Prefabrication experiments - 404 - Open-source kit from Schemata Workshop

 

Industrialized building systems, the topic of abundant literature, are inspiring a new generation toward a revolution in construction. Accentuated by digital manufacturing concepts, modern processes can alter both design and building production. DfMA, «platform» methodologies, or offsite, are all discussed as innovative prefabrication theories improving construction’s stagnating productivity and have increased mainstream attention for preparing building chunks in factories.  

 

Recent, significant venture capital investments have identified offsite as perhaps the next Klondike or at least the sole remaining sector to have escaped high value industrialization; According to many, construction industrialization’s day has finally come. Even architectural firms that have contested the standardization associated with factory produced architecture are suggesting prefab as a better design/building/business model.

 

Schemata workshop, a Seattle, USA based design firm has developed two systems that transcribe digital potentials for design. The first developed with manufacturer Dogwood industries is an integrated service core known as Middlemod. The consortium-based business, Building and Module Manufacturing LLC (BAMM) unites architects and fabricators in a limited liability partnership.  The modular core is designed to fit into any construction system and can adapt to multiple spatial arrangements. The unit is planned to maximize factory preassembly, facilitate just-in-time delivery to any site with simple plug-and-play utility connections, and optimize virtual coordination. The MIddlemod concept sometimes also known as a combo-pod includes kitchen, bath, and utility room.

 

The firm’s other product is a component-based structural frame and kit that speeds up design by systematizing parts, construction, and assembly details from project to project. The steel skeletal and panelized building system includes envelope segments, windows, PV panels for energy production and mechanical distribution in a digital distributable format. The open-source methodology intends to bring affordability to housing production by multiplying the number of projects using the same parts, exploiting serial production. Schemata Workshop along with their partners envisioned this construction system to reduce waste at all project stages.

 

While promising in theory, the open-source concept applied to architecture is still relatively marginal. However, firms like Elemental, 369 pattern buildings and even Wikihouse share innovative building ideas and improve them through harvesting crowd iterations. The digital revolution applied to prefab suggests these platform-based directions to help the building sector at last adhere to industrialization’s promised advantages.

left: Combo pod; right: Kit-of-parts

Prefabrication experiments - 403 - Lego Block Modularity

 

Growing, scaling, and adapting homes according to evolving needs can be governed by systemic modularity. Potentially outlining the intensified use of industrialized building methods for affordable housing, modular flexibility positions standardized or regulated design strategies as well as interoperable sub-assemblies toward many variable housing arrangements. Dimensional coordination, repeating parts and details frame the principles of this ingrained adaptability. Interchangeable pieces and even spaces can sequence generative criteria according to functional parameters. Modularity combined with service distribution grids and networks can structure element-based schemes combining, aligning, stacking, and juxtaposing room fragments or mechanical units to personalize dwelling design. 

 

A group of researchers in South Korea has explored a type of space-block modularity in a core house system. The proposal is conceptually like other core-housing prototypes; The systematized one-storey boxes about the size of a common room surround service spaces. Each box is attached with a vertical sliding lock mechanism used to stitch the system into a single family or multi-unit residential building. The locking curtain wall uses a combination of extrusions that friction-fit and slip together. Their ease of assembly is also reversible making it possible to move entire wall planes to respond to new or evolving family dynamics.  Stair or roof segments complete the dwellings and conform to a set of design rules and dimensional conditions. Technical core spaces include services in a centralized, linear, or even cross pattern; organisations can branch out into larger tract housing subdivisions which link the core dwellings with an underlaid urban distribution.  

 

Pushing this concept even further the proposal includes energy independence using solar roof panels for electricity and central distribution of other active energy systems.  The expanding housing kernels can be multiplied in all directions from the focalized hub unit displaying the analogy to Lego Blocks. The overall modular composition could feasibly be assembled using mass-produced boxes or even reuse existing segments and sections from dwellings that downsize and no longer require all their initial components. Uniting flexibility with adaptability makes this type of scalable system potentially mass manufacturable to optimally control construction costs, increased scalability and quality by monitoring all aspects of the product’s fabrication.

See full article at 

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/20/5561

Prefabrication experiments - 402 - Aqueduct House

 

Service circulation is a multifaceted and unavoidable part of building construction often studied too simplistically when designing industrialized building systems. Except for service cores which integrate disparate technical elements in a manufactured hub or pod, strategies for networking services over multiple homes or types is limited; Off-site construction using mechanical pods is habitually applied to distinct constructions.  Multi storey dwelling blocks usually use similar core principles to stack multiple apartments' kitchens or baths to rationalize piping through vertical chases. Scaling or imagining these practices for civil infrastructure could lead to more efficiently sharing amenities and a more integrated approach to community planning including standardized and shareable schemes. 

 

Servicing dwellings cost-effectively becomes particularly critical in contexts where facilities and their democratization are sparse, at best. Developing countries facing housing crises or building in remote locations require concepts that make allotment of power and water supply or disposal the basic framework of community planning. 

 

Alejandro Aravena's Elemental practice has made sharing universally resilient housing designs based on combining industrialized and low-teck solutions a staple of multiple proposals. Perhaps, best known for their Villa Verde scheme in Chile where occupants could personalize half of a core-dwelling prototype, the firm has deployed similar adaptable principles for larger housing tracts. Their ambitious speculative proposal, Aqueduct House, suggests civil engineering elements, sidewalks and paths, to equip a linear urban plan:  A sidewalk and a first-floor girder span multiple lots as box beams or caissons forming a continuous duct line and a common support system. The reinforced concrete tubes channel mechanical elements across divided parcels to align a band of flexible townhouse spaces.  Demising rectangular concrete columns indicate property lines and support the concrete beam onto which other urban elements such as lighting can be connected. 

 

As in most other core housing prototypes, occupants play a major role in the construction of their dwellings, their evolution, and their community development. The brutalist overhead conduit is proposed as an assembly of modular concrete elements; a type of kit-of-parts civil power bar that could be set up and branched out in any context.

Elemental's Aqueduct House proposal

Prefabrication experiments - 401 - Open-source service core

 

In the field of prefabrication or offsite construction, one concept above all others, has been discussed, tried, and tested, from both architectural and industrial perspectives: the service core. Rationalized as the dwelling’s technical heart, the central appliance, engine, or hub projected all wet and technical spaces within an integrated factory-produced unit. Other conventional systems for structure, skin and circulation would surround these cores in an on and off-site hybridization. Visions of the core proposed plug-in pods containing baths, kitchens, and other mechanical spaces to service flexible arrangements radiating from a productive nucleus. Sometimes compared to subassembly components in vehicle manufacturing, the core implies the same harmonized supply chains for its commercialization.

 

The idea has not evolved much since the beginning of the twentieth century’s first experiments. A non-exhaustive list of cores https://www.arcc-journal.org/index.php/arccjournal/article/view/426 outlines suggested theories and practical applications. While mostly imagined as vertical elements, Italian architect Carlo Ratti known for his ideas and projects uniting design with open-source methodologies has developed a unique take on the core. 

 

Working with not-for-profit Indian firm Werise, the team created a prototype horizontal core inspired by a computer motherboard analogy where the utilitarian plane constitutes the platform of a user-centric housing configuration. The mother board is part of a core-house strategy providing an integrated service space approximately 12 square meters (3m x 4m) encompassing the dwelling’s technical elements from batteries for electricity to water filtration, storage, and distribution.  From this generative cartridge, the house can evolve in any direction while being hooked-up to the power panel. 

 

Proposed as a flatpacked easy to deliver subassembly, the thick floorplate also elevates interior spaces from the surrounding landscape, providing services, protection and a place marker.  The LivingBoard transposes ideas used within the maker movement to empower users to foster tools and devices from simple to use components; Arduino boards are probably the closest analogy to Ratti's living board as they can be tuned to accomplish a variety of programmable tasks. Ratti estimates that his version of a horizontal service core can simplify the house design, procurement and building process. 

Living Board schematic