IDEAS&APPLICATIONS
The Future of Wood: Parametric Building Platforms How technology convergence enables consistent, yet infinitely configurable, mass timber Oliver David Krieg and Oliver Lang
If design, engineering and manufacturing converge in a platform-based development process, the resulting building can be beautiful and functional, blurring the boundaries between mass production and uniqueness.
The construction industry has utilized the same time-consuming and costly process for decades. As a result, we are left with aging, unsustainable buildings that contribute to a significant percentage of global emissions. With the growing global demand for affordable housing, both industry leaders and city planners agree that change is needed to address the housing deficit with building solutions that are fast to construct, and less expensive to build and operate. Vancouver, for example, recently enacted the Greenest City Action Plan and the Climate Emergency Action Plan to work towards carbon neutrality. This change is already on the horizon. While the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is developing new technologies that can deliver buildings faster, more cost efficiently and with better performance, recent innovation in software and manufacturing automation now enables a
departure from a fragmented service industry towards a productoriented and platform-based approach for urban development. By combining the seemingly opposing ideas of repeatable and scalable production with new forms of highly configurable design, engineering and manufacturing solutions based on mass timber, this approach promises to provide breakthrough innovation to an industry that has been lacking productivity gains for over 75 years (see the World Economic Forum 2016 report: Shaping the Future of Construction). Parametric design software enables the needed convergence of design engineering with systemized mass timber construction and automated prefabrication, towards this product-based approach. It offers infinitely configurable design from a highly adaptable platform, while ensuring process consistency, certification, building code and bylaw compliance, quality control ‒ s p r ing / su m m e r 2 0 2 1
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