Plug+Play Construction
STEVE KIERAN STOPS BRIEFLY to survey the Chesapeake Bay from the living room of his half-built house. It's a great view, but today he's most interested in what's inside the walls of his utility room.
"Look at that," Kieran says, leading me into a small, tidy space filled with neat bundles of flexible orange tubing. Bolted to the wall is a row of black manifold boxes, each the size of a coffee cup. "It's beautiful. It's like the engine of a car." He's right; it looks less like a typical utility space – meters and junction boxes crammed with wires that splay off in all directions – and more like a piece of industrial design, crafted with planning and precision. And for good reason: This room and two more like it hold the house's high tech systems. It arrived at the site as a single unit stuffed with a tankless water heater, pumps, and other equipment ready to hook into the air, water, data, and power systems.
Snapped together from a combination of modules, panels, and preformed structural frames, the Loblolly house, named for the loblolly pines here in the Maryland tidewater area, is a manifesto for a new way of building. Architect Kieran and his partner, James Timberlake, have long been known for their finely crafted and energy-efficient buildings and materials. But the Philadelphia-based pair wanted more than just high-profile commissions – they were looking for a breakthrough technology that would let them make smarter, greener structures that could go up quickly and cheaply.
In 2001, after studying how the automotive, aircraft, and shipbuilding industries had revolutionized themselves over the previous 15 years, Kieran and Timberlake realized that architecture needed the equivalent of an integrated circuit. They began to combine glass, drywall, pipe, and wood frames into finished units, each precision-engineered for cost, beauty, and sustainability. In the Loblolly house, the walls and floors are made of panels (some as tall as 21 feet) that were manufactured with wiring, insulation, plumbing, and ductwork already in place. And the main power systems of the home, including two bathrooms and the galley kitchen, were delivered to the construction site in preassembled, plug-and-play units. After the site was prepared, the 2,200-square-foot house took three weeks to assemble.
Just a few years ago, "home tech" meant gadgets or beige boxes hidden in cabinets, closets, or the basement. At Loblolly, though, the technology is buried in the ceilings, walls, and floors – the beauty is in what you don't see. In the construction system that Kieran and Timberlake have devised, the systems and controls are nearly invisible. The six other houses in this annual issue of Wired Home are built with hidden technology as well. But Loblolly takes this trend to the extreme. The approach Kieran and Timberlake have developed uses detailed digital models borrowed from the aerospace industry, tightly coordinated design and fabrication, and carefully orchestrated supply chains that will dramatically reduce cost and build time.
THE MOST EFFICIENT WAY to construct a house is to build it in a factory. This reduces a home's "embodied energy" – the amount of power expended in its fabrication and construction. And conventional homebuilding is dirty work. From the fuel used by commuting workers to onsite diesel generators, the construction and operation of homes and other structures generates 40 to 50 percent of all the greenhouse gases in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. On top of that, studies suggest that more than half of a home's leftover materials – drywall and lumber – winds up in landfills. Plus, as anyone who has ever remodeled a kitchen knows, construction work isn't exactly high tech. Raw materials are dropped off at the building site and then assembled by hand with hammers and saws. The so-called material systems approach developed by Kieran and Timberlake banishes this primitive model. Better still, it's future-proof: Homes may be built to last, but the modules of material systems structures are built to be upgraded.
The big home builders – name brands like Pulte and Toll Brothers, which together sell more than 50,000 homes a year worth about $20 billion – are watching. They already have factories churning out roof trusses and wall panels designed, cut, and assembled using computers. "People thought we were crazy when we started this," says Tom Argyris, Toll Brothers regional president. "It used to take 52 workers to build four houses per shift; now we build 10 houses with 14 people." But the plumbing, heating, and electricity systems are still installed in the field. Until recently, with the housing market booming and labor plentiful, builders had no pressing need to innovate. "As we see more of a labor shortage, that will drive more sophistication into the panels," Argyris says.
For all their factory origins, though, these homes are quite different from simple prefabricated houses. Sleek, modernist prefab cottages may be stylish, but for now, most represent an aesthetic innovation more than a technological one – lipstick on a double-wide. Which is how they're treated: Banks are reluctant to finance prefab houses, and many communities have building codes to exclude them. These factors, plus the obvious constraints of trucking houses down the highway, mean that most fully built prefabs wind up as second homes along the coasts.
But the prefab movement did make architects and builders wonder how they could get their structures up and running even faster. For example, when PeopleLink software founder Steve Glenn erected his own prefabricated house earlier this year, the place went up in just a day, but then it required three months of finish work. That just wasn't good enough. So Glenn, who runs LivingHomes, a prefab builder in Los Angeles, struck a deal with Kieran and Timberlake to incorporate their panels and material systems into his projects. "If our major focus is making the product better, quicker, cheaper, and with a smaller ecological footprint," Glenn says, "we need a high level of technology integration."
That's what Loblolly is all about. The house is like a concept car at an auto show: The point is not to do it more cheaply right now but to show how it can be done better later. Being gorgeous also helps. The Loblolly house won awards from the American Institute of Architects when it was still just a schematic. By the time it was half built in October, Kieran and Timberlake were regularly shuttling a fan club of engineers and trade journalists down the eastern shore of Maryland to see it. They've also taken a road show, in which they describe their material systems and how to use them, to architecture schools and sustainability conferences around the country. If prefabs are assembly-line Fords, Loblolly is a custom hot rod, begging for mass production.
EVER SINCE WE ADDED plumbing and power to homes, architects have been losing influence to engineers and builders. "By the end of the 19th century, we'd gotten pretty good at using bricks and mortar to make buildings, but the influx of all these systems still baffles us," Kieran says. "It's sausage stuffing, and you pray the casing is big enough to hold it all."
In 2001, with the help of a $50,000 research grant, Kieran and Timberlake set out to find a better way to stuff the sausage. They found it at Boeing, where they watched an engineer working with a 3-D computer model zoom into the skin of a 777, select a single, fist-sized shear stud, rotate it, then call up its history – structural properties, how many had been used and in which aircraft, even past purchase orders. Like most architects, Kieran and Timberlake had used 3-D computer models, but Boeing was introducing a fourth dimension: information.
Kieran and Timberlake realized that a part-for-part digital model of a building – not just a representation but a true simulation – could put power back in the hands of architects. Instantly, designing the sausage casing becomes a lot more precise. So does stuffing it, which means you can allow for a high level of complexity, relying on smart systems rather than dumb materials.
All this coincided with Kieran and his wife wanting a new home. What better guinea pig than himself? The Loblolly house would be Kieran and Timberlake's proof of concept. Now they just needed to find someone to build it. They visited several manufactured-home builders with their plan, which included an unusual aluminum frame, precise clearances, and all the mod cons, including the kitchen sink. But everyone was spooked by Loblolly's weird metal structure, and they were concerned that the modules would get stuck on the assembly line. Finally, the pair went to Walpole, New Hampshire, and met Tedd Benson. His company, Bensonwood Homes, makes primarily timber-frame houses, but the place has been cutting wood by computer for 20 years, a useful skill if you're going to start manufacturing integrated building systems. When Kieran showed up at Benson's office 18 months ago with wild notions of parametric models, tiered supply chains, and shop-built components, Benson just shrugged. Yeah, we do that. "In some underlying philosophical sense, substituting an aluminum frame for timbers was not a big leap," he says. Benson is now working with a team of architects from MIT's House_n research consortium to create open source building standards that would let anyone build a Loblolly-like house.
In October, a crowd of several hundred building professionals gathered in a Manhattan auditorium for the McGraw-Hill Construction and Architectural Record Innovation conference. The topic: high tech systems for sustainable buildings. Kieran and Timberlake presented the first case study, the Loblolly house. Handing the microphone back and forth, they described their prototype's energy-saving innovations – a breathable facade that allows maximum passive heating and cooling, low-energy systems, and minimal impact on the land because of offsite fabrication. But it was the last slide that sent murmurs through the audience. "Loblolly has been designed to come apart in the same way it came together," Kieran said. "What happens to those pieces?"
It took a moment for the crowd to get it: There on the screen were Loblolly's pieces – its aluminum frame, its cedar rain-screen panels, its floor and ceiling cartridges with insulation and radiant heating – all for sale. On eBay. In the future, the supply chain will be a circle.
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