Prefab Redux - another look at green prefab

From the Seattle Business Magazine April issue, "Prefab Redux"

Great to revisit the topic now that the hype has withered away. Such a shame that there is still so little discussion about how the majority of high-performance homes constructed to the strict passivhaus / passive house and Swiss Minergie performance standards are prefab. Then again, the Swiss, Germans, and Austrians are years ahead in integrating applied buildings science into the design-fabricate-construct process for high-performance building and even that is not generally recognized within the North American building community so of course there is little awareness about how they achieve and scale the process.

Practical BIM-to-CNC Workflow: Big Empowerment for the Small Firm

Jeff McGrew of Because We Can does a great job of introducing BIM to CNC work flows to architects in this short video.



In our video we show how the process and software work on a large-scale residential project






Here are photos of the fabrication, the on site assembly and the finished home in the Lake Tahoe region in California.

And finally, here is a short video showing a CNC Hundegger K2 in action



I also suggest joining the linkedin group "digital fabrication and design" for more related discussion with about 600 other members.

Report on global market for prefabricated housing

The full report cost $4500. A freehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif summary is available here. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

It would be a great read I am sure, but I do wonder about how they define prefab.

Net Zero Energy Buildings information

Great information on Net Zero Energy buildings in this series of PDFs. Worth reading a number of times.

FABRICATE - 3D printing and computer-aided-manufacturing

Media coverage and events focused on fabrication continue to proliferate.
First up - On March 25-26th academic leaders and pioneering fabricators converge in Los Angeles for the SCI-arc conference on composites and digital fabrication. The event is free but prior registration is required.

Next up, the FABRICATE conference in London on April 15-16th. BLDGBLOG contributes some background and enthusiasm for the event.


The Economist put 3D printing on the front page of the February 10th issue with this compelling photo and title, "Print me a Stradivarius."



and subtitled, "How a new manufacturing technology will change the world" and an article stating that it may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did.

And now for some fun. Watch a Japanese industrial robot picking cookies in this video.



A WiiLabyrinth with a KUKA youBot

Prefab - Revisiting the hype circa 2007

It is interesting to look back at lessons learned from the era when Michelle Kaufmann was discussing offers of $100 million, dozens of factories, and thousands of homes.

I suggest reading this "It isn't easy being green" April 2010 article from the New York Times. Then consider that "prefab" continues to become more efficient and capture a growing share of the market in Europe and Japan. Will the North Americans fall even further behind and attribute the lack of innovation to the weak housing market or will the efficiencies of prefab lead the rebuilding of the industry?

ITCON Issue on Using Gaming Technologies in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction

The Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon)published a special issue on gaming meets AEC. Almost 600 pages with 32 articles on the building industry and virtual reality, augmented reality, training, education, collaborative design, etc.



Having just returned from a week at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I am enthused to see academic recognition of the convergence of a very innovative industry (gaming) with one of the largest, but very change-resistant, trillion dollar industries - building.