Ger­man sci­en­tists believe that they have found a way to solve Africa’s hous­ing short­age. Gerd Niemoeller has cre­ated a card­board house. The house has been stand­ing up to wind and rain tests, and the sci­en­tists believe they are ready to begin production.

Niemoeller’s card­board houses are intended to be sued as emer­gency shel­ters or to replace slum housing.

From Jansamachar, we learn more about the design of the houses.

The break­through came with Niemoeller’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary method of hon­ey­comb card­board soaked in poly­mer resins. Resem­bling a hon­ey­comb wafer bis­cuit, this struc­tural design has been a main­stay in air­craft and yacht design for decades, but not in hous­ing.

“Up until now hon­ey­comb struc­tural con­struc­tion ele­ments have been pro­duced pri­mar­ily from alu­minium. But that of course entails a local indus­trial capac­ity which is costly and very energy-intensive — which is unaf­ford­able in the Third World,” says Niemoeller.

That’s where his “paper house” comes in.

“Peo­ple want to stay in their own coun­tries. It’s only the dire cir­cum­stances of poverty which force them to become refugees,” he says. “The chang­ing cli­mate will only exac­er­bate this trend crit­i­cally, unless we can come up with alternatives.”

Niemoeller uses cel­lu­lose, pri­mar­ily from recy­cled paper, which is soaked in poly­mer resins. The cel­lu­lose mass is sub­jected to extreme heat and pres­sure and is formed into wafer-like hon­ey­comb struc­tural elements.

Each hon­ey­comb is a mini-vacuum which helps to hold the panel together and increase ten­sile strength.

“If you put a nail in the wall, you dam­age only one sin­gle hon­ey­comb with­out dam­ag­ing the vac­uum prop­er­ties of the sur­round­ing hon­ey­combs,” says the 58-year-old engi­neer from Lue­beck, Germany.

“A 4-centimetre-thick wall has the ten­sile strength of a 40-centimetre-thick con­ven­tional com­pressed board wall,” he says.

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