G03: mass-customisation & the prefabricated house

Is it possible to find a solution in which everyone can generate their own custom prefabricated house?
As more advanced levels of digital technology are incorporated into housing design, we will begin to see a prefabricated house that is truly unique. Through the utilization of mass-production and digital fabrication techniques, a customised prefabricated house could be entirely unique, designed specifically for an occupants needs. In turn this offers personalized, unique and affordable house that would be available to the general public, making architecture more accessible.

mit instant house project

The instant house project, developed by Marcel Botha and Lawrence D. Sass for MIT ‘s Department of Architecture, studies how to digital design and fabrication can be utilized within an urgent housing environment. Specifically designed as a relief effort for natural disaster areas, refugee camps or any other improvised emergency human habitat, they propose of a system that is both rapidly deployable and scalable, while fostering a large degree of individuality within the newly rebuilt community.

Botha and Sass intend to create an atypical solution in large quantities for emergency, transitional and developing contexts, while giving personal ownership to the end user, through generative computational methods and CNC fabrication techniques. The Instant House ships as a flat packed structure ready for implementation. A generative system that mechanizes the interaction between user, designer and fabrication, attempts to effectively deploy customized dwellings without incurring a cost premium. It is not intended that the process proliferates cosmetic change, but more importantly structural and spatial variation.

Past examples of generative methods have tended to produce house designs as spaces and forms only. The instant house combines concepts of prefabricated low cost design systems with those based on shape and a system for digital fabrication. The Instant House process produces a customized, habitable mono-material plywood structure. Various joint types that sustain their assembly through friction connect each component of the system, eliminating the need for nails, screws or glues. The process is divided into five stages; shape design, design development, evaluation, fabrication and construction.

metropolis magazine - living for tomorrow
the instant house
Kolarevic, B:2003, Architecture in the Digital Age – Design and Manufacturing, Spon
Press, New York.

prefab housing in the digital age

The housing markets today are saturated with cheap affordable houses that are indistinguishable from each other. The idea of customizing your home to your particular needs or tastes does not go beyond the color of the exterior wall and the height of the hedges outside. Mass customisation in architecture, particularly housing, can currently be divided into four broad categories:

Mobile Home - Manufactured off-site, transported to the site in a largely completed state, minimal on-site labour.
Kit Home - Kit manufactured and packaged off-site assembled on-site.
Modular Home - Building designed using pre-existing modular products/systems, built on-site using modular/prefab components and "standard" materials.
Custom Home - Custom designed, custom-built on-site from "standard" materials, on-site labour-intensive.

However, mass customization of the prefab home is only now gaining momentum as a solution for housing in all markets.
Even though the prefabricated home has been around for a while it’s been slow to produce a popular home for the masses. After the Second World War there was a general effort to design, fabricate and sell homes as if they were automobiles. The Lustron home in the U.S. became a popular solution to housing with its aluminum house, and before that Matti Saarinen with his Futuro home, but their intention was plagued by high production costs and low demand. These were all moving in the same direction, but how customizable were these homes? How did they respond to their owners needs?

Recently, however, modern architects are experimenting more often with prefabrication as a means to deliver well-design and mass produced CUSTOM homes. Werner Aisslinger’s LOFTCUBE is basically a mobile home that is built off-site and later on transported and placed in any setting. Its exterior paneling is interchangeable, and there is a choice of different enclosures, and various distribution schemes. Its portability which relies on its cube shape, and size to be transported, is also the reason it is not as customizable for masses.
The Quon modular home however utilizes interchangeable spaces that connect to each other and can be arranged adapted to the owners needs. These modular cubes consisting of a living, bathroom, master bedroom, and kitchen are built off-site transported by truck and placed by crane in the desired configuration. The transportability of this house (fits into a average container) and its rapid production make it an innovative solution as a customized home. They do become homogenous after they are stack one beside the other.

In essence the idea of buying your home by parts is as customizable as you can get in the housing market, but the architects from System prove to take it one step beyond with their BURST house. Creating custom houses parting from a structural frame, cut on a CNC machine, transported to the site and assembled simply. Then applying the distinct configurations to allow sunlight and ventilation in, making the house environmentally passive. The façade of the house is designed to fit the owners tastes. In the end the house responds to a prefabricated construction system using cnc milling, responds to environmental concearns and is unique at the same time. This intention of a customizable home that meets today’s global requirements using todays technology gives an idea of the direction of the prefab home and its incursion into mass customization.

skin deep materiality

With emergent digital technologies becoming more prevalent in contemporary architecture, few parts of a building remain untouched in some way. Often, the facade and skin treatment of a building are the most obvious expression of new processes and technologies. The majority of advanced facade systems rely heavily upon complex computing and modeling systems that are now utilised by architects and engineers.

LAB’s Federation Square, Melbourne 2002, clearly demonstrates its use of highly advanced systems of design and documentation. One of LAB’s directors, Donald Bates, is a graduate of the AA and spent many years working for Daniel Libeskind, whose influence is clearly evident in the internal spaces of the building.
It’s exterior is clad in a unique system of triangular zinc, glass and sandstone tiles, arranged in a highly complex manner based around a pin-wheel fractal. This system allows the facade to move and adjust freely around obstructions and service areas. As additional tile panels are added, the new sections blend seamlessly into the facade, maintaining an intrinsic coherence through its fractal expression.

The Seattle Public Library, OMA 2004, uses it’s angular facade to express the internal program of the building creating a stunning visual icon for the aging library. The Glass facade is pushed, cut and re-located as it wraps around the floating floors within. The detailed expression of the facade is quite simple, a repeating glass diamond framed in metal, but it’s transparency reveals its true genius.
In order to create such a demanding shape, highly technical computer modeling and testing systems were utilised in order maximise the efficiency of the structure. ARUP, the buildings engineers, ensured that structural elements were only placed exactly where needed using advanced computer analysis packages. The evolution of OMA’s work is quite obvious in their CCTV building in Beijing, currently under construction.

When it comes to advancing the materiality of a building, few do it consistently as well as Herzog & de Meuron. Many of their projects demonstrate a new form of expression in its materiality; the translucent plastic façade of the Laban Dance Centre (London, 2003), the inflated ETFE bubbles of the Allianz Arena (Munich, 2005), and the double glazed bulging diamonds of Prada Tokyo (2003). Their most advanced expression of materiality is, however, in the currently under-construction Beijing Olympic Stadium (2008, we hope). In collaboration with Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, HdeM have created a birds nest of steel that wraps over itself providing the structural system and external skin of the stadium. The final result would never have been possible without the close collaboration between architect, artist and engineer, in additional to the utilisation of high level computer modelling software.

As more architects embrace digital technologies new possibilities in material expression are created. The adaptation of existing technologies, invention of new materials and the creation of complex system have created an environment for architectural materiality to be re-born.

Complex Geometries, Different Technologies

Complex geometries in architecture may seem like an invention of the digital age, but for many years architects have been designing and constructing buildings that contain significant complex elements. Gaudi’s Sagrada Familiar demonstrates that complex forms could be created as early as 1882. Utzon’s world heritage listed Sydney Opera House, 1957 – 1973, is one of the most significant examples of organic architecture before the use of computers. Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum in 1990 eluded to the fluid forms that he wanted to create, but was unable calculate or realise, even with the very basic computational resources available to architects at the time.

As more developed countries become more capable of using complex geometries as an effective way to produce built structures. Developing countries are finding it harder to produce and reap the benefits of CAD and CAM technologies, due to the overall difficulty to adapt culturally to relying on machines and fear of the high costs these types of strategies can imply. An example of how this type of technology was mixed with a manual fabrication of space was with a student at IAAC drawing countless number of plans to be able to produce a design made digitally (center images, Contemporary Urban- Chris Lee Architects).
A catalyst of this type of technology would greatly benefit the social housing and customization of the built environment in either poverty stricken areas or even refugee camps. The Instant House proves to be an interesting take on the ongoing problem of housing in a limited time frame. Its use of prefabricated elements mixed with digitally modified and fabricated ones; make it a good example of the direction where this type of technology could be utilized in the third world.

In many ways, architecture as it enters the 21th Century, stands at a cusp. The development of new technologies of design and construction combined with the introduction of revolutionary new building materials means that many of the utopic dreams of the mid-20th Century dismissed then as fantasies can now be realised. Architects can design, and build, ever more complex forms, new typologies of buildings, radical structures.
In the last years, we can see the new buildings which are built by architects like NOX, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Herzog de Meuron which show us the next step of architecture. Now we can see the first future visions which are designed make such a big step into the future. The most of them are just in the moment only concepts which are published in the internet, but we can be sure some of them will be built.

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