Production line technology for housing

Sustainable house expert Michael Mobbs from Sydney has a new production line called SALA homes, Ken Latona has the Smart Shax range, Studio Internationale the Platform 1234 range. Penny Collins and Huw Turner have developed the Silver Box. Many of these houses look like modernist versions of traditional housing but have little connection with the new technologies from the automobile industry. The next generation of houses however is connecting much more with the image of the car. They are beginning to make the house streamlined with curved cladding and dynamic shapes.

Coming out of Los Angeles, the home of Frank Gehry of Bilbao fame, is Greg Lynn. He is equally famous in the architectural world for his “Blob” architecture. Driven by his desire to completely utilise computer aided design software and then computer controlled robotic processes, he generates complex fluid shapes. The result is a series of blobs that look similar to a jellyfish. His “Embryologic House” has this form, with a curvilinear skirt around its base and with the option of a variety of curved shapes clad in an aluminium skin. The brief for the house gives a clue:

Domestic space that engages contemporary issues of brand identity and variation, customisation and continuity, flexible manufacturing and assembly, and most importantly, an unapologetic investment in the contemporary beauty of voluptuous aesthetics of undulating surfaces rendered vividly in iridescent and opalescent colours.

Greg Lynn sees his new approach as being beyond the mass-production techniques of the past. He sees the new technologies as the way forwards, “using animation software and advanced surface modelling software for designing more complex shapes for architectural applications is one thing”, he says. Lynn uses advanced design software based on the curves of calculus equations rather than on co-ordinate points in space, which allow for the creation of greater variation in shapes. “You don’t have to design every single variation … you just design a system in the computer and then let it calculate all the subtle variations,” he says. “The architect’s job is really to design the seed for it, to design a program in a manufacturing system, and then all the variations and specific examples of it happen after you have designed the seed.”

The Dutch Government is well known for its initiatives in the area of housing. A recent example is the “Industrial, Flexible and Demountable” (IFD) building programme, through the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, and the Ministry of Economic Affairs. A demonstration project evolved from this programme titled Variomatic, designed by the architectural office Oosterhuis NL.

One of the main features of the Variomatic is its interface with future residents through an interactive website. The site uses parametric modelling to provide feedback on changes to the base structure, in essence a catalogue of options that can change the dimensions of height, depth and width. The houses are not the normal image of a Dutch house. Oosterhuis has designed curved roofs and walls that are made of panels like a car, fixed to an internal frame. The client can modify the plan and the overall shape within minutes as well as choose the materials and colours.

An essential part of the Variomatic’s approach has been to respond to the Dutch government’s request that customers have more say over the final outcome of the house. Using the web a dialogue can occur between designer and client that doesn’t require face-to-face meeting. While still in the experimental stage, the Variomatic could become the way of the future.

Our demographics are changing - we have less buildable land and environmental imperatives are increasing. Maybe the automobile industry can provide a model for new design approaches that rethink the Aussie house.