[about3fitty]

I have been both to this site and to Coober Pedy, South Australia. Pretty neat bit of architectural convergent evolution for extremely high temperature environments.

[illuminant]

It astounds me that these things do not catch on.

[Aurornis]

> It astounds me that these things do not catch on.

Basements are very common throughout the country. Once you've built a basement, you might as well put a house on the next floor up.

Modern insulation technology is very effective. It's much cheaper to put a lot of insulation in the above-ground portion of a house than to try to build the equivalent area entirely below the grade.

Building entirely below the surface without putting anything on top would be massively expensive compared to the same square footage in a traditional home, even if you accounted for equivalent insulation and cooling costs. It's not even close.

[joshuanapoli]

I think that underground or earth bermed homes are often failures. There are different water and ventilation concerns for these. An above ground home is pretty accessible for repairs, but these can be nearly impossible if the home is underground.

[rbanffy]

I wonder if there aren’t zoning laws that create incentives for or against some of these approaches. In dry places the living space can be connected to rain-collecting cisterns that further help to reduce evaporation losses. When you free the surface to other uses, you can also generate power from wind or solar (and solar also helps to protect the top soil from evaporative losses).

[ramesh31]

It's neat as an art project, but we aren't hobbits. People like windows.

[infecto]

It does not astound me. Building things underground is expensive and in a lot of cases not cost effective compared to the cost of electricity at human scale.

[beambot]

It has a long heritage. In fact, Cappadocia in Turkey is thought to have housed 20,000 people in one big underground network!

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220810-derinkuyu-turkey...