Prefabrication experiments - 100 - 96 000 units per day – «a standard of living package» ?

«Rapid urbanization places remarkable strain on housing and serviced land. By 2030, about 3 billion people, or about 40 percent of the world’s population, will need proper housing and access to basic infrastructure and services such as water and sanitation systems. This translates into the need to complete 96 150 housing units per day with serviced and documented land from now till 2030.» unhabitat.org

What do these colossal numbers mean in terms of what we build and how we build it? The building industry is generally acknowledged as the source of approximately forty percent of CO2 emissions from material extraction to building production. How will this energy intensive industry comply with the necessity to produce much more but consume much less?

Last century’s industrialisation and political conflicts put a similar strain on housing and underwrote its lot of experiments into producing more while using less. Structural and functional efficiency were the staples of 20th century building system’s experimentation; From the Japanese metabolist experiments in mobility to Walter Segal’s experiments in self-build, these extremes framed architectural visions for improving the world we live in.

Buckminster Fuller’s work exemplified building more with less. From the 4D dwelling tower to the Dymaxion mobile units or dwelling machines and his geodesic structural prototypes, the quest for architectural and structural efficiency to serve the masses sustained Fuller’s experiments and his lasting legacy in architecture. His «standard of living package» proposed a potential industrialized process to reduce our impact on the planet and make a better house.

His explorations of an «Autonomous dwelling facility» elucidated by the «skybreak dwellings» studies included a transportable module of standard dimensions filled with commodities, which unfolded beneath a self-contained dome. Furniture, equipment, and a grand piano were part of the «standard of living package» and supported domesticity.

It seems naive today to imagine that all the requirements fit into one industrialized package as lifestyles differ as much as cultures, communities and individuals. The dream of an industrialized house seems in this sense further than ever as the critical needs for housing are more pronounced in non-industrialized countries: the need for 96 000 units per day is an epic crisis to which the only solution is optimism. The apex of architectural creativity has always been crisis and we hope that this century will be as fertile as the last for architectural prototypes. 

Buckminster Fuller's standard of living package - a transportable module of commodities

Prefabrication experiments - 99 - «HOMB»'s triangular tectonics

Method Homes is an American company based in Portland, Oregon. Established on a relatively new business model: made-to-order/measure modular prefab. Method Homes is part of an expanding generation of manufacturers that are attempting to expunge the long lasting tension between architectural originality and the advantages of factory production in matters of waste reduction, climate controlled quality, worker safety, productivity and timeline efficacy.

Connect Homes, Blu Homes, Arkit, Ecosteel, Muji, are just a few contemporary producers that renew prefab’s practical potential to serve but also energize its architectural output. Method Homes offers a series dwelling types, all with a characteristically «dwell» modern vibe articulated to a totally customizable buyer experience. In addition to this customizable experience, product families showcase associations with architecture and design firms.

The «HOMB» series has received attention from contemporary prefab literature as it relates production with modular mass-customization processes. «HOMB» functions as an open modular building system comparable to Swiss Architect Justin Dahinden’s Trigon 65.  The «HOMB», or an inhabitable honeycomb was co-developed by Skylab architecture, illustrating the fertile cross pollination between designers and producers: collaboration which is marginally present in the traditional prefab industry but supports many of the more progressive producers and embodies the contemporary sustainable design discourse.  

«HOMB»’s open structural system’s adaptability is governed by the strength and compositional agility of triangles. This straightforward but forceful search for innovative building and architectural systems arranges 102 square-foot triangular based prisms together in multiple geometries or architectural compositions and could generate infinitely adjustable plans. In a responsive display of architectural tectonics, the timber-framed triangles are revealed through the use of both contrasting materials for ceilings and exposed joinery. The geometric base adapts to any modular coordinated solid to a width of 13 feet. Designers and clients can personalize window sizes, finishes, and materials further enhancing the made-to-measure capacity of the planning grid.

This information based modelling collaboration between architects and manufacturers achieves a mass-customization potential characterized by its ordered variability. Along with its flexible organisation, Homb modular prefab proposes energy efficient systems for reducing the building’s environmental footprint. Method Homes and more specifically the «homb» series showcases a new prefab with quality, careful and collaborative design, open to a host of potentials from spatial organisation to overall system adaptability.

HOMB modules from the website