Now that we have some understanding of why 20th century attempts at the industrialization of building were such abject failures we can better appreciate the potential revolution eluded to in this Ancient Lasers article. It is far more than just a revolution in automation. It’s not simply obsolescing building contractors. It’s industrial technology that radically changes the way of building, facilitating something that is more consistent with the original, organic, nature of architecture itself, and which past industrial technology and paradigms were simply inadequate to. Facilitating potentially great economy with a design freedom that was once well expressed in pre-industrial times, despite the limits in technology, but could not be economically sustained under Industrial Age paradigms with their market logic, over-specialization of labor, and ‘over-professionalization’ of the craft of the built habitat.

Something is brewing in architecture, explains Eric Hunting, in this fascinating analysis of the digitalization of the building craft:

In their article How To Print A Building Ancient Lasers ( http://blog.ancientlasers.com/how-to-print-a-building-the-coming-real-estate-revolution/ ) blog writer Dan offers us a fine look at some of the recent developments in the emerging architectural applications of 3D printing. The article anticipates a coming revolution in building as this new form of automated construction frees architects from dependence on often less-than-efficient contract construction services while circumventing this predominately human based labor will bring the costs of construction down radically. Such a revolution has been very long anticipated and there is a bigger, more complex, and perhaps more interesting story to tell here. Let’s have a look.

Machine Age Building:

One of the ironies of the Industrial Age is that the one activity that seemed to so typify it–the rampant growth of cities and the proliferation of increasingly large buildings–was, in fact, one of the least industrialized activities of the era. Even with the advent of high-performance industrially-produced materials like steel beam, the habitat of the Machine Age was built predominately by hand, not machines. Across the 20th century architects and inventors were obsessed with the notion of industrializing or automating construction as a means to overcoming the chronic problems of inconsistency and ballooning cost associated with human construction labor. Many assumed that by applying the more ‘scientific’ paradigms of industrial mass production to factor out the vagaries of human skill in construction and, eventually, machine automation to eliminate human labor altogether one could not only make building cheaper but solve a vast host of problems with our built habitat and society. In particular, many understood that the blight of homelessness and substandard shelter was a largely modern problem, created by modern social and economic paradigms, and which they felt needed modern technological solutions. It simply made no sense that the civilization could make such sophisticated artifacts as the automobile accessible to so many yet somehow couldn’t manage to provide basic shelter for all. That’s even more tragically ironic today when the average American homeless person may often carry more computing power in their pockets than put men on the Moon and yet still can’t have a safe home–homes that, for the American middle-class today, are evolving toward little more than mysteriously shrinking dimensional lumber, plywood, and high-tech papier-mâché.

And yet, try as they might, designers and inventors of the era never did succeed at industrializing building. Countless new and alternative building technologies were devised and explored across the 20th century and almost none of them survived to become mainstream today while almost everything else in our culture became factory-produced. Why? The reasons are many and complex but the extreme variability of architecture itself relative to the capital costs of tooling for industrial production and the broad cultural seduction of the finance industry seem to be two of the key issues.

Strangely, most designers and inventors–right up to the present day–have been woefully ignorant of how industry actually works, which lead to a vast assortment of promising alternative building technologies being shelved or completely lost when their creators simply couldn’t muster a viable argument for industrialists–or worse yet sought, in frustration, to soldier on by themselves with often tragic results. Most industrial products are the same. For any particular type of product a single method of production and core design prevails and the differences between brands and models are generally very superficial. Almost all cars sold in the world today are really the same car, with the same core architecture, made with the same welded pressed steel unibody construction standardized in the 1930s, and the same basic materials. The traditional deal of industrial production is that for things to be cheap they need to be produced identically in large numbers. The larger or more complex an artifact is the higher the tooling costs for its mass production and thus the larger the volume you need to make to pay for those tooling costs, relative to the ‘cost of money’. Corporations invented things like planned obsolescence and model-year cosmetic design variations to maximize the cycle of replacement on products in order to justify the tooling costs of primary equipment whose investment was amortized over a span of at least 20 years. More significant changes in design and technology in the auto industry have actually been–roughly–keyed to a 20 year cycle of production tool replacement, which is why the car industry forever seems to be behind the curve of contemporary technology and why significant improvements in safety or propulsion are such a struggle for them. What sort of architectural design is there that you can say has been so universal as to be reproduced in largely identical millions? There may be only one; the Port-O-Potty.

Building is a quintessentially human activity and we’ve been at it for a very long time. For a long time it was also a very personal activity, rooted in personal or at least very local skills and labor. As a result, we have invented and evolved a diversity of design, technique, and cultural vernaculars so vast and adapted to so many different climates, situations, materials, and aesthetics it is only matched by the diversity in design of clothing. And so, long before the Industrial Age even existed, the ‘industry’ of shelter had a Long Tail characteristic. There is no universal architecture for the house. How then does it fit into a traditional industrial production paradigm? Recognizing this situation, some Modernist designers sought to devise such a universal architecture by dubiously ‘scientific’ means–and, of course, failed. What is ideal in an ergonomic and industrial production sense is not necessarily ideal in a cultural sense and western society tends to be very conservative in its housing ideals and compulsively inclined grab onto visual cues for class and race stereotyping. The inherent ‘trap’ of affordable housing is that, once you’ve devised an optimally efficient form of shelter at a particular income bracket, its design becomes a hallmark of a particular social class and then damned and banned from the presence of higher class society. This is what happened to the ‘mobile home’–the closest the 20th century came to practical factory-made housing. Originally intended as convenient vacation housing for the middle-class, its eventual association with the white rural underclass saw it banned from the suburban presence and relegated to its own special kind of exploitative slum–the trailer park. Today common low income housing wastes a great deal on class camouflage in order to be allowed in the relative presence of middle-class communities, giving the working poor a fighting chance for upward mobility. We western people are always looking for excuses to segregate and exploit.

Shelter is a verb, not a noun, and it’s fundamentally inappropriate to regard housing, buildings, our collective built habitat as discrete products rather than something more organic, evolving, networked–today especially. The ideas of permanence and optimal functionalism are fundamental errors of contemporary design–hopeless anachronisms in our current age. The key error in past attempts to industrialize architecture has been in treating buildings as products rather than process, chasing perfect designs instead of effective systems/platforms. Practical strategies for the industrialization and automation of building needed to be based on a different industrial paradigm altogether–one which did not begin to emerge in our culture until the Information Age with the very different ‘industrial ecology’ models of computer development and production across global communities of companies bound by shared cross-industry interface standards. Some 20th century designers and inventors did seem to partly clue into this and the result is a vast assortment of often very clever modular building systems. With modularity one leverages the potential of machine automation on the ‘back-end’ of production at much smaller, less capital-dependent, scales to reduce skill and labor on the front-end of building with a much reduced trade-off of aesthetic and design restriction. This gives you an accross-the-board economic and functional improvement in the way building is done without visually labeling it in ways that can be exploited for class stereotyping. However, lacking a common industrial ecology model–which frankly isn’t even commonly recognized to this day in IT–these more far-sighted designers still found themselves stuck in the dead-end of selling discrete designs instead of cultivating ecologies. Modularity was often employed only as a Modernist aesthetic gimmick or as a contrivance to divide large structures of discrete design into pieces more manageable in a factory setting. They very often missed the point, and thus, again, a great many promising technologies were shelved, unable to ever achieve critical mass.

A Timely Way Of Building:

Now that we have some understanding of why 20th century attempts at the industrialization of building were such abject failures we can better appreciate the potential revolution eluded to in this Ancient Lasers article. It is far more than just a revolution in automation. It’s not simply obsolescing building contractors. It’s industrial technology that radically changes the way of building, facilitating something that is more consistent with the original, organic, nature of architecture itself, and which past industrial technology and paradigms were simply inadequate to. Facilitating potentially great economy with a design freedom that was once well expressed in pre-industrial times, despite the limits in technology, but could not be economically sustained under Industrial Age paradigms with their market logic, over-specialization of labor, and ‘over-professionalization’ of the craft of the built habitat.

The popular example for the Long Tail is the music industry. But I pose a simple question about that example; is the Long Tail of the music industry today a new phenomenon of new technology, or was it really that the Industrial Age system imposed on the art–adapted to high capital cost media technologies of the time–suppressed the actual nature of the art and its market in order to accommodate paradigms that were, basically, in denial of reality? Is the music scene of today (I say scene as opposed to industry as the music industry remains a doomed anachronism running on its economic inertia) enabled by digital media technology actually more like it was always inclined to be but couldn’t be under Industrial Age paradigms? I ask this exact same question about architecture and building and I suspect these new technologies may soon reveal an answer.

But this is nascent technology and there are many issues to work out. Our newly emerging digitally assisted building techniques currently fall into three classes of technique; scaled-up versions of ‘additive’ fabrication producing monolithic structures offering wholesale automation of construction, manufacture-on-demand modular kit production, and advanced modular systems that both facilitate low-labor construction while integrating digital awareness into structures and affording cross-industry platforms. The logical fourth category–subtractive fabrication at large scale–remains precluded by a lack of appropriate materials, but has been approached with increasing automation in precision excavation.

The D-Shape 3D printing system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Shape ) developed by Enrico Dini is actually one of a number of similar systems recently devised and perhaps first demonstrated by the Contour Crafting system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contour_crafting ) developed at the University of Southern California. (how Dini managed to actually patent this technology may long remain something of a mystery of European bureaucracy…) The origins of such systems actually predates the 3D printing systems they seem to emulate, being rooted in a number of concrete and adobe extrusion machines that were designed to produce relatively simple shapes. For instance, in the 1990s one American entrepreneur sought to market a unique kind of ‘survival’ home based on simple cylindrical designs built with a radial boom-like mechanism that automatically extruded concrete to build concentric walls, while dividing walls were made more conventionally. (alas, this company seems to have disappeared from the Internet today) Similar mechanisms have been devised to produce domes and other shapes. With digital controlled cartesian motion systems, as we are currently seeing explored, we have a great freedom of form as with much smaller 3D printers. However, cartesian motion systems are cumbersome at such great scales. It is likely that the near future will see these evolve to cable-based Stewart platforms (like the NIST RoboCrane) and scalar motion systems affording even more flexibility with much more easily deployed hardware.

A radially different additive approach, however, has also recently appeared thanks to the discovery of bacillus pasteurii, a common pond bacteria with the remarkable ability to solidify sand into sandstone. Pioneered by architect Magnus Larsson ( http://www.magnuslarsson.com/ ), a technique harnessing this microorganism allows for the construction of structures by injection of fluid culture into sand dunes/piles along a gridded contour, producing rigid organic-shaped forms that can then be simply excavated and finished. This could arguably one of the first examples of a macro-scale method of nanofabrication, these re-purposed bacteria being our first true industrial ‘nanites’. Though quite a nascent technology, this has already been proposed by Larsson for construction of what could be the largest built structure in the world–a linear city megastructure crossing Africa as a barrier to the expansion of the Sahara desert.

The critical limitation of these additive construction techniques, however, is the monolithic nature of the structures produced. Once again we see the creeping delusions of permanence and perfection in design, though here partially rationalized on the presumed extremely cheap nature of this construction. These sorts of structures are difficult to modify or expand–though scalar robotics may eventually help in that respect. Changes cannot be made using the same technique, requiring resorting once again to high labor/skill methods. But the implication here is that the reduction of buildings to ‘blobjects’ makes them so cheap to produce their complete demolition and replacement would be a nominal cost. Maybe. At todays rate of building and home renovation this would require new recyclable materials that are not yet being explored. It is more likely that practical applications of this technology would anticipate retrofit adaptation of larger, simpler, more functionally generic structures but at present the designers exploring these technologies are more caught up in the heady freedom of elaborate organic forms.

Manufactured-on-demand production seeks to leverage the potential of rapid automated digital fabrication on the back-end of production at a much smaller equipment scale. A prime example of this approach was MIT’s House For New Orleans exhibit at MOMA’s Home Delivery show in 2008. ( http://ddf.mit.edu/projects/DIGITALLY_FAB/exhibit_assembly.html ) Here a simple but durable puzzle-fit system of assembly was devised for use with the very simple material of sheet plywood with the set of custom parts rapid-cut by CNC machines–the particular design suggesting possible solutions for relief and low-income housing. Here we see both a modular assembly system used to eliminate human skill and tools on the front-end of construction while a digital characterization of design is combined with automated engineering to procedurally generate a custom kit-of-parts on demand with little human involvement beyond design. Here we are leveraging the power of automation without the bulkiness of machines that need to be some large fraction of the scale of their end-product, leveraging low-skill low-effort labor for the front-end assembly affording possible options of volunteer labor and owner-sweat-equity. But, again, we see the house treated as a blobject with a very specialized design only evolvable on the back-end, in it’s virtual digital form, and thus again we are assuming the notion that the building is so cheap it’s disposable rather than adaptable–not a terrible trade-off in the context of relief architecture and small buildings. But since this is not a monolithic construction this is less ‘blobject’ than the buildings created by additive techniques and thus the obsolescence of structure is potentially compartmentalized along the topology of its parts. As long as there is demountability in the system of components there is the option to reduce the replacement of structure to a sub-set of parts rather than the whole structure.

Advanced modular systems are less concerned with the details of component fabrication than the nature of building as a system and the standards in interface between components. Instead of a digital method of fabrication–though parts may most certainly use that–we are dealing with a very different way of defining structure itself–as ‘applications’ of ‘open structural platforms’ composed of ‘commodity prefabricated components” that exist, potentially, in a global industrial ecology like the components of computers. There is no particular concern here in the discrete design of buildings except in terms of maximizing the potential diversity allowed while facilitating, to some degree, quick, safe, easy design and construction by non-experts. End-user empowerment and convenience is their key virtue. Along with this comes the option to ‘smarten’ the components of structures through integral digital sensing and communications technology, giving structures –and ultimately the built habitat generally–an active feedback response to their environment, their users, and their structural integrity–something which is a driving premise for development with these systems as their other potential impacts are, curiously, not as well understood by their own developers. Like the manufacture-on-demand schemes, this seeks to employ digital/virtual characterizations of buildings as an aid to the automation of their engineering. But the end-result is not a procedurally generated kit of custom fabricated components but rather a BOM (bill of materials) of pre-developed commodity (and optionally custom) components which may be either produced on demand or sourced pre-fabricated globally–like electronics and computer parts. In this way we have the maximum leverage on the potential of global industrial production and alternately cooperative/competitive development for sake of innovation, economy, and improving performance–creating the same set of evolutionary forces for the advance of building that drives Moore’s Law in computing. Currently, few whole systems of this type have been developed–this author’s own proposed Utilihab being one. ( http://utilihab.wikia.com/wiki/Utilihab_Wiki ) Research, done in places like MIT, have been more focused on the IT aspects of such systems than the development of any functional kit of parts. But the market impetus for such development is demonstrated by the compulsion in companies such as IKEA in the development of novel architecture complimenting their furniture design ideals. It seems likely that we can expect more progress toward such technology even if a vision of it is rather less than coherent in the design community.

A New Built Habitat:

Clearly, digital automation and systems are already demonstrating a great potential for disruption in building industry and coming years will offer many interesting developments. But whether they can realize the gravitas to truly transform our built habitat and address the problems left us in the wake of the fading Industrial Age can only be speculated. Other factors beyond technology will come into play here; in particular the crisis of confidence in the old financial industry, the evolution of the global economy (for we are not now in a mere economic downturn but a comprehensive state of evolutionary flux in our economic paradigms), the changes in global environment, and their collective impact on the patterns of human mobility on the globe. What does seem clear is that the status quo in our built habitat cannot be maintained. Our short couple-century experiment in an ironically non-industrial Industrial Age way of shelter has proven a failure–has proven clearly unsustainable. And so it will have to change, one way or another.