I had a look at the online...
I had a look at the online version (link below).
I am not an architect, but usually find it interesting to see what architects do when they build for themselves. Judging from the article, the house is a small revolution.
But when I look at the photos, I do not see anything special. The building tells me little if anything about the time it was built in, it does not relate to or comment on current architectural trends in any radical fashion, nor does it use materials or consume energy in any novel way. There is much talk about CNC milling and using computers to achieve nonstandard shapes and forms, but it seems to add little more to the architecture than cosmetics, and is not really as unique as it comes off in the article. Other parts of the text raises some questions, like why the ceiling was lowered. There are only four photos online though, so I may be missing out on something. Maybe it just has to be experienced in real life. It does seem to be constructed differently than most other prefab houses, but will most likely remain a one off that never makes it to serial production. The most interesting aspect is that it can be relocated (at a cost of appr. 45,000 USD). What really put me off though is this "The architect is asking the buyer to view the 08 as a work of art." Modernism taken too far, or true modernism?
On a more conceptual level, I find the idea of sculpting unique forms from standard geometries interesting. Would it be possible to design a house entirely in the computer, then break the designs down to a series of building blocks and send models of those blocks to machines on or near the site that would cut them out from standard sized and shaped components? All the parts would be numbered and come together with some clever joining technique. Assembly would be quicker. Mass customisation at a fraction of the traditional cost of building. Still a bit too science fiction, I guess.
http://www.dwell.com/homes/prefab/36193189.html
my humble opinion
From my "minimalist" point of view, I think the house would've looked better without the couple of "jokes" he spread out through his project. After a while, I believe one will become tired of the drop falling on the front facade, or the elliptic windows on the side. But that's just my humble opinion!
Gustaf...
Your idea is NOT too science fiction! It is terrific, especially now with digitally controlled cutters.
If I may take flight on your idea just for a second, wouldn't it be awesome to set up a company that owns and operates mobile cutters and other related machinery in various market locales and moves them site to site to do the work onsite. And each market area has expertise about its local building codes.
The problem here in the states is always whether or not such an assembly could meet the highly balkanized local planning, zoning and building and infrastucture codes. You can always build off the grid in remote areas, of course, but to become a force in the market place you have to be able to bring your product to the rapidly developing trade areas and seams of development, where the enormous home builders operate.
Typically, in a place like California, there are 10-12 major builders that operate lobbying entities in the state capital. Often they are even headquartered there. These major builders lobby hard for state and local building codes and infrastructure enabling legislation at the state and local levels to channel development toward their land holdings, when they are ready to develop those land holdings that they either own, or option. They see it as only fair, since they are fronting the land holding costs and up front "soft" development risks of politicing the process into being. It is all very tight, cooperative/collusive and economically and politically rationalized--to a point.
Cont.
It is basically an oligopoly producer model. Development cannot occur unless there is enough development to be done that a regime of 3-6 developers, or up to 11, can participate in the process and agree to it. When it starts, they go into the effected communities--usually small towns, or the edges of large suburbs, and force feed the minor civil divisions (i.e., cities and towns) general plans that lay out what will be built and at what densities and where. Once these general plans are approved by city and county governments, then infrastructure plans are made and the infrastructure extention into the area commences. Then the commercial, retail and residential subivisions are laid out with specificity. Then the lots are graded into pads and infrastructure is stemmed into the individual housing lots. Then home builders commence building the tract housing in phases. Whether we like what they build, it is a massively rationalized process that is hyper efficient and virtually irreversible once it starts...for many reasons. And it NEVER starts unless there are major lenders standing in line to finance every step and be taken out of every step along the way.
The most logical way to implement your approach would be to sell the oligopoly home builders on the approach. But each homebuilder represents not only itself, but a constellation of contractors and subcontractors and related unions, etc. And each oligopoly home builder has an enormous amount of sunk costs in doing things the way they already do. To change over to this type of construction you are talking about would mean obsoleting many of the suppliers, many of the trades and many of their related unions. It would be a huge trauma to the system. Why? Because when all of these players in the system are marginalized, they become free agents with the expertise in varying degrees to go out and become possible competitors in ways that are very hard to predict or forecast. As a result, the oligopoly builders have an enormous disincentive to embrace this new approach. In turn, they lobby like heck to marginalize anyone who tries it before them.
cont.
What happens historically, is that all these ideas for global change of the real estate industry are stymied, but over time, they are broken down and integrated in pieces incrementally in a way that the system can absorb the shock of the change. Walk in any subdivision house in California and there is drastically more componentization observable today than 20 years ago. But it is not glamorous. A shower/bath which used to involve separate tub, tile and plumbing fixtures, to be installed by various trades persons, is now a single fiberglass insert. Windows have become units that are inserted instead of carpentered on site. Cabinet systems replace custom cabinets. And on and on. And what is most misunderstood by proponents of manufactured housing is that subdivision homes ARE manufactured housing already. There are 4-6 floor plans in a subdivision. Everything in the house has been milled somewhere in the exact quantities needed to build the exact houses that will be built. Everything has been thought through a million times to lean up the process. 2 x 4 studs ARE manufactured. They are cut to lengths that will make using nail guns on site and hand saws incredibly fast and easy to use and to make assembly quick as a wink. Watch how fast these guys can build houses when the demand is there. They go up FAST! And, the materials are incredibly easier and more cost effective to ship than a finished house, or even halves of finished houses. Proponents of manufactured housing really have to wake up to the concepts of shipping and warehousing and distribution systems. Product designers of furniture understand the concept of break flat furniture that fits in boxes and occupies a minimum amount of space in a box car or tractor trailer truck. Why can't they grasp this most basic thing regarding just how efficient it is to ship the studs in a house BEFORE they are assembled, rather than afterwards?
cont.
Manufactured housing advocates need to start looking at exactly what you, Gustaf, are talking about. Its just stupid to ship a ready made house, unless someone can figure out a way to ship housing structures in a stacked mode like plastic cups are stacked. The future of housing likes in nano-ization of many of the ungainly components of housing so they can be shipped as efficiently as 2 x 4 studs, yet be essentially plug and play on site. And the other huge opportunity is in the digitization of raw material processing on the site. How to you miniaturize the milling equipment and digitize and automate its process on or near the site? This is where the great efficiencies await. But these are hard, unglamorous advances to make, because the oligopoly developers are already standing in the economic space and they are appropriating/stealing everything anyone else tries that is good. This is always the problem with oligopolized, or monopolized, producer markets. Net and desktop computing lagged for a long time (probably still does), because it always made more strategic business sense for Microsoft to buy up new ideas and run people out of business than to develop stuff themselves. The focus of an oligopolists or a monopolists business is always significantly on how to stay a monopolist or an oligopolist, rather than on how to improve the widget.
Any way, your idea is a good one that is not entirely new, but has some freshness to it given the progress and direction of digitization recently into cloudware and into massively parallel processing that could revolutionize what is possible to be done onsite being programmed from remote, central locations.
The Great Stagflation that...
The Great Stagflation that is going to be the next 5-10 years will be a time when a lot of things will be tried in desperation and most will fail, because there is inadequate velocity of money in the economy; i.e., there ain't enough buying power in consumers to sustain existing production capacity, much less underwrite innovation. But it is always during these periods that a lot of ideas are developed and they shelved to be exploited the next time and place economic vitality manifests again.
My bet is the place to do what you are talking about is neither USA, nor Europe, but China, India and South America. South America should be especially receptive to this idea, because they have temporarily anyway, left the Western program. Argentina, Brazil and others have told the the IMF and World Bank they are welching on their loans (actually they did this several years back). They have allied with Venezuela, which has the largest oil reserves in the world presently, and are planning their own currency and their own central banking system and their own oil bourse to back that currency system. The leaders there have ascended based on populist and democratic and egalitarian promises and so their consumers/voters/citizens are going to want to solve the housing shortages and all the infrastructure shortages that are so prevalent there. Their energy is dirt cheap no. Gasoline is 15 cents a gallon or something in Venezuela. They can grow much of their own food. The Western environmental organizations, operating as fronts for oil and other resource companies, have gobbled up an awful lot of South American water rights and associated high elevation watersheds in debt for equity swaps, but these probably will be nationalized in time permitting this emergent South American regime control of its water. With control of its currency, its food, water and energy, the South American regime can develop at just about any pace it chooses, IF it can find a way to protect itself from traditional western political and economic harrassment of those that do not play ball. I don't know South American building codes and institutions and regimes well enough to know, if they will obstruct your type of approach though. I only know that the high level political and economic and financial infrastructures, plus the mass consumer sentiment could be on the side of your approach.
End note on environmental organizations debt for equity swaps...
I should point out here that I certainly do not know for a fact that these environmental organizations are doing debt for equity nature swaps to get control of watersheds, and so forth. I can only say that getting control of watersheds has been a time tested way of wresting control of development's path and timing in many parts of the world and that some of the debt for equity swaps I have read about include key parts of watersheds. Maybe it is just a coincidence that certain environmental organizations, some of which reputedly have start-up roots in resource companies, are aquiring these watersheds in debt for equity swaps. Maybe not. But in any case, this is a not central to whether Gustaf's idea might get good reception in South America. Consider all of the above related posts opining regardless.
cont.
Building is very much a technology centered on the capacity to put standard components together in an assembly of different scales but basically with the same functions. The size of the building, even when it is a one family home is such that transportation of the total assembly will always be an expensive component of the costs. To ?assemble? is generally not considered a task that requires high skills so it is usually easy to find a local workforce that is as skilled as any trained work force in a assembly factory. Contrary to most assembly work of smaller products, the high cost of very low tolerances can easily be offset by assembling on the spot. Plumbing components for instance could, and are in many cases pre-cut. But in order to fit the measurements of the building have to be so accurate that it is often cheaper, just to cut on the spot. Large industrial products like busses, airplanes etc. suffer from the same inconvenience: very small tolerances are exponentially expensive and so a large part of the assembly and cutting of components is done on the spot.
I am not very familiar with architectural software but we use so called parametric software that will automatically adapt all components that are linked within the parametric frame to any change to that product. I presume that there is architectural software that does the same thing and upon the increase of the size of a wall it will just add studs and anchors to the drawing and to the component list. My expectation is that because it is an assembly and not something cut out of a solid bloc, buildings will be standardized through there components and not in their totality. That is what we have seen since WW2 and I think it will continue toward larger integrations (complete kitchens, bathrooms, laundry rooms, solar or wind energy generating systems etc. but as far as the other spaces that will link them together are concerned, the way we build them right now, is a quite rational way and proposals like the one in Dwell are not very convincing that bulging walls in curved corridors are adding in any way to the quality of life of the inhabitants?unless being featured in Dwell is such a quality.
To some degree...
....Gustaf's proposal is what Renzo Piano worked on in the late sixties, but he pushed it a little bit further by building programmable membranes in which one could cast different parts of a building by programming the shape of that part in a flexible mould. That brings me to my reasons for being sceptic after reading the Dwell article and after seeing the few pictures available on line. As DCWilson points out, buildings are not machined but build with a number of standardized components. Typically 2x4 rolled galvanised steel studs, pre-assembled beams etc. To assemble is quite a different technology from milling, i.o.w. from cutting away. Although I can see a bench of a reasonable size (tree to four people) being milled out of pre-assembled wooden parts like the one Zaha Hadid designed for PP moebler. I also understand that it took the machine ca. 36 hours to complete the cutting of such a bench?and I suspect that it does not include the cleaning afterwards. Having some experience with cutting large 3D pieces on CNC, I know that we are still a long way from doing anything the size of the house shown in Dwell. I am quite sure that there is no relationship whatsoever between the fact that the architect bought a former tool shop and the way the building is actually build, other than the fact that he acquired a large space. Large CNC equipment of the size needed for the Zaha Hadid bench is not even standard equipment in a well equipped tool shop. So, I presume, as Gustaf did, that there are some short cuts in the article.
It is unfortunate, but notions like: computer generated, computer designed, CNC milled, 3D printed etc have all grown from being a simple designation of the tooling used, to a kind of quality of its own, as if the fact that these tools are used gives the end result a certain quality. I know, this is part of another discussion but it fits well into this context. Sometimes we should be reminded of the fact that both Eames and Bertoia and so many others did organic forms long before computers were even in the picture. Ronchamps, the "Poëme electronique" both by Le Corbusier and his collaborators were build without any recourse to computers or 3D modeling.
But back to Gustavs proposal and DCWilsons insight in real estate development as it relates to pre-fabrication. It sounds as if the building industry in the U.S. is so well organized to favour a certain type of real estate development that there is very little hope for any kind of change. I am not so sure that there is much more hope in other places either.
http://www.pp.dk/index.php?page=collection&cat=3&id=130
dcwilson and koen, thanks...
dcwilson and koen, thanks for your elaborate insights. I learned a lot. Sadly, I think you are right in that it is very hard to change the industry, yet it could make such a difference to so many people.
I am not familiar with what has been done, but assume many great minds have thought about it. My inspiration came mainly from an article I read a while back about building on the moon, as well as from igloos and from having worked for a couple of summers on a construction site. I still think there could be a right place and time for this technology, but that it is not here and now. Perhaps it could be something good coming out of the space program, an otherwise tragic waste of money.
However, with all these factors you mention working against a change, the high cost of today's methods must be working in the other direction. Productivity has remained almost the same for a long time, as has the amount of material lost (around 10% in Sweden I think). One would expect the builders themselves to start realising that something needs to be done. They are not the British Museum, after all.
As one example that the industry, at least in Sweden, is trying to cut costs in radical ways is in the provided links. In brief, it tells the story of a major project undertaken by NCC, one of Sweden's largest construction companies to build a prefab house factory using Lean manufacturing inspired assembly methods. They hired people from the auto and manufacturing industry. The whole thing got axed after little more than a year because they hadn't been able to reduce costs as much as expected. Very different from what we are discussing here, but nevertheless interesting (I had a hard time finding good write-up in English though):
http://www.cisionwire.com/ncc/ncc-launches-world-leading-residential-pro...
http://www.wmaker.net/immonews/m/index.php?action=article&numero=3196#1
Another case in point is ManuBuild, an ongoing, partially E.U. funded research project:
http://www.manubuild.org/summary
Still, I am left with the impression that the many laws and regulations, cartels and oligopolies, vested interests and corrupted local governments, make this a very tough business to change. But it would be fun to try.
Hej Gustaf...
It is interesting that you would mention the NCC project. When the Hallstahammar plant was closed I think the general consensus was that it was too difficult or expensive to work within ?industrial tolerances? The second point I remember was that too much of the final finish (wall paper, furniture etc) was damaged during transportation. It was also interesting to hear some reactions from the unions. One of the arguments that came up was that NCC had tried and failed in turning skilled jobs (on site) in jobs that could eventually be exported to low wage countries. From a North American point of view, it felt strange from the beginning that the system would be build around concrete casting technology. Concrete is not only a known heavy polluter, it is also a poor insulation (in both cases in function of specific gravity or mass) Transportation and assembly of concrete elements requires also heavy equipment. Especially under a tent as in NCC,s case, it can not be very economical.
I also think, and this is the point of view of a designer, that they would have been better of using design methods rather than engineering methods. One of the comments at the time was that NCC had given their clients (users) too much choice and the diversity of solutions became too big. In design one of the first things you look for is to find common denominators and consensus in order to make the end result as similar as possible. Thank you for bringing the NCC project into the discussion.
To truly appreciate this hous...
To truly appreciate this house, physcial interaction is a must. I read the hard copy of this article, and the additional pictures do a better job translating. As Massie stated, he wants the future occupants to view this as a work of art. This I agree, the thoughtful explorations translates into a work of art.
On housing development, DC does provides a good overview of the housing game. There needs to be a revolution in how development is done in business and poltical corners. The current paradigm is so textbook, it's virually the same across the country. Rather than more development that leads to sprawl, there needs to be greater focus on renewal. Sadly, greed prevents this and I really really hope someone can crack this B.S.. I would tackle it, but way out of league.
How can design lead us away from this cancerous from of development? How can design help people become aware of and avoid contributing to overpopulation. The last two questions are frequent mental gymastics for me. Is there a development firm working with these issues in mind that deserves attention? I'd like to know and learn.
If you need any help, please contact us at – info@designaddict.com