Oil Silo Home

Like the swords to plowshares metaphor, the idea of turning oil-centric objects of design into post-pollution paradises is nothing new, but rarely fleshed out quite so well as in this proposal.

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This idea by PinkCloud.DK involves turning old spherical oil silos into a new sustainable multifamily residential buildings – since they are already portable and well-sealed, the conversion is mostly additive.

With 50,000 of these sorts of structures in existence, it reminds one a bit of shipping containers: there is sufficient supply that you could imagine an upcycled solution being designed once and applied many times over, saving time and money through efficient repetition and deployment.

OIl silo diagram

The spheres are also naturally optimized for things like adding solar panels and streamlined to channel or deflect winds as desired for natural ventilation purposes.

“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.”

Oil Silo Home interior

“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!”