Fab House 2017-2018

Location: Germany, Fab-lab Kamp Lintfort

The role at the project: Project Leader, Instructor.

Duration: 10 Months

News: (Link)

The Fab House, is generally inspired by the tiny house movement and in particular by the Wikihouse and the Earthships, which favors not only environmentally friendly and affordable living but also a natural life and democratic house building.

FabHouse was made in a interdisciplinary course at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences in winter term 2017-2018. We developed an open source self-sufficient house that can be reproduced in any of the >1400 Fab Labs worldwide and be deployed anywhere in the world. This vision is taken from the WikiHouse-Project, which “endeavors to democratize and simplify the construction of sustainable, resource-light dwellings“. However, the focus of this course was to not to simply copy it but to ‘Re-Think it’, driven by the goal of making it as sustainable as possible. This included not only the construction of the house and materials used, but also energy harvesting and management systems.

Eco-DesignSprint Approach

please visit to see paper (Link)

To create a new mindset of eco-friendly makers, we set up a so called Eco-Design-Sprint approach and applied this within our FabLab.

Eco-design projects involve intense research, more than conventional product design projects. This includes research about materials, technologies and target audiences. This can especially be confirmed for the context in which we applied the framework – a study course that aims to create a sustainable house, made in a fab lab. Because of this context, we also had to tailor the general approach of Ecodesign. The course does not address the typical target audience of product designers (for which the framework was made) nor commercialization (including sales) of the product.

The word ‘Sprint’ refers to the speed in which we applied it. Due to the weekly meetings as part of the course, we established a report-discuss-and-develop-practice

Design of the FabHouse

FabHouse Assembly Manual: FabHouse Assembly Manual v1.0 (click to see)

FabHouse Cutting-Files: FabHouse CuttingFiles v1.0.dxf (click to download)

FabHouse SketchUp: FabHouse SketchUp v1.0.skp (click to download)

I was responsible at design and production of the house. Also, I led the students to design building systems and give feedbacks according to the Fab-House structure and to teaching them how to produce assembly parts with a CNC machine.

The FabHouse has an inverted roof shape, inspired by a leaf. It is collecting rainwater in the centre of the leaf –in it’s core. Kamp-Lintfort has continuous rainy weather. Almost every morning possible to see a good amount of water in the center of the leaves. I decided to use this form and idea to implement it to the house. The FabHouse construction system is based on three modules: Middle, corner (“caky”) and key modules. Key modules link all other modules and provide columns to carry the roof. Corner modules can be mirrored. Middle parts are used to stretch the space. All modules are growing around the core