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Designing your own house

Architecture News - Jun 19, 2008 - 18:24   10377 views

The home-building industry could be transformed, MIT researchers argue,if it adopted the mass-customization methods being introduced in other industries.Dell Computer, for example, allows PC customers to pick their preferredhard-drive size, monitor type, and memory configuration from a Web-sitemenu. The elements are then pieced together from existing parts and delivereda few days later. Applied to home building, the customer-design processwould be considerably more advanced. A Web-based "preference engine"would take home buyers through a series of questions, design games, anddiagrams in a dialogue that would ideally approximate a conversation betweena client and an architect. Having established the basic facts {budget, numberof inhabitants and their ages, working habits, cooking habits, etc.}, thepreference engine would then attempt to determine more subjective preferences.For example, it might show different interior spaces, then ask the customerto pick a favorite and answer questions on what makes it preferable {lighting,color, detailing, sense of comfort or security}.For much of the last century architects and designers have wondered whythe home-building industry couldn`t be more like the automotive or aircraftmanufacturing industries. Cars and airplanes were the apogee of the machineage, precision-engineered in factories with the latest materials and technologies,their aerodynamic forms molded by functional requirements. Houses were theopposite: dumb boxes laboriously hammered together on-site. Designers, architects,and even governments spent untold hours and dollars trying to force constructionto go prefab. "We have only to apply to building the same techniquesof design, manufacture, and selling that have given us a motor car for everyfour people in the land," wrote Walter Dorwin Teague in 1942. "Inthis way the American genius of mass production that is winning the warcan win the peace as well."Offsite:The MIT Home of the Future Consortium, architecture.mit.edu/ house_n.Peace is an elusive target, and so is automated home building. Even themost ingenious of schemes for mass-produced prefabricated homes--BuckminsterFuller`s Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, and Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann`sPackaged House--became treasured failures of architectural history. Fullerpulled out of the Dymaxion project in the late 1940s, ditching a few thousandorders, and Gropius and Wachsmann saw only 200 houses built before theircompany closed down. The "house of the future" has consequentlyremained a curious artifact of the exposition showground.But in the last three years Kent Larson, an architect at Massachusetts Instituteof Technology, has been laboring to revive the Modernist dream and producea housing system of the future that will have a real and lasting impacton home building. The twentieth-century smart home was doomed by its prescriptiveness,according to Larson. "It became a timeline of buildings that essentiallyhad no effect on the industry because they were single-purpose structureswith a single form driven by one ideology," he says. The MIT project,on the other hand, is infinitely adaptable. "It`s about creatinga methodology that can be scaled to different climates and people,"Larson says. "What we`re proposing is that houses should move towarda mass-customization process."One argument fueling the project is that a smart home equipped with sensingnetworks could help avert the crisis looming over America`s overworked health-caresystem. During the next 30 years or so, our elderly population will double,increasing the burden on the creaking health-care infrastructure. The answer,according to the MIT team, is to upgrade the home so that it can supportthe needs of an aging population. Their prototype housing will test a monitoringsystem that can keep track of its occupants` activity levels, is
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