Platform theory and its relevance for building construction has been suggested as potentially harmonizing design variables with fabrication, construction and furthermore to facilitate a circular approach in construction as pieces used for multiple buildings would be designed as modular and interoperable. Hardware commonalities exist in construction as steel buildings, prefab concrete components, and a myriad of other assemblies are normalized to be used across diverse organizations using repeating parameters within singular designs. Using platforms for building construction is often compared to the automobile industry: cooperating manufacturers share dimensional and material components of their products’ underbellies. An equally interesting analogy to platform theory directed to making is LEGO® plastic toy brick variability; standardized toy blocks are dimensionally compatible, can be clicked and composed into an infinite number of designs.
Since the late 1970s and the LEGO® patent’s expiry, the same type of toy brick expanded commercially where other companies, Mould King, Sembo, Cobi produce compatible products. The toy bricks have expanded to include software platforms developed to create and virtually construct a LEGO® model, visualize its completion, categorize its required components and potentially even create a purchase order or a bill of materials that is coordinated with producers – an idealize vision of applying DfMA in architecture.
LEGO® Digital Designer, Mecabricks, and BrickLink studio are three configurators that offer users similar capacities to test their designs and share them with an online community of plastic brick architecture designers. Linked to online sharing sites, these configurators, a type of LEGO® Information Modeling, communicate modular coordination principles, automate take-offs, facilitate cloud sharing and distribution. On-line communities also use these platforms to buy and sell, new, repurposed, or vintage pieces that multiply design potentials.
This approach to crowd sharing and interoperability could be directed toward building design and fabrication. A configurator for personalized designs from a catalogue of interchangeable pieces based on bulk purchasing, automated estimating, working drawing packages and shop drawings frame a formidable strategy from which users create buildings of any scope and scale from a regulated and categorized number of predetermined subassemblies.
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| LEGO® blocks |
