Book: Refabricating Architecture

Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake of KieranTimberlake Associates wrote "Refabricating Architecture" in 2004 as part of a Research Fellowship awarded to them by the AIA in 2001. In this book, they examine the design and construction technologies and processes currently used in the building industry and then propose that architects and builders need to rethink the construction process to take advantage of modern advances in manufacturing, information sharing, and mass customization. They argue that today's architects have relinquished responsibility for assembly, product development, and materials research, resulting in a segmentation between design and construction that inhibits advances in the building industry.

Because this book is relatively brief, it presents some compelling ideas and examples but doesn't really go into a whole lot of detail how to go about implementing these changes. Like many architects interested in prefabrication, they argue that the automobile, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries provide good models for efficient and progressive manufacturing processes. Kieran and Timberlake are able to clearly and simply explain all the advantages that these model industries hold over the construction of but their proposed application to the building industry remains loose and idealistic. In the end it's the big ideas in this book that inspire a rethinking and "refabrication" of architecture.

The Digital House

Here's another interesting prefab project in London, this one taking full advantage of digital manufacturing by cutting all the pieces with a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) Router. Designed by Bell Travers Willson Architects, this 3-story residential extension to an existing building was completely modeled on a 3D computer program down to every interlocking joint and every screw hole. The 3d model was then fed to a CNC Router which cut out all the parts of the building. These parts were then hand assembled in less than 4 days by fitting together all the custom cut parts like legos and bolstered with extra screws and bolts.

Article from The Architectural Foundation
Article from Building
Bell Travers Willson Website

Image taken from Bell Travers Willson website

Volumetric Construction in London

This article from London's Building website takes a look at some recent volumetric / modular projects currently being designed or being built in the near future. Many of these projects take a look at applying volumetric prefabricated construction techniques to larger scale buildings, such as hotels, offices, retail, and mutli-family housing. Several of these interesting projects look to break out of the "boxy" look associated with modular construction and introduce curves through arrangement of the modules. In addition, some employ the use of computer aided manufacturing processes to lower tolerances, reduce waste, and allow for mass customization.

Image taken from Building.co.uk website

Lifecycle Building Challenge

The Lifecycle Building Challenge is an innovative competition sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency that encourages designers to consider futures changes in use, disassembly, re-use and recycling of the building or materials and components when designing a building. By minimizing waste during construction, allowing a building to adapt to a new use rather than tearing it down, designing materials and components that can be re-used in a new building, and considering how a building can be easily disassembled and moved, environmental and economic benefits can be realized.

The idea of designing for disassembly go hand in hand with prefabricated design in architecture. To design a structure that can be taken apart into transportable and reusable components in the future solves the same problem as designing a structure to be shipped to the site in pieces or volumes for assembly. In both cases, the designers are strongly considering the complexities of connections in assembly/disassembly and ultimately reducing construction time and waste. The winners of this competition came up with some solutions that are well thought out and aesthetically pleasing.

Check out the winners of the Lifecycle Building Challenge

Image taken from the Lifecycle Building Challenge website

New Affordable Condo on Oahu

I saw this story about new affordable condominiums going up in the Salt Lake area on yesterday's KHON newscast. The applications for the units were on a first-come-first-serve basis starting Sunday so families were camping on since Friday in hopes of landing a home they could call their own. The condo units cost anywhere from $218,000 for a one bedroom unit to $397,500 for a two bedroom unit. The article reports that median condo prices on Oahu are currently about $325,000 for resales and $577,953 for new condos.

Click here to read more about this project.

Image taken from Salt Lake 6 LLC at the Honolulu Advertiser

Configuring Your Future Home Online

LivingHomes is a company in Los Angeles that develops Modern, Green, Architect-Designed, Prefabricated Homes. Started by Steve Glenn, a tech entrepreneur who happens to also be an architecture enthusiast, the company's goal is to build and sell healthy, luxury homes at lower prices and higher value by employing prefabrication technology in the construction process. Pricing of these semi-custom homes ranges from $180-$250 per square foot, which does not include design costs, permit fees, engineering, transport, installation, or foundation. The additional services add another $70-$90 per square foot. As you can see, these homes are relatively expensive, although LivingHomes estimates that their prefabricated construction process saves anywhere from 20% to 40% of the cost of an equivalent stick-built custom home. All of their homes are at minimum LEED Silver and they offer options such as cistern and water reclamation system, photovoltaic system, solar water heating, home automation systems, environmental home monitoring system, denatured alcohol-based fireplace, and motor-driven window shades.

The website does a great job of presenting their product and also helping a buyer understand the steps necessary to build a LivingHome. One of the coolest parts of the website is the ability to configure the home with real-time updates of the price, LEED rating, and renderings. This is exactly what you would expect when visiting a car website and configuring the options for the car. Once you have your home configured to your likings, they provide a handy budget worksheet to help calculate a rough estimate of how much the entire project will cost. A few other prefab developers like Marmol Radziner Prefab offer similar configuration sites, but I really like how LivingHomes setup their configuration interface.

Click Here to begin configuring your future LivingHome.

Image taken from LivingHomes.com

Home Factory - Stackable Prefab

About a year ago, two young professionals working in Marketing/PR and Advertising decided to form a company called Home Factory with the intention of creating a designer prefab apartment system at affordable prices in the Greater London Area. Their business is geared towards forming partnerships with various Housing Associations to deliver a mix of Private, Shared Ownership and Social Rented apartments. Although they shy away from the term "Prefab" and the connotations that may go with it, the units are constructed from two modules prefabricated in a factory setting. Once shipped to the site, the modules are fitted together and then can be stacked upon each other. The concept is similar to the Murray Grove project mentioned in an earlier post, but is marketed more as affordable designer housing. Interior and exterior finishes can be selected depending on the buyer's budget. The units they are producing are geared towards young professionals, first-time home buyers, and social/government employees priced out of the market.

Home Factory Website

I think Home Factory has a good marketing and business plan but the architectural product is mainly focused on the interior presentation of the units. The stackability of the project sets it apart from other prefab housing projects, but also limits the exterior expression of the building. Once everything is put together, what will visually and physically distinguish it as a product of prefab, or Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) as they prefer to call it? I think for modern architect designed prefab to be successful, it must both present an affordable and efficiently constructed product as well as provide innovations, features, or forms that are only possible through the process of factory production and technological advances in construction.

Image taken from Home Factory

Book: The Prefabricated Home

I just finished reading "The Prefabricated Home" by Colin Davies last night. It is by far the best book for architects to read about the history of prefabricated housing. Davies takes a critical look at the successes and failures of prefabricated housing and analyzes why architects have not been able to make any impact on one of affordable housing's most lucrative fields.

The tone of the book is set in the fourth paragraph:

"Although we think of architecture as being in some sense in charge of the activity of building, for 150 years or more the prefabricated house has managed perfectly well without architecture's guidance. Situated outside the architecture field, it has cheerfully ignored architectural law. The strength of the prefabricated house lies in its popularity, its cheapness and the industrial base from which it operates. These are precisely the areas in which modern architecture is the weakest. Modern architecture is unpopular, expensive and divorced from industrial production. That is why whenever it has tried to extend its field to include the territory of the prefabricated house it has failed and been forced to retreat."

While the book may feel negative and even anti-architect at times, it presents compelling reasons why architects have not been successful in prefabricated construction. Some books on prefab that I have read just glaze over the general history of prefab and then present pretty pictures with invariably positive descriptions about the buildings. Davies' book is a good reality check on all the hype surrounding modern prefab and at the same time provides some solid footing on how architects should proceed in the field of prefab housing. If you are interested in a deeper analysis of prefabricated architecture, I highly recommend that you check out this book.

The Prefabricated Home by Colin Davies

Image taken from Amazon.com

Is Modern Prefab Just a Fad?

In this frank slideshow essay found in Slate Magazine, the author, Witold Rybczynski, argues that "the current vogue for prefabs is more about industrial chic than affordability." Many of the projects he cites are those made popular by magazines such as Dwell and furthermore they are touted as the "future of American housing" in The New Yorker. In the end, Rybcynski feels that modern prefab is another passing fad in architectural history and that the much cheaper, established, and traditional-looking modular and manufactured housing industry will continue to prevail as the option for those searching for affordable, new, single-family homes.

Slate Magazine: The Prefab Fad

I agree with several of the points that Rybczynski makes, many of them referenced from Colin Davie's book, "The Prefabricated Home". I think that much of the modern movement of prefab single-family homes is geared towards buyers who want a custom architect-designed home but cannot afford one. For those who are just looking for an affordable, well-designed dwelling they can call their own, modern prefab homes are still out of their price-range. For example, Rybczynski cites that although Rocio Romero's prefab kit-of-parts LV Home is listed as $31/sqft, that only includes the exterior shell. After all the interior necessities are added, such as plumbing and heating, the home comes out to more than $100/sqft. On the other hand, a conventional prefab panel home, also a kit-of-parts, comes out to less than $40/sqft when everything is included.

So what should be done? I think there is certainly a market for the modern prefab movement, but it will not make much of an impact for the everyday person searching for an affordable home. Instead, I think architects who want to make in impact in affordable housing through prefabrication need to look at how prefab technology can be applied to larger residential multi-family projects.

Images taken from Witold Rybczynski's slideshow essay at Slate.com

Murray Grove - London, England

Murray Grove is an innovative affordable multi-family housing project that is composed of prefabricated light steel framed boxes that are stacked on top of each other to create a five-story 30 unit complex. The housing was designed by Cartwright and Pickard for the Peabody Trust, a London housing association that pushes affordable, sustainable housing. Click here or on the picture to read more about Murray Grove.

This is exactly the type of project that I want to inform my own Arch. D. research and design project. In addition, I'd like to investigate more technology derived methods of prefabrication. The prefabricated volumetric modules in Murray Grove are standard light steel framing, which is built in a factory and then shipped to the site to be installed. Instead, I'd like to see how prefab technologies like CNC milling can be used to create easier assembly processes or more custom and creative, but still prefabricated, forms.

Image taken from Roger Sherwood at HousingPrototypes.org

Inhabitat Blog: Prefab Housing

The editors over at the blog "Inhabitat" have been posting great examples of prefab housing for well over 2 years now. Its worth checking out and it provides a good jumping point to discover what architects are designing today in the realm of modern prefab housing.

Inhabitat: Prefab Housing

"No Relief in Sight"

This article written a little over a year ago by Andrew Gomes of the Honolulu Advertiser discusses some of the issues of affordable housing in Hawaii. He talks about some of the efforts being taken on by government agencies and developers but concludes that there is "No relief in sight" as the demand far outpaces the supply for housing in Hawaii.

One interesting affordable project that is being developed on the Big Island is an affordable condominium complex that will offer 108 two bedroom units for about $290,000. The developer, Westpro Holdings, has already started building modular single-family homes and will be using the same prefabricated construction techniques in their condo project. I'll keep track of this project to see how it goes.

Image taken from Martha P. Hernandez at the Honolulu Advertiser

Arch. D. Project Proposal

My Project Proposal is now out to my committee for review. Here's an excerpt from my Project Statement, outlining what I hope to accomplish through my research and design:

"As median home prices in Hawaii continue to increase, nearly doubling over the past six years, the problem of affordable housing for average income residents continues to grow. There have been efforts by developers and government housing agencies to alleviate this problem, but demand continues to outstrip supply. Furthermore, developers are struggling to breakeven building conventional stick-built affordable homes unless there are sufficient incentives and tax credits offered by the government.

To better address the above issues, there must be a fundamental shift in the strategy of planning and building affordable high-quality, high-performance housing in Hawaii. We can no longer rely on conventional development strategies and conventional construction techniques to solve the problem. In the face of energy conservation and environmental deterioration, as well as the limited amount of residential zoned land in Hawaii, it will be more prudent to develop affordable housing as multi-family residential complexes rather than sprawling developments of single-family homes. On the construction front, designers and builders should look to the opportunities afforded by modern prefabrication technology as a means to build housing better, faster, and cheaper. Possibilities such as off-site modular volumetric construction, factory assembly processes, prefabricating components using computer-controlled milling and cutting, and the use of standardized, off-the-shelf components should all be considered.

In addition to cost and affordability, the design and construction of new housing in Hawaii must be planned carefully with regards to its context, the quality of living it provides, and its impact on the earth. The quality and performance of affordable residences must be held to high standards if it is to provide a sustainable solution.

To truly visualize what modern prefabrication technology can offer as a solution to affordable housing in Hawaii, this project will provide a design prototype for a prefabricated multi-family residential complex. This design exercise will put into practice the ideas and methods collected throughout the research process to show how modern prefabrication technology can provide a promising solution to the affordable housing problem in Hawaii."

Arch. D. Committee

It took a little longer than anticipated to form my Committee, but I was able to get everyone on board this week. I'm excited to be working with the following people on my project this year:

• David Rockwood, MArch
  University of Hawaii at Manoa


• Stephen Meder, ArchD
  University of Hawaii at Manoa


• William Massie, MArch
  Cranbrook Academy of Art

My committee gives me a great mix of expertise including structural technology, affordable housing, environmental systems, digital design, prefabrication technology, and architectural design.