Prefabrication experiments - 400 - Open Manufacturing

Industrialization altered the way everything was fabricated. Factories became the locus of commercializing everything from utensils to pharmaceuticals, building parts and automobiles. In generally closed loops, businesses safeguarded their commodities and methods through patents and protectionist attitudes underwritten by privatisation. Strategies were outlined to give each corporation a competitive edge over their peers. Design and manufacturing were trademarked, intraoperable and exclusive only to internal stakeholders. Methodological frameworks from Ford to Toyota envisioned their production secrets as their very ethos and core of their potential economic successes.  This closed manufacturing is the emblem of industrialization, and of the free market economy. 

 

Digital principles and societies’ crises are challenging these closed loops in favour of shared access to crowd iterations. Many have been inspired by the open-source revolution in software to apply the same interoperable freedom to hardware and to a diversity of manufacturing sectors. Known as open manufacturing or open factories, these attitudes harness the power of commonalities, democratized designs, innovative processes, and shared research infrastructure crosspollinated across customarily private lines. Trade associations can play an important role in the suggestion of normalized and acquiesced methods to elevate quality through industrial clusters. Collaboration or sharing hubs put forward innovation and expand peer production to explode closed ideological loops.  

 

This type of sector endorsed equity and normalization could offer opportunities in offsite construction, whether modular or panelized.  Currently, most manufacturers protect their production secrets even though most are building in a similar way. Timber based prefabrication for mobile homes, volumetric modular or open wall and floor panels use timber frame principles that are non-proprietary and used onsite to realize the same basic structures as their factory-built analogs; frame details and materials are common construction knowledge. Still, the industry remains very conservative about sharing. Mutual methodologies pushed by trade associations could be a way forward to increase capacity and develop process and design intelligence throughout the industry making it possible for many small companies to compete fairly against larger manufacturers. Even for larger manufacturers, open and peer production leads to knowledge accessibility, potential affordability for the consumer and possibilities for greater growth.

 

 

Automated wood panel production

 

Prefabrication experiments - 399 - customize - 10 - Robots for production or design

 

Current and future digital modelling and fabrication methods advance opportunities for architects and designers to develop complex designs, organizations, and structures. While offering these shape-finding possibilities, design objectives are often conceptually distant from manufacturing targets. If singularity is a definitive objective of architectural design, repeating fundamental characteristics and criteria underwrites efficient production. Even with robotics slowly percolating the construction industry, the contrasting systemic postures of design and manufacturing still underscore certain fundamental snags between architecture and construction. 

 

With robots programmed to cut, lift, nail, screw, or to execute any other task, architects are envisioning and exploring forms and geometries that are only possible through this computerized precision. For both design and simulating fabrication, miniature cobots can be brought into any office to validate this bespoke file to making approach. This one-off methodology is in sharp contrasts to how robots are used to optimize off-site construction to efficiently reduce both costs and schedules. 

 

Autovol Volumetric Modular’s https://autovol.com  use of automation in their factory symbolizes its potential to solve current labour shortages and construction’s lagging productivity. Once robots are programmed to perform a repetitive job, they can be part of a linear or cellular manufacturing process with people only keeping an eye on the machines and making sure materials, nails or screws are in position implementing their ordered tasks. Panelized elements like walls and floors can be fabricated on tables and then assembled into volumes or prisms that are easily stacked on site with robotic prompted precision. 

 

A streamlined mass-production process is based on strict, consistent, and precise automation and dependent on clear standards for construction with the repetition of common design dimensions, geometry and criteria from project to project. Modular automation certainly offers opportunities for major gains in time versus conventional construction. Improvements are made through process replication and optimized by a continuous production loop. These patterns of production are poles apart from the one-off prototypes architects sometimes conceive. Even as robots integrate the construction industry, the conceptual distance between both fields can be bridged or widened according to the same age-old debate between customization and normalization.  

Photo from the Autovol website

Prefabrication experiments - 398 - customize - 09 - Stackable micro apartments

 

The pressure of providing affordable housing in cities is driving an era of renewed interest in the «minimum dwelling». First articulated in 1932 by Karel Teige, the approach argued for inhabitable private cells and shared services to reduce redundant spaces. The inhabitable cell inspired the plugged-in unit on a common core prototypes of postwar Japan’s Metabolist movement. The minimum dwelling, a type of machine for living, was one of modern architecture’s obsessions: fabricating a dwelling from the conceptualizations of the industrial age, mechanization, mass production and Frederick W. Taylor's task separation; The efficient dwelling was a theme for architects to explore and illustrate potential well-run living environments complete with technological devices and built-in furnishings masterfully managing every square cm. 

 

Today's equivalent capsules or tiny houses are suggested not only to be tuned to contemporary living conditions but also to increase density and more critically to decrease building costs. Made offsite and transported to urban building sites, manufactured micro-lodgings can reduce construction time and site disturbance. Further, commonized flats can be stacked, maximize production, and harmonize design with procurement criteria to foster cost effective multi-unit buildings.  

 

MyMicroNY at Carmel Place, in Manhattan, opened in 2016. A series of stacked micro-apartments designed by nArchitects, the proposal outlines the possibilities provided by this budding micro-unit typology for urban housing. The nine-story building is organized by 55 units varying in size from 260-360 square feet (24-28 square meters). Each is a dimensionally coordinated container-like module serially produced in a factory setting. The apartments are a straightforward enfilade of bath, kitchen and living space. Built-in murphy beds convert day spaces into night spaces or provide flexibility for receiving guests. Made from a cold rolled steel framed chassis, the stackable boxes are completely fitted-out for delivery and to be set in place. The steel chassis outlines a precise construction system with a 3mm tolerance making a case for modular construction's stable processes that save time as well as increase construction quality. 

 

Produced by New York City company Capsys corp at the company's Brooklyn naval yard plant, the building was developed from a competition proposal as a pattern for increasing supply of affordable living spaces in cities at the front line of housing crises.

Setting a stackable unit in place from architects'
website https://narchitects.com/work/carmel-place/

Prefabrication experiments - 397 - customize - 08 - Cosmic Buildings

 

The future of construction is being guided and informed by the assimilation of digital technologies in the design and building processes. As climate change imposes reductions in resource consumption as well as adapting new energies, calculating carbon emissions, and reforming present take-make-dispose approaches, policy makers and project stakeholders are investigating parallel industries to generate innovative production ideas for breeding economies, efficiencies, and greater productivity. Streamlining supply chains and harmonizing design with offsite production are key ideas being touted as a path forward. Deploying modular, normalized, reproducible, intelligent and factory optimized assemblies that can be leveraged toward assorted designs is the basis of an industrial product platform ideology percolating from automobile and kit furniture sectors to architecture. While still marginal in construction, innovative start-ups are illustrating the potential for product platform theory to help increase output while making the whole industry more prolific. 

 

Sasha Jokic, a construction innovator well-versed in robotics and their application in construction, is the founder of Cosmic, a company that is proposing a building system to plan and create affordable, efficient, and low-carbon housing prototypes. Jokic’s scheme elucidates an open «product platform» imagined for ease of assembly and standardized component production. The basic volume is outlined by a steel and timber chassis, a modular volume that could be aggregated to produce innumerable patterns. The company is marketing a no-frills Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) that could be added to any backyard on simple tripod, strip or granular foundations. 

 

Cellular web, cold-formed, sheet metal joists are connected to columns to fashion a post and girder framework braced by plywood panels. The open joist floor plates are panelized as a type of cartridge that can be flatpacked to facilitate its bundling and delivery. Mechanical, plumbing, and electrical systems can also be modularized into the floor cores.  All elements are ordered and repeated over multiple units to distribute design and production costs, a basic principle of industrialized production. The first ADU also includes solar panels for energy production conserved in lithium-ion batteries that provide enough energy to run all systems including heating, cooling and ventilation making the unit completely self-sufficient. 

Assembling the floor plate cartridge onto the posts - from Cosmic Buildings https://www.cosmicbuildings.com/