Hexayurt
From Math2033
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Members
Asa King
Rachel Myers
Michael Hall
Autumn Lewis
David Church
What is a Hexayurt?
The hexayurt was invented in 2002 by Vinay Gupta. It is a six-sided building created from sheets of wood. The simplest hexayurts are built from 4' X 8' sheets of plywood. The final product is 8' tall, 16' long, and 14' wide. The walls are made by screwing together sheets of plywood and the roof is created by cutting the plywood in half diagonally and placing the pieces in the shape of a triangle.
Below is a plan for a basic hexayurt:
Steps for Construction
How did our group go about constructing a hexayurt?
First Step: With help from Columbia Forest Products, who donated 4 x 8 feet sections of plywood, we assembled our materials.
These included:
- Twelve 4 x 8 feet sections of plywood
- 2 inch wood screws
- 2 x 2 inch boards of wood
We also used:
- Saw
- Hammers
- Drill
Second Step: We teamed up together one Saturday morning and began construction!
Third Step: We cut 6 pieces of the 4 x 8 ft. sections of plywood diagonally. These pieces would make up our roof.
Fourth Step: Taking the remaining 6 pieces of plywood, we cut 6 inches off of each section. These pieces would make up our walls, and needed to be shorter in length so that the roof could have room to hang over the wall so as to provide more shelter from weather, stronger stability, and to provide us with a margin for error.
Fifth Step: We took 1 piece of the plywood section that we would use for the wall of the hexyurt, which was now a 4 x 7.5 ft. section, and measured two feet inward from the length on both sides. This would be our door. We cut through the width of the section in those two places, and viola: a door.
Sixth Step: After the plywood was cut, we moved to the building site and began construction there. First we needed to plot out our measurements on the ground. Using sticks and rocks, we marked a center point for our hexayurt. From that point, we measured the length of one of the boards (7.5 ft) Seventh Step: In order to connect the hexayurt we needed to make some kind of connector to link the walls. We did this using the 2x2 in. boards of wood, which we cut into 3 inch pieces. Since the hexayurt has six vertices, we determined that we should use 2 connectors (1 on top, and 1 on bottom) for support of the walls, thus meaning that we needed to make twelve connectors. After cutting twelve 3 inch pieces of wood, we cut a 120 degree angle out of each one. Since the sum of the interior angles of a hexagon is 720 degrees, that means one interior angle is 120 degrees, and thus is the angle we would need to use to connect our walls.
Eighth Step: Using the screws and the drill, we put up the walls with our connectors.
Ninth Step: In order to begin assembling our roof, we had to connect the triangular sections of plywood we had cut diagonally. The way we needed to connect them was so that two of the pieces would form a larger isosceles triangle when connected. In order to do this without using more wood, we simply overlapped the two triangular halves by two inches, and then drilled them together.
Tenth Step: After connecting the twelve individual pieces of diagonally cut plywood into six isosceles triangles, we cut roughly six inches off of the top points so that when the roof was constructed there would be a hole for ventilation, smoke, etc.
Eleventh Step: In order to make the roof we connected all of the triangles and put it on top of our wall. We then secured it, and VIOLA, a Hexayurt!
Practical Uses
The Hexayurt is a new kind of sheltering solution.
To make the simplest hexayurt, make a wall by putting six sheets of plywood on their sides in a hexagon. Cut six more sheets in half diagonally, and screw them together into a shallow cone. Lift the roof on to the wall with a large group of people, then fasten it down with more screws. Seal and paint it for durability. Your basic hexayurt is complete.
This shelter will last for years in most climates and costs less than $100. This basic design can be improved with proper windows, doors, room partitions, stove fittings and other architectural features. More durable materials could give it a very long life. See video here: blip.tv/file/2596816/
It may be ideal for a variety of disaster relief situations.
Here are the key points:
Hexayurts can be built in plywood/OSB for less than $100 for a 166 square foot (15 sq meter) building.
Hexayurts can be made in a variety of sizes using simple tools from industry standard 4'x8' (1.2x2.4m) sheets with zero waste and can be made successfully from many different materials, like plywood, OSB, coroplast, composites, hexacomb cardboard or other honeycombs and polyiso insulation boards.We also have new work from Edmund Harriss on quad-sized hexayurt-like domes which share the zero-waste property with the hexayurt itself. These are huge and very exciting. Hexayurts are public domain with no copyright or patent, meaning anybody can build as many as they like for free.
Depending on your choice of materials, a Hexayurt can last for years or even decades. In some long stay applications this could cut the cost of providing shelter to 10% of the cost of using standard relief tents. The hexayurt enables regional shelter self sufficiency, where in a crisis, pre-trained local builders or military personnel can work with first responders to rapidly create shelter from materials in the local supply chain, typically plywood or OSB.
This could prove particularly useful in areas with large scale repeated rehousing needs, such as the Hurricane Belt or flood-prone areas like Bangaldesh. Materials can be trucked in from near by unaffected areas at substantially lower cost than airfreighting in tents: in fact, the typical $100 air freight on a $350 relief tent is enough to pay for a whole hexayurt. We are actively seeking NGO partners to field-test this radically lower cost sheltering solution.
Science for Humanity is helping us coordinate research on the hexayurt with scientific and engineering institutions.
-Vinay Gupta
Zero Waste Nearodesic Domes
Zero Waste Nearodesic Domes
Edmund Harriss
http://www.mathematicians.org.uk/eoh
http://maxwelldemon.com
Buckminster Fuller was an architect with a sense of mathematics. He
recognised that simple forms would often have the strength and other
properties required. As a result he promoted many structures from math-
ematics that have been found to be excellent for construction. Most
notably he promoted the Oct-Tet truss and the geodesic dome. The
geodesic dome in particular was taken up by the environmental move-
ment for simple housing. The problem is it requires a fair amount of skill
to build and if the faces are made with sheet material, takes quite a bit of
waste.
The first to address this directly was Vinay Gupta, creator of the
Hexayurt. His starting point was the 8’x4’ rectangle. A standard size for
building materials, for example plywood. In particular he introduced the
triangle made from a 2x1 rectangle cut along the diagonal:
Six of these triangles come together to form a pyramid. The pyramid of
six triangles is placed on top of a hexagon of 2x1 rectangles to form the
hexayurt (for more details see www.hexayurt.com):
This triangle and rectangle combination can be used to make larger
buildings. Here are two:
For the first (the Tri-dome) the standard roof (six triangles put
together) is lifted higher with squares (2 rectangles together) on 3 of the
sides joined by half-roofs:
For the second (the Quad-dome) four standard roofs are made
and leant together around a square. The remaining holes are filled, with a
square on top and four squares cut accross the middle round the side. The
diagonally cut squares are vertical:
