Home Delivery: Digitally Fabricated Housing
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 07. 7.08
It is getting awfully close to the July 20 opening of Home Delivery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where five architects are building and displaying seriously cutting-edge prefabs. We will be looking at each of them this week.
Lawrence Sass of MIT has been working with the idea of the digitally fabricated house for a few years; we first met him at Prefab Now two years ago, but it has evolved significantly since then. Imagine a flatpack house that you assemble like a kid's toy.
Sass's team has taken elements of a traditional New Orleans house and transformed it into 3,000 pieces that lock together like a puzzle. Compared to traditional MCA (measure, cut and assemble) construction, SGA (Self-guided assembly) "employs tabs, slots, and grooves to guide the assembly of parts. There is no measuring or cutting on the jobsite—it is assembly only, or self-guided assembly (SGA). From a cost standpoint, we have removed two costly functions from the jobsite (measuring and cutting). From a builder's standpoint, the system is playful in assembly, not unlike building with LEGOs. The negative side of our work is that if we miss cutting a hole or slot in the design, it is difficult to adjust in the field."
More on their blog at ::Layer by Layer
Digital Houses in TreeHugger
Five Modern Prefabs Coming to the MOMA
1:1 Making the Digital House
This is technology at its best. It appears that even the un-trained could put up their own house, probably at considerable savings over site cut and nail system. Kudos for the Sass's team.
I like the idea of prefab housing. All the materials for a house generally need to be shipped there anyway (it seems like very few builders use locally sourced stuff unless they are going for LEED certification). Plus, a standardized design can be made efficient and green once and repeated many times at low cost. In suburbs, where a neighborhood might consist of a handful of house designs built hundreds of times each anyway, you don't lose much from mas production.
Perhaps I missed this somewhere, but do these constructions meet any building codes?
If they are actually building them for occupation then they must get past code. I don't think a building developer would proceed without that in mind. In many cases, these homes SURPASS code in many ways.