Oil Silo Home

Detroit, Michigan USA

The Oil Silo Home is a self-supporting housing solution for the post-oil world.

As the Earth’s human population increases at an exponential rate, oil discovery is decreasing at an exponential rate. Natural gas is becoming scarce and oil silos are now becoming abandoned as storage containers. In this age of limited resources why not convert some of these existing structures into homes?

The Oil Silo Home claims to build upon the work of Buckminster Fuller, establishing an evolution of Bucky’s Dymaxion Home. The designers believe that the sustainable Silo Home exceeds a net zero carbon footprint; it is carbon positive. They also believe that if they can build more Silo Homes, the overall quality of the global environment will actually be improved. The Silo Home is prefabricated, inexpensive, highly structurally stable, efficient to assemble and disassemble, and has the capacity for mass production.

The Oil Silo Home is designed on a firm belief that sustainability begins with eliminating waste. The Silo Home is an adaptive-reuse design. Abandoned oil silos are transformed into efficient, affordable, and comfortable housing for families worldwide. Our design of the Silo Home anticipates a post-petroleum world in which declining crude oil supplies eventually lead to the obsolescence of oil refineries and oil silos worldwide. By utilizing existing empty oil silos as the main element of our design, waste and embodied energy are dramatically reduced, thereby conserving both cost and time. An oil silo, or LPG Vessel, is a storage container for compressed liquefied petroleum gas.

There are approximately 52,000 oil silos in 660 oil refineries worldwide!

Team: Leon Lai, Eric Tan, Nicolai Schlapps, Sarah Roberts