners, because building to code in New York would be overkill in Texas.
You could have unique plans for each climate zone, but then the slope of the land and the shape of the lot also matters. Ideally, you'd want to be situated on a southward facing slope, beneath the road, so you could have huge windows towards the back of the house to taking in winter sun, natural insulation from the hill, and smaller windows facing the street. If you can't, you'll have to compromise on something that makes the house less pleasant to live in and/or harder to heat/cool.
At this point, we might actually have 100 distinct home designs, for each climate zone and slope. If you're lucky, these standard might actually be compliant with zoning for your lot, and maximize the allowable use of the lot. Every town is different, and who knows what silly rules your town requires.
At this point, you still need a design that local builders know how to build. Builders talk about "communities of practice", where they know how to build a certain way in response to how all of the other contractors in that area will also build, so that a subcontractor doesn't ruin another subcontractor's work. If you hire builders to build in ways they're not familiar with, they'll make mistakes. Most mistakes will be fine, but they could add up to failing to meet the code or standard for which the house was designed.
Ideally, you want to find an architect and a builder who have worked together before, to design and build the kind of house that you want using the techniques appropriate for that design, with the builder having crews of subcontractors that he/she has worked with before. If you've reached this point, you might as well take the extra step to building the perfect house for you, and customize it just a little more.
Our house will have a space for one car (under a roof but not in the garage) a motorbike and some bikes (all bikes in a shed). If some of the kids will have their own car before they move out (IMHO 40 % chance), they can park on the street.
Where do you get this information from? Three-car garages are quite rare in Texas, and I am struggling to recall if I have ever seen a household use both carports for vehicles. At max, one car is stored in the garage while the other half is used for storage.
- buying some architectural books. Many (good ones) have plans in them from excellent architects. A sample from a good one is at [0]. If your tastes are not so 'architecture school' there are others.
- looking at the development approvals in your local area. Plans are often open to all. And they will (assumedly) be up to code in your area today.
Imo the concept of 'open source' doesn't translate to houses as well because regulation, construction approaches and tastes can be so locally specific and also change over time.
> Imo the concept of 'open source' doesn't translate to houses as well because regulation, construction approaches and tastes can be so locally specific and also change over time.
I think that's the biggest problem. You can draw up a house in free apps in a couple of minutes or hours but that doesn't mean it's structurally sound or that the walls will have the right dimensions for the pipes and cables that need to run through them or that they're the right size for the kind of insulation you want or that the windows meet your country's/state's legal regulations or that the house meets the code for where you want to build (which can literally depend on the part of the road the building will be on).
We approached our architect with pretty much a full floorplan in hand but it still took us months to pin down something that would get fast-tracked for approval and even then the floor plans had to be modified by the construction company to account for the placement of things like toilets and showers. Even without changing any of these details we couldn't take the floorplans and just submit them for a different part of town as they would likely not match the requirements there.
A large part of differences between towns is pure corruption! Material strength is physical facts. Water runs down hill. Many other such things. Many towns are in one of a couple national form based codes plans where if you follow the rules as laid out there is no need for approval as the engineering was already done for any generic house. If your town/state is not, or is but provides extras on top it is corruption: either the industry is trying to create a local monopoly via legal means; or your town board is trying to increase their power. Either way it is only making housing more expensive without serving any public good.
Not all houses need to meet the form based codes. If you want to do something different then you need a professional engineer to stamp and approve the plans - once stamped the town needs no more input.
Apartments and commercial buildings start to get more complex (but even then many meet form based codes as it is cheaper than calculating out all the stresses). However again professional engineer needs to approve the plans not the town.
I would add that an architect’s job is to find the little details that make your big investment better. One thing I associate with off the rack house plans in big developments is having the shades drawn all day because otherwise the sun will shine right in your face. An architect looks at the site and the sun and adjusts window heights and overhangs to suit. Amongst many other details. A house being such a big investment, hiring an architect seems wise.
Your last sentence is super important, having a sketch of a house is far from enough. Googling "construction detail drawings" will bring up endless drawings of all the small, but critical, things you need to take into account.
Otoh, if your house was built by a developer, the plans on file may have only a vague relation to the as built.
My first house was a Seattle skinny, garage off the alley. The plans on file were for a garage in front, different upper floor layout, and a different roof shape.
We do have prefabs. They tend to be built in a way that's compatible with a lot of jurisdictions (some would say better than traditional homes because of this).
Planning applications in the UK are publicly available and many have architectural drawings/site plans attached with varying degrees of detail.
There are millions of applications and each local authority has a different database so it may take a bit of digging to find what you are searching for.
Same in Denmark, you can either look them up on https://weblager.dk or if a house you interested in isn't available there you can normally request the drawing from the city, for a small fee.
In Hungary there is a public project to create freely accessible house plans with all necessary documentation to start to build them. The website is only available in Hungarian (but google translate manages to translate it quite well), and the houses are mostly really small compared to American standards, and their style is just way different from American houses. Anyway, let me drop the link here, maybe there is something interesting to be found there: https://www.oeny.hu/oeny/nmtk/mintatervek
There are so many things you notice while living in a particular house which would have been trivial to fix in planning stage, but impractical after it's built.
I'm not sure where you're located, but here in the US you can build the building you're describing (a square house with a gable roof, without eaves if you want the roof to terminate at the wall) pretty easily with regular dimensional lumber framing.
Barndominiums generally imply steel framing and requires heavy equipment, at least to hoist the steel beams into place. They are less easy to build and maintain than a stick-framed home, in my opinion. A simple incarnation of a latter could be thrown up by two hobbyists, if it's small enough.
Lstiburek's "perfect wall"[0] may be of interest to you. Simply put, layered from the inside to the outside, it's drywall, wood studs (with batt insulation), sheathing (plywood or OSB), plastic house-wrap over the sheathing to serve as an air and vapor barrier, some depth of external insulation on top of that in the form of boards, then finally the exterior cladding.
Yeah, the perfect wall is definitely part of it - and I want eaves that overhang quite far because that protects the walls something fierce - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPUvfTipgyg
That's essentially what I designed for myself, to reduce budget while (IMO) still looking pretty and historic. It's a 30x38 foot box. I've wrote a bit about it:
The envelope on your house is the least complex part of it. How are you going to insulate? Where are vapor and air barriers? How will your framing interface to your foundation? What will your foundation design look like depending on soil conditions, moisture, frost heave, etc? What kind of plumbing, mechanical, and electrical components and infrastructure are required according to local code?
Any GC (General Contractor) in Massachusetts (US) can build one of those for you. They are called "Ranches" and "Raised Ranches" depending on how deep the foundation is at your front door.
Any GC should have a huge stack of these plans sitting around, or has worked with a designer that can quickly edit a pre-existing plan for you.
FWIW: I grew up in a Raised Ranch built into the side of a hill. One side had the basement mostly buried, the other side had the basement wall mostly exposed with a garage. The front door was at the point where the basement as 50% underground, so the entry has a very high, and impressive ceiling. At the end of the day, it was still a box with the roof you want.
I have wanted to build something similar for a long time, but I would like it to be a passive house as well. I gave up on ever finding a premade plan. Instead I have been using fusion 360 and sweet home 3d to design it myself.
If you’re willing to make your final result available I’d certainly take a look!
I realize that actually building it will require customization for local codes, etc, but I’d love a place to start - and I want to integrate building science instead of building spectacle.
The big thing is the detailed blueprints. The “look” is just the start of it.
Yeah, that's it (gable or a-frame, maybe possibly consider a Gambrel but I don't know if that "bend" greatly increases the possibility of various forms of failure).
What I'm really looking for is someone who has taken a basic "square/rectangular" house and though out interesting and intelligent ways of arranging the rooms inside.
Loads of people on YouTube building those, usually as cabins. Bushradical has several small ones, but there are plenty of examples out there. Haven't found any plans, per se, but I haven't really looked, either.
Readit News
Earthships are also said to be open source, but the plans are (definitely) not free https://earthshipbiotecture.com/
You can also check Open Source Home, by Studiolada (those are free, but the plans are in french) https://www.countryliving.com/remodeling-renovation/news/g46...
Open Source Ecology is now listing a house in their list of builds https://www.opensourceecology.org/extreme-build-of-the-seed-...
Open Building Institute is also promoting a configurable house https://www.openbuildinginstitute.org/
The plans aren't on the website anymore, but you can get it from https://web.archive.org/web/20170918182346/http://www.studio...
The architecture industry is enormous. Real estate is enormous. There's no automatic drawing, electrical, plumbing, insulation, ect... generators given specifications? I'm kind of amazed no one's trying to disrupt that. "Hi Stable Diffusion, please draw me blueprints for a 2000 sq. ft. house, with two stories, given this landscape. Thanks Stable Diffusion."
There isn’t just one set of building codes for every jurisdiction, different jurisdictions adopt various sets of code.
Different geographic regions require various things that other areas don’t require. My state doesn’t have earthquakes or hurricanes, but we do have to have stronger roofs for handling snow load. Buildings in Florida need specific methods to handle hurricane force winds. Buildings in California need specific methods to handle earthquakes. And so on. How a building is designed is highly dependent on where it is located geographically.
You’re also underestimating just how many different materials/fixtures/fittings get installed in a house. Plumbing fixtures and light fixtures, electrical wiring devices, floor/wall/ceiling finishes, doors and door hardware, siding (type, color, trim color), windows, woodwork, cabinet, cabinet hardware, countertops, bathroom vanities, appliances, rain gutters, garage door, driveway/sidewalk material and color, deck material and color, etc.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that designing and building a building is far more complex than it seems.
Random text/image generators have no intelligence, no knowledge of design, building regulations, engineering, physics. A fun little tool to set up boilerplate is its peak usefulness.
Or an app with some dials and checkboxes for a constrained design space. Like for micro homes. Or vertically integrated companies like Lindal Cedar Homes. Kind of like buying a customized airplane or RV.
But for general purpose construction documents? I'd bet no. So many different construction codes. Site planning. Construction tech and products are constantly changing. Customers are psychotic. Etc, etc.
Disclaimer: I was just a drafter working misc A/E/C jobs. And I wrote add-ons for arch and civil engr. But mosdef am not an architect. Would like to be proven wrong.
The initial design could be done using an interactive tool that you can use. This is not different from web tools used to design a kitchen. I also think IKEA uses one.
I live in Scandinavia so it is probably different from what you know.
The company designing the house took our drawings and ideas and created drawings and an excel sheet they used to calculate the price of the project. A tool to do this would be valuable and same the customer some time ad I would be able to do most of the work designing the layout.
After the contract is signed the company would make proper plans used for building the house etc..
The complexity of the whole project is enormous but the initial planning would be a good fit for an interactive tool.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.instructables.com/Build-you...
Would a pre-existing plan account for the sun exposure of your land? Would it have a roof that makes sense for how much it rains or snows? Would getting sunlight in the bedroom also mean facing traffic? Would it take advantage of elevation for views or make sure to block a nearby neighbour? Would it deal well with moisture, or fires, or access roads? Would you build a porch where you can laze away late summer afternoons and feel everything's just right with the world, or a place to dry laundry where nobody goes?
If you really want to design your own house (a great idea), look up materials around A Pattern Language instead. Learn what makes a great house, then design a plan incorporating those ideas but customised towards your plot and your needs.
There's a free software tool from National Renewable Energy Labs that lets you make a rough sketch of your house, including orientation and try alternate features to determine if adding more insulation would be worth it. Or a more efficient furnace. Each airport (at least in the US) measures weather (temp, wind speed/direction, humidity, cloudiness, etc) every hour. Local climate files will have the past 20 years of weather so you can evaluate the costs/benefits of different systems with your actual records.
https://www.nrel.gov/buildings/beopt.html
Disclaimer: I worked on an older version of this tool.
The mega builders that build big developments certainly don't match up house plans with the way lots are oriented, and that's where most houses are built.
I'm not trying to argue we shouldn't work on that, but to just dismiss off the shelf house plans entirely because "you have to build for the site" is rejecting the reality of how things are done.
At the very least, a repository of plans that was categorized simply by the orientation it was optimized for would be a step ahead of how most housing is planned and built today.
If you really don't believe me just survey home owners in those now 2-year old tract homes. Even if the actual houses have excellent construction you'll discover the builder completely declined to take into account things like drainage of the lot or how maintenance can be performed.
It's more general than lot to lot, but still seems to take into account the general lay of the land, the city's codes and etc.
There will be compromises because they build for average buyer, not for you.
And people that are looking for a house usually want to move there as soon as possible, doing custom not only means you need to pay more but that you also have to wait longer and pay for the place you're currently living extra year or two.
Ideally all would start from some common plans then architect would customize it based on the future home owner input but that's frankly expensive.
Historically, for example, log cabins are popular in the woods because logs are plentiful and adobe was used in desert environments because of the abundance of sand, lime, binders, etc. I would not build a solid wood home in the desert of New Mexico for the same reason why I wouldn’t build a masonry house in the forests.
Today, we have all but perfected the manufacturing of, developed logistics for, and codified laws governing building standards focused on raw building materials that you can order from a lumber yard or even Home Depot.
Modern building construction, at least in North America, is based around the “balloon framing” idea that the walls support subsequent floors and the roof, maybe with a load bearing wall in the middle somewhere. With 2x6 framing members, you can go up to 3 floors in some jurisdictions without additional engineering sign off. As long as there is a flat platform to build the first floor, you can build up.
The foundation is the only thing that would require custom construction, with a pier and beam, you need to drive your pier 1-3ft below the frost line and with a slab or basement foundation, you also need to reach below the frost line, but requirements differ between codes.
Drainage is another area that needs special attention and is 100% custom for each project.
I think you're getting balloon and platform framing mixed up.
Why not? Perhaps the US is different, but in mainland Europe you'll find plenty of brick houses in the forest.
Yes, historically you'd build a log cabin out of materials found on-site, but is anyone doing that anymore? Presumably you'd want logs shipped from elsewhere, if only to get ones that have dried out already.
At that point, why would it be prohibitively expensive to choose other building materials?
Would you, the first-time-house designer be able to accommodate for all those issues? Or even know they exist in the first place?
> If you really want to design your own house (a great idea), look up materials around A Pattern Language instead. Learn what makes a great house, then design a plan incorporating those ideas but customised towards your plot and your needs.
Horrible idea. By all means be the input in the process, but pick someone that actually knows how building works and that can instantly point out any misunderstanding or lacks of knowledge you have.
One, it is meant to be read alongside The Timeless Way of Building. It is not simply a how-to manual.
Two, it comes from experience gleaned in the field working as an architect and builder. It is not simply highbrow art, mysticism, or eccentricity.
Three, the patterns are separate from implementation: "[You] can use the solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice." He goes on to distinguish patterns in which he believes an invariant property has been established from those in which more research is needed. He even states that some patterns are just a guess and shows how to identify those in the description of each pattern.
Lastly, he states there is a danger that people will assume that this one pattern language should stand for all time: "Is it not true that there is a danger that people might come to rely on this one printed language, instead of developing their own languages, in their own minds? The fact is, we have written this book as a first step in the society-wide process by which people will gradually become conscious of their own pattern languages, and work to improve them."
The purpose of the book and its principles is not to recreate an aesthetic through pastiche. You are meant to use the principles in the book to create your own language that works for your context. A pattern that works for me in my environment may not work for you. That fact doesn't nullify the value of the pattern. The purpose of the two books together is to acknowledge that humans have deep feelings about the environments they inhabit. Whether those feelings can be explained or not is beside the point. The point is that we have them. These feelings happen across cultures and time. When we apply those feelings about our environments to the built world, several patterns seem to emerge. Hence, you get the concept of pattern languages.
Alexander takes the bold step of not only acknowledging human feelings but centering them in the discussion about how the world should be built. This point should interest those who are sympathetic to the Agile Manifesto, or to principles of user-centered design, or to product design and product management. This fact is also likely why certain interests are uncomfortable with his work. Powerful interests do not, in general, like to lose power, and change is expensive.
Later works, including his series on The Nature of Order go deeper into his exploration of these principles, even the possibility of an objective evaluation of beauty. And yes, there is a bit of woo going on which can make some people feel uncomfortable. We are all capable thinkers. You can decide for yourself which ideas resonate and which do not.
Personally, I found that his ideas changed the way I experience the world, including giving me the ability to evaluate the kind of home I want to live in and how to optimize that home to increase my own happiness. I may not ever get the chance to build my own home. But I have a voice. I participate in society. I believe the world could and should do better than optimize itself for money. I believe I am not unique in finding the books useful.
(edited for clarity)
I get this is hn where diy ethos runs deep, but please don't do this. Hire someone to design it and oversee construction for you.
Expertise exists and matters.
Only the rich can afford good houses.
It's very rare to be in the position to build your own home, as you'll never do it cheaper than a mass market/spec builder. It's almost always cheaper to just sell your property and buy something already existing.
If you do end up building custom, it's almost a waste to find free plans, as you'll want to customize to your liking as much as possible.
It's like a system design template dictionary for homes, spaces, cities, etc.
A roof pitched for heavy snow with storm shutters for hurricanes would stand out like a sore thumb in Arizona.
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That is untrue
Perhaps not the "best possible" but relocation of houses is very common and practical. Kitset houses are transforming the industry
This is far more complicated that the author appreciates.
Your typical signal family neighborhood has the following requirements: There will be room to store at least 3 cars, and at least 2 of them will be indoors. The path from the street to where the cars are stored will avoid hitting things with the car. All this means that every house will have a 3 car garage up front with a straight driveway to the road. A 3 car garage defines how wide your lot will be. All houses look the same because the car defines so much about how the house must look.
It rains everywhere, so you will account for that in all houses so you can take any plan knowing rain is accounted for. Views are the only thing that might be different, and most people don't live where the views are worth worrying about - unless you live in a rural area your view is the other houses in your neighborhood.
It rains here, but it also snows here -- so a roof that can shed water but not hold the weight of 3 feet of snow is not suitable. Putting our roof on a house in Georgia would just be a waste of money.
Some ground can deal with basements. Most of Florida can't, so they build on slabs. Then they need to put the HVAC and plumbing somewhere that isn't the basement.
A house in Florida should be designed to withstand hurricanes and floods. A house in California should expect frequent minor earthquakes.
My backyard view is great. My front view is of a road. Planning for those in the wrong direction would be bad.
Not every house needs triple-pane windows and R25 insulation in the walls, sitting on a 8-ft deep basement, with a steep roof pitch for snow to slide off of. Generally, you want to cut corners, because building to code in New York would be overkill in Texas.
You could have unique plans for each climate zone, but then the slope of the land and the shape of the lot also matters. Ideally, you'd want to be situated on a southward facing slope, beneath the road, so you could have huge windows towards the back of the house to taking in winter sun, natural insulation from the hill, and smaller windows facing the street. If you can't, you'll have to compromise on something that makes the house less pleasant to live in and/or harder to heat/cool.
At this point, we might actually have 100 distinct home designs, for each climate zone and slope. If you're lucky, these standard might actually be compliant with zoning for your lot, and maximize the allowable use of the lot. Every town is different, and who knows what silly rules your town requires.
At this point, you still need a design that local builders know how to build. Builders talk about "communities of practice", where they know how to build a certain way in response to how all of the other contractors in that area will also build, so that a subcontractor doesn't ruin another subcontractor's work. If you hire builders to build in ways they're not familiar with, they'll make mistakes. Most mistakes will be fine, but they could add up to failing to meet the code or standard for which the house was designed.
Ideally, you want to find an architect and a builder who have worked together before, to design and build the kind of house that you want using the techniques appropriate for that design, with the builder having crews of subcontractors that he/she has worked with before. If you've reached this point, you might as well take the extra step to building the perfect house for you, and customize it just a little more.
Maybe in your city.
A home designed for Texas is not a good home in Calgary.
Our house will have a space for one car (under a roof but not in the garage) a motorbike and some bikes (all bikes in a shed). If some of the kids will have their own car before they move out (IMHO 40 % chance), they can park on the street.
- buying some architectural books. Many (good ones) have plans in them from excellent architects. A sample from a good one is at [0]. If your tastes are not so 'architecture school' there are others.
- looking at the development approvals in your local area. Plans are often open to all. And they will (assumedly) be up to code in your area today.
Imo the concept of 'open source' doesn't translate to houses as well because regulation, construction approaches and tastes can be so locally specific and also change over time.
[0] https://issuu.com/birkhauser.ch/docs/floor_plan_manual_housi...
I think that's the biggest problem. You can draw up a house in free apps in a couple of minutes or hours but that doesn't mean it's structurally sound or that the walls will have the right dimensions for the pipes and cables that need to run through them or that they're the right size for the kind of insulation you want or that the windows meet your country's/state's legal regulations or that the house meets the code for where you want to build (which can literally depend on the part of the road the building will be on).
We approached our architect with pretty much a full floorplan in hand but it still took us months to pin down something that would get fast-tracked for approval and even then the floor plans had to be modified by the construction company to account for the placement of things like toilets and showers. Even without changing any of these details we couldn't take the floorplans and just submit them for a different part of town as they would likely not match the requirements there.
Not all houses need to meet the form based codes. If you want to do something different then you need a professional engineer to stamp and approve the plans - once stamped the town needs no more input.
Apartments and commercial buildings start to get more complex (but even then many meet form based codes as it is cheaper than calculating out all the stresses). However again professional engineer needs to approve the plans not the town.
My first house was a Seattle skinny, garage off the alley. The plans on file were for a garage in front, different upper floor layout, and a different roof shape.
There are millions of applications and each local authority has a different database so it may take a bit of digging to find what you are searching for.
Application example - https://publicaccess.tewkesbury.gov.uk/online-applications/a...
Drawings example - https://publicaccess.tewkesbury.gov.uk/online-applications/f...
https://www.oeny.hu/oeny/nmtk/tervreszletek/NMTK-138
waste all that space on the recessed entrance instead of just making straight wall to the roof ?
There are so many things you notice while living in a particular house which would have been trivial to fix in planning stage, but impractical after it's built.
You do have to provide some basic info to get them but I can confirm that they're a full set of plans.
1. the house uses novel construction techniques. it's more of a design exercise than a serious attempt at something people might build.
2. you can't use the plans without getting sign off from an architect or engineer. this defeats the whole purposes of "releasing" plans.
I want it to be designed to minimize cuts and make building simple. I want the roof to be two slabs with no fancy protrusions, angles, gables, etc.
I want something that is easy to build and maintain.
As far as I’ve been able to find out, bardominiums are the closest to what I want.
Barndominiums generally imply steel framing and requires heavy equipment, at least to hoist the steel beams into place. They are less easy to build and maintain than a stick-framed home, in my opinion. A simple incarnation of a latter could be thrown up by two hobbyists, if it's small enough.
Lstiburek's "perfect wall"[0] may be of interest to you. Simply put, layered from the inside to the outside, it's drywall, wood studs (with batt insulation), sheathing (plywood or OSB), plastic house-wrap over the sheathing to serve as an air and vapor barrier, some depth of external insulation on top of that in the form of boards, then finally the exterior cladding.
[0]: https://buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-the-p...
Something like this look: https://www.stocksy.com/791391/two-story-house-with-wrap-aro... is exceptionally resistant to weather issues.
https://map.simonsarris.com/p/designing-a-new-old-home-begin...
But what you decide for the interior plan, to be ideal for you, is very much up to how you plan to use your house.
Part of what I want to see is how others use their space, and use that as a "springboard" to how I could use mine.
The frame of the house is easy. The rest is not.
https://www.houseplans.com/collection/shouse-plans
Any GC should have a huge stack of these plans sitting around, or has worked with a designer that can quickly edit a pre-existing plan for you.
FWIW: I grew up in a Raised Ranch built into the side of a hill. One side had the basement mostly buried, the other side had the basement wall mostly exposed with a garage. The front door was at the point where the basement as 50% underground, so the entry has a very high, and impressive ceiling. At the end of the day, it was still a box with the roof you want.
I realize that actually building it will require customization for local codes, etc, but I’d love a place to start - and I want to integrate building science instead of building spectacle.
The big thing is the detailed blueprints. The “look” is just the start of it.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gable_roof
What I'm really looking for is someone who has taken a basic "square/rectangular" house and though out interesting and intelligent ways of arranging the rooms inside.