Jeffrey Sipprell

January 3, 2007

Refabricating Architecture

About a year ago I read Kieran & Timberlake's Refabricating Architecture, finding it to be the perfect, not too theoretically deep, architectural manifesto that one could digest over the course of many 30 minute trips via the L train in Chicago. It's sort of the 'Towards a New Architecture' of the early 21st Century - first building up its argument through an attack on historical modes of production before positing its own vision for the future at the end.

It is that 'future' that I read with some extra care as it is always a rare treat to see an architect's polemic actually practiced within the same text. Face it, I'm a guy who needs pictures. Often I'll go to the bookstore, see a very interesting book on some facet of architecture, and find out that it's about 150 pages on of fine print text. NO Thanks! I've gone through enough poorly put together course readers in my days to want to come home from a hard day's work at the curvy titanium farm to want to crack into one of those babies. But, this isn't a rant about architects who can't write for shit, but rather a post to heap praise on the authors of this book.

Even though the examples they showed were somewhat limited, there was a genius in even the simplest examples that one could grasp. The bathroom at Cornell I found the most compelling as I know from experience how many different on-site trades who barely know what they're doing are involved in even the simplest of toilet rooms. Yet here was an example of where something quite exquisite could be done and with the control and precision of something as finely tuned as crafted millwork. It was certainly the beginning of what would be some compelling work.

Why am I writing about this now you might wonder? Well I recently opened the January 2007 issue of Wired Magazine and found myself reading their annual 'Wired Home' section. It featured Kieran and Timberlake's Loblolly House "where the walls and floors are made of panels that were manufactured with wiring, insulation, plumbing and ductwork already in place. And the two main power systems of the home, including two bathrooms and a galley kitchen, were delivered to the construction site in pre-assembled, plug-and-play units. After the site was prepared, the 2,200-square-foot house took three weeks to assemble."

One statistic I was truly amazed by was that "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."

I currently work at a firm that has pioneered the use of a part-for-part digital model of a building - mostly to allow for the construction of highly complex formal moves in the architecture of Frank Gehry. K/T has used the same technology (or something similar) in an entirely different way (and in my opinion more important to the discourse of architecture). Here they have leveraged the software to create pre-fabricated units that contain all of the guts of a living, breathing building - allowing for smarter and more complex systems of design and integration. Not only does the fabrication eliminate waste, but it's also elegantly designed to have as little impact on the environment - the perfect marriage between digital information modeling and sustainable responsibility.

Loblolly in Wired (Available January 9)
Loblolly House in Architectural Record

Posted by jsipprell at 10:29 PM | Comments (0)