Tedd Benson on the Open-Built Strategy

One of the building industry's leading innovators, Tedd Benson of Bensonwood, speaks about his work with Open-Built and about innovation (and the lack of it) in the industry.




Tedd discusses his open-built system at length and how this system is derivative of Andrea Palladio's work in the 16th century.

Because he views the world from a builder/fabricator perspective, he defines building information modeling as pre-building a structures digitally (as opposed to a more common view of BIM as being a particular cad authoring application) and then fabricating them using CNC. I share his opinion (and frustration) that all other industries have been using an integrated design-optimize-fabricate-assemble process yet it remains largely unknown in the building sector.

Tedd uses a lot of European technologies including Cadwork design/manufacturing software and purchased one of the first Hundegger CNC lines to be used in the U.S.

He is working with researchers at MIT on the Open Prototype Initiative but does state at minute 4:25 of the video "I stopped doing research in this country in the late 1980s. Really in fact, to be honest with you, there is not much good going on in America in building technology."

Quite a statement from one of the leading innovators in residential construction.

Japanese Precut Timber Construction - Digital Fabrication

Precut - Modern Japanese Timber Construction from BAKOKO on Vimeo.

The Arch Daily website included this great video in an article on a beach house prefabricated and then assembled in one day. Great to see another example demonstrating the potential of digital fabrication.

CAM CNC fabrication in Cascadia

We finally have the CutMyTimber blog live. Here it is with some great photos of a timber frame project we cut in Oregon.