Well, obviously first we'd need land. What land we get will determine who is legally allowed to build a dormpartment building, and what techniques and materials they're allowed to use.
That said, if it was up to me, I'd probably want to build something out in the Arizona desert, probably near Snowflake, and I'd want to use cinderblock construction. The great thing about that is that you're basically making giant lego-houses out of hollow concrete blocks and mortar.
So step one would be getting a bulldozer to level the land, then a cement truck and a shitload of cement to make a foundation (highly recommended we get a construction company to do that part, rather than doing it ourselves), then build up from there. A backhoe to dig out large water tanks and a septic system will be necessary, assuming this will be somewhere off-grid.
The great thing is that solar is actually doable these days, so we could get REAAAALLY cheap off-grid land, build a big-ass solar farm, and then our only issue is potable water, which is doable with a reverse osmosis system and a large enough catchment tank, if you don't care about living too close to a major city.
I think you and Alicorn have drastically different ideas about the end product :-)
Rationalists like to live in group houses. We are also as a subculture moving more and more into a child-having phase of our lives. These things don't cooperate super well - I live in a four bedroom house because we like having roommates and guests, but if we have three kids and don't make them share we will in a few years have no spare rooms at all. This is frustrating in part because amenable roommates are incredibly useful as alloparents if you value things like "going to the bathroom unaccompanied" and "eating food without being screamed at", neither of which are reasonable "get a friend to drive for ten minutes to spell me" situations. Meanwhile there are also people we like living around who don't want to cohabit with a small child, which is completely reasonable, small children are not for everyone.
For this and other complaints ("househunting sucks", "I can't drive and need private space but want friends accessible", whatever) the ideal solution seems to be somewhere along the spectrum between "a street with a lot of rationalists living on it" (no rationalist-friendly entity controls all those houses and it's easy for minor fluctuations to wreck the intentional community thing) and "a dorm" (sorta hard to get access to those once you're out of college, usually not enough kitchens or space for adult life). There's a name for a thing halfway between those, at least in German - "baugruppe" - buuuuut this would require community or sympathetic-individual control of a space and the money to convert it if it's not already baugruppe-shaped.
Maybe if I complain about this in public a millionaire will step forward or we'll be able to come up with a coherent enough vision to crowdfund it or something. I think there is easily enough demand for a couple of ten-to-twenty-adult baugruppen (one in the east bay and one in the south bay) or even more/larger, if the structures materialized. Here are some bulleted lists.
Desiderata:
Obstacles:
Please share this wherever rationalists may be looking; it's definitely the sort of thing better done with more eyes on it.