Is It a Product Design or a Building Design?

By Ann Thorpe

It’s not that uncommon to see architects designing furniture and product designers involved with small buildings like street carts or garden sheds. In sustainable design terms, a common suggestion for architecture is that we get serious about manufactured housing, that is, housing where the components are manufactured offsite, then delivered and assembled on location. This idea, of course, has a long history as “prefab” or “prefabricated housing.”

Architecture firm Keiran Timberlake is known for promoting high precision manufactured housing, such that component parts are so reliable and interchangeable that you could buy and sell them on ebay when it is time to make modifications to your structure. Their Loblolly house (short video or a blog post) exemplifies this approach where wall components basically become products assembled into buildings–and disassembled later. READ MORE >>

The built detail (left) and the reconstructed detail (right)
from Loblolly house by Kieran Timberlake

via www.designers-atlas.net