A house unfolds

All of the houses on the MoMA lot have very rectilinear geometry, except for the project called BURST*008. Raised on steel pilotis, it has a C-shaped section, one completely glazed elevation, and a bleacherlike stair connecting the living area with the ground. Designed by New York City−based architects Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier, BURST*008 is made of 725 nonidentical plywood ribs attached to each other with steel X-clips. The resulting cagelike lattice is clad in structural insulated panels (SIPs)-a sandwich of rigid insulation between two sheets of oriented strand board.

 

BURST*008 (1) is made of 725 nonidentical plywood ribs joined with steel clips to form a latticelike structure (2 and 3). The ribs and clips were assembled off-site and packed in three tightly stacked piles (4) for transport to MoMA. There, contractors unfolded the stacks like an accordion (5) and secured them to an already-installed steel piloti system. Installation of the exterior skin of SIPs (6) completes the BURST*008 structural system. The panels were CNC-milled and cut with grooves to accommodate the underlying ribs precisely. The ribs lock the skin in place and hold it taut. Photo and drawing: courtesy System Architects and Gauthier Architects (2,3,4,5)

 

 

In a process similar to that of the MIT house, the ribs were CNC-milled at Associated Fabrication, in Brooklyn, New York. With specialized nesting software, the company determined how to distribute the rib pieces on the fewest number of standard 4-by-8-foot plywood sheets. But for the MIT project, the layout of the individual elements on the plywood sheets was organized according to the order of assembly. "We had to balance assembly efficiency and waste," explains MIT's Michaud. 

The Burst team's choice to nest the irregular pieces meant labor-intensive sorting of all the components. "While this process was time consuming and required attentiveness and many hands, it did not require any specialized building expertise," point out Edmiston and Gauthier.