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.