Web-site/web-house looks carefully at a very new issue in design which is called ‘mass-customization’: how can we make objects – in this case houses – that are designed as for an individual, but have the pricing of a mass-product? Generally the answers that are given to this question are purely of a technological nature. Web-site/web-house investigates new ways to use technology and mass-media. There is a strong political sense behind it: How can we deal with the forces of globalization (which are often forces of atomization and individualization) and re-organize them as positive and contributing to social fabric?”(Lars Spuybroek).
The issue of the “customer” (subject who personalizes a industrial product) was achieved thanks to “The Web of life” from Fritjof Capra (0), Ulrich Beck’s essays about “Individualization, Globalization and Politic” (1), Bart Lootsma’s “Synopse: Jenseits des Standards” (2) and “New subjectivity: architecture between Communication and Information” from Antonino Saggio (3). After studying contemporary research that have treated these issues – like Nox, Greg Lynn, Oosterhuis, RAMTV (4) – as well as the most interesting brands who already customize products through the web - such as Nike, Acumins, Levis (5) - the focus of the research was set: the goal is to connect people and to make the housing-process more comfortable, affordable and highly customizable.
The www is the best place for such a design. An abstract world where customers can operate, build and destroy, cluster, share, and most important, see what their actions cause to other people.
An endless space (6) in which the houses are thought of as a model, or clusters of a model, that the customers can personalize and transform like a living organism, until a state of equilibrium in the pattern before the industrial production.
Web-site is a virtual-atmospheric site to where people can cluster and create communities. The virtual site is intended as a tool that improves the communication between the designer and the customer.
Visiting the web-site, the customer selects the Web-house [house-model to personalize] from a catalogue referred to existing house-types. Then people can modify, playing the housing-machine interface, their own house-model based on a path [an organizational centre line that concentrates all activities along a spline and that builds the topological geometry and program above them].
Thus, the customers can connect to neighbor houses, making agencies and creating new typologies. Each house-model is thought as a whole living organism made of a web of relations between his parts.
Once a cluster of customers is done and the internal equilibrium [both programmatically and socially] is found-the models, and their relations, are frozen and the virtual whole is ready to transform in the real one.
The city Frankfurt (GE) is re-mapped selecting high identity areas where the cluster can look for the site to build between a range of free-sites proposed.
Once the site is individuated, the geometrical information is sent to the factory. Then, using C.A.M.- non-standard sandwich panels are manufactured. In order to reduce the milling cost, a re-modeling strategy [per repetitions in the forms] in each house and between different houses of the cluster is used. Thus optimizing the form without loosing information of its geometry.
All these strategies together [sharing site and space, co-manufacturing panels] decrease the cost, improve the relative budget of each customer and build the social relations between future neighbors.
In order to optimize the cost and stress the potential of the C.A.M. technology, we designed a special system of UHPC [Ultra High Performance Concrete] sandwich panels consisting in two structural skins [internal and external]. The shape of panel is structural and aesthetic at the same time.
Re-cycling. Finally, the design was put under stress checking the flexibility of each produced house. Since each house is unique [personalized and part of a social and topological cluster], the aim was to understand how the houses might be re-cycled. More precisely, how the houses and the clusters can transform if a crisis occurs [a dweller leaves or a house is transformed] and what happens to the cluster both geometrically and programmatically.
The results show some limits of the personalization process due to the extreme determinacy of the form. For instance, a “rapid” re-customization process is possible just if the old customer is similar to the new one, otherwise a geometrical transformation of the house [and of course the cluster] is needed.
Reference:
(0) Capra Fritjof, The web of life, Doubleday-Anchor Book,
(1) http://www.archplus.net/archiv_ausgaben.php?show=158
(2) http://architettura.supereva.com/coffeebreak/20040718/index_en.htm
(3) Greg Lynn 1998-99, Embryological House, http://www.glform.com/
Nox 1999, Offtheroad_5speed, http://www.noxarch.com
Kas Oosterhuis 2002, Variomatic, http://www.oosterhuis.nl
RAMTV, 2002, Negotiate my boundary!, http://www.ramtv.org/
(4) NikeID, http://nikeid.nike.com/
Acumins spa, http://www.acumins.com
(5) Levi's, http://eu.levi.com/
(6) Hatje Cantz 2001, Frederick J. Kiesler Endless Space, Dieter Bogner and Peter Noever editors.
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