Providing high-quality, creative as well as comfortable, affordable and resilient housing is a contemporary challenge, with demand not seen since early industrialization, urbanization, and world wars drove population displacements, shortages and massive rebuilds. The impetus to supply housing productively has renewed discussions around factory production and its potentials to improve conventional construction's degrading productivity.
Policies pushing for greater uptake include road maps, building type catalogues, centralized building designs, all pushing the idea that efficiency is related to normalized patterns outlined for quicker and cheaper production. However, the standardization that succeeded in other industrial sectors is difficult to reproduce in construction where local traditions, regulatory frameworks, civil infrastructures, and climate conditions particularize project criteria and characteristics limiting architectural or systemic repeatability.
Regularity in design is the basis for mass production's capacity to reduce costs while increasing quality and output. From mass customization to platform approaches promoting design families for different residential assets, these methodologies have garnered interest, but remain marginal, as both fields architecture and manufacturing remain mired in their anchored values.
A fundamental cultural shift is required for architects and designers to understand industrial processes and their application; at the same time manufacturers in the building sector need to be educated in what constitutes quality architecture. The automobile, ship, aircraft, and mobile phone industries along with many others integrate design criteria values from the start of product development. All too often, industrialized production of architecture is seen as just another sub-trade in the construction process which makes it extremely difficult to become cost and design effective on a project-by-project basis.
Systemic change is difficult to replicate within a construction culture ingrained in its artisanal fragmentation. Still, the change is necessary and could eventually provide outlets for a new type of industrialized architecture defined by some form of content standardization that supports innovation. The argument of singularity is moot, as architecture already repeats many processes; it is time to harness greater collaborative efforts between fields to achieve design productiveness. If the discussion continues to oppose unique design to cookie-cutter repetition, no advancement is possible.
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| Resolution 4 architecture's take on normalization and singularity |
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