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Production line technology for housing

By Chris Johnson - posted Thursday, 14 October 2004


The house and the car are the two biggest purchases of most Australians. They are produced in vast numbers with ever changing styles. But the construction of the house remains as an arts and craft activity compared to the modern production processes for the car. Around the world this is changing as computer technology has opened up the design dream of using mass-production techniques to produce not endless copies of the same object, but diverse variations.

Look at the Holden production line in Elizabeth, Australia. Holden is capturing a new international market - it is not to be the world’s biggest, it is to be the best niche international supplier. Holden has used expertise to design special vehicles like the Commodore, which is built as one of only two rear-wheel drive platforms made by the company. An article in the Australian Financial Review by Peter Roberts (January 6, 2004) explains how special Holden is … “in this Goliath of a market, Holden has made a virtue of its size through a small company’s ability to move quickly on new opportunities”.

The Elizabeth plant on the outskirts of Adelaide has been equipped to produce 780 cars a day. It is one of the most flexible automobile production plants in the world. Roberts defined the production line as almost a non production line. “Such is the flexibility of the plant that a red Commodore sedan can be followed along the line by a white four door utility and a yellow Pontiac GTO - batch size is as little as one.”

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The use of automobile technology to influence the design of homes has been a long held dream of modernist architects. In 1923, Le Corbusier wrote one of the most influential books on architecture and building. Towards a New Architecture was a call to arms to designers and architects to join the modern “Fordist” world of mass-production. Corbusier was inspired by three new design typologies that evolved from the mass-production world - the ocean liner, the aeroplane and the automobile. Le Corbusier sees the design of the automobile as the key to house design:

If the problem of the dwelling or the flat was designed in the same way that a chassis is, a speedy transformation and improvement will be seen in our houses. If houses were constructed by industrial mass-production, like the chassis, unexpected but sane and defensible forms would soon appear and a new aesthetic would be formulated with astonishing precision.

Le Corbusier’s ultimate conclusion is that “the house is a machine for living in” and these words have become one of the great statements of modern architecture.

The dream is now becoming reality as Toyota moves into the housing market in Japan. Toyota is a company that is into systems - with 264,000 employees world wide, vehicles marketed to 260 countries and sales of Yen 16,000 billion - this is a big company that must take a systems approach to its businesses and must be continually involved in R and D.

Toyota has a philosophy of developing new industries world wide in areas inside and outside the company. It is in this context that Toyota has a special programme called More than Cars. As the automobile is at the centre of Toyota’s activities, the technology and know-how accumulated through development, production, sales and servicing of the automobiles are being harnessed to venture beyond the car industry. Toyota in following this direction has moved into information and communications, marine biotechnology, forestation and housing.

Click onto the “housing” button on the Toyota website and we have the Toyota home “building 21st century comfort and luxury into houses in Japan”. The language that describes these homes comes from the automobile industry - “Toyota’s house making is based on the skeleton and infill approach”. The homes include “equipment that incorporates high level automobile technology …“. However the images of the Toyota home certainly don’t look like cars. In fact they are disappointingly quite traditional, hip roofed, tiled homes. The technology is there behind the image but the cladding is not what Le Corbusier would have expected.

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Even more information on the Toyota home can be found on www.toyotahome.co.jp where the graphic details are displayed of the construction of a typical Toyota home. Starting at 9.00am by 10.00am the first floor is complete, by 11.30am the second floor is completed, and by 3.00pm the roof is on and the structure enclosed. Within one day 85 per cent of the construction is complete. The chassis of the building is a series of lattice steel frames that link together to give sufficient rigidity for earthquakes and typhoons. Special corners are available for a curve or 45-degree cuts, as are cantilevers to overhang a car parking space. A 2.6m ceiling is an extra over the standard 2.4m ceiling.

A series of air quality systems are available to take Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) out of the air and improve cross-ventilation. The automobile research process affects materials in the house with the reduction in formaldehydes that cause “sick house” syndrome. Most materials (99 per cent) are also desalinated through “Bi-AZTION”. Clearly Toyota’s research department for automobiles is beginning to have a major impact on better technology for the construction of the Toyota home.

Can Australia move to a similar shake up of our housing market? Just imagine the Holden house appearing in a street near you. A number of Australian architects are espousing these approaches. Foremost among the team is Gabriel Poole from Queensland, who has been a champion of the mass-produced house for many years. While he has designed many award winning individual houses on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, his real drive has been to experiment with production line systems to produce a range of houses accessible to the larger market. His latest range is intriguingly titled “the Takeaway” and is interchangeable with his previous range “the Small House” series.

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.

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Article edited by Robert Standish-White.
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About the Author

Chris Johnson is the NSW Government Architect and General Manager of the Government Architect’s Office, Department of Commerce.

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