Our contemporary lifestyle is comprehensively connected. Smart phones oversee every part of our lives from efficiently organizing our workdays, downtime, to our interactions on social media. This connectivity outlines immeasurable data sets containing what we want to eat, what we search for, where we want to vacation or what products we crave. Amazon epitomizes how our shopping habits are dictated by our online profiles responding to behaviors and even ordering products for us as they are required. Alexa, Amazon’s intelligent home device has taken the smart phone from the palm of our hands effectively linking our private spaces: Playing music, turning on lights or controlling indoor temperature and climate. The smart home was the next frontier for Amazon. Looking at housing supply as the next sector for development, the company invested close to 7M$ in Plant Prefab, a design and fabrication company, in 2018.
Combining virtual design and construction with manufacturing principles, Plant proposes customized building kits based on modular panels, volumes, and cores: The Plant Building System. The company isn’t providing techniques that have not been employed before but is adapting and packaging them in a sophisticated way. Leveraging interest in modular construction and a growing need for sustainable building practices, the company’s process distills any home design to a complete kit using their 3 sub-assembly levels: panels, modules, cores. The modular and prefab system is advertised to be 50% quicker than conventional construction as systems are built in a controlled setting and can be manufactured concurrently to site infrastructure and foundations. This task overlap is responsible for time and cost savings.
Plant proposes architecturally designed homes to democratize current aesthetic values. Uniting manufacturing with architecture and Amazon’s global brand creates a potential framework for marketable prefab that addresses any latent prejudices. Further, installing intelligent doorbells or providing other gadgets, the home of the future will not only be produced as a commodity but will include real-time monitoring. The disruption in the way we live will come not from the materials and building systems (hardware) but from the software preinstalled in these homes, potentially censoring every aspect of a user’s life, for better or worse.
Excerpt from https://www.plantprefab.com/architects-and-designers
No comments:
Post a Comment