Loblolly House: In Stock and Ready to Ship

KieranTimberlake Associates fabricates the loblolly house in a warehouse, setting up a new supply chain and establishing a base to revolutionize the firm's future production.
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From Architectural Record
Russell Fortmeyer

In his essay, "The Great Gizmo," in the September 1965 issue of Industrial Design, Banham neatly summarized the progressive objectives of American industrial initiative embodied in prefab: "They do not require high skill at the point of application, they leave craftsmanship behind at the factory." While nearly all Modern prefab houses-particularly those so recently in consumer vogue-share this ambition of realizing standardized components, wide application and adaptability, and quick assembly, few designs have achieved extensive implementation. Experiments in mass-customization of housing by the federal government, such as George Romney's 1970s programs as director of the Housing and Urban Development agency, fell apart when funding evaporated. The grand exception to these trials, of course, clogs highways from coast-to-coast: flat-bed, truck-mounted, factory-built "traditional" homes designed to meet the hauling requirements of the Interstate Highway System. Lately, these units have achieved a certain dreaded notoriety as so-called "Katrina houses."



From the outset, KieranTimberlake Associates (KTA) resisted such conventions. Instead, it was intent to realize a hybrid version of prefab with flexibility in its design to permit a variety of floor plates and programs, even perhaps to eventually find use in commercial and multifamily housing projects. It's not a new house the architects were after, but rather a new production process for architecture or, as they argue in the book, a transformation of the architect into something akin to a process engineer. "There is no incentive to change," Timberlake says. "But, like the car industry, architecture and design will eventually develop a product that works anywhere in the world. At least, it's good to dream that way."

Not your father's prefab

KTA's Loblolly departs most wholly from past prefab models through its innovative component-based design, in which KTA minimized the number of parts. "We want materials we can take apart like used auto parts, as opposed to ending up with rubble," Kieran says. Unlike many houses, even those built with sustainability in mind, Loblolly's components, or elements, as the architects call them, could be unbolted and reconfigured at another site for a different house or, as the architects like to demonstrate in their public lectures, sold off in pieces on eBay.


  1. Green roof
  2. Cedar cladding panelized
  3. Prefab boxes for bathroom and kitchen
  4. Prefab coffer floor system
  5. Structural pilings
  6. Double west wall skin
  7. Bosch Rexroth structural aluminum frame
Steve Kieran says the entire Loblolly House fit on two tractor trailers for delivery to the site. The architects reformulated typical house design into larger elements that combine a variety of CSI building materials into simple units, such as floor cartridges, that could be easily installed in the field.


Both Kieran and Timberlake credit the advances made in digital parametric modeling for enabling the project to move forward. Created in AutoDesk's Revit, one of the most widely used building-information-modeling (BIM) programs, Kieran says the software provides a previously unattainable level of certainty. "We had a new depth of control and a new depth of specificity, geometric certainty, and three-dimensionality, where we could just order materials directly without going through a shop drawing process," Kieran says. He is still somewhat amazed that he could sidestep one of the more time-consuming, paper-wasting jobs of the contemporary architect. This precision in design entitled the architects to divide the house into a series of major elements: uniform "cartridges" for floors and walls; a standard, off-the-shelf aluminum structure; uniform exterior rain screen cedar panels; and factory-built bathroom and kitchen modules.

These elements fuse, in design and specification form, the Construction Standards Institute (CSI) divisions architects and consultants typically use. Kieran and Timberlake both feel the CSI divisions limit the possibilities for the integration of building components. "CSI doesn't disappear, the products still exist," Kieran says. "They just aren't isolated any longer, they're integrated." But for this to work, the architects needed to establish a new framework for how each conventional material would then be combined into the unconventional elements used in on-site assembly, while also identifying the party responsible for the work-be that the on-site contractor or the prefab assembler.

 

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Originally published in Architectural Record.
Originally published in November 2006

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