CAN MANUFACTURING SET ARCHITECTURE FREE?
We may have spent a century standardising the wrong thing?
THE SHELTER JOURNAL | NO. 008
There is an uncomfortable contradiction in architecture.
We celebrate individuality.
We talk about place, culture, climate, landscape and the people who will inhabit a building.
And then we construct almost every house using essentially the same slow process.
One site.
One builder.
One trade after another.
One piece at a time.
In the rain.
In the heat.
With scaffolding, waste bins, deliveries, shortages, mistakes, variations and an extraordinary amount of human effort spent simply coordinating it all.
We call the finished building architecture.
But perhaps we haven't questioned the machinery behind architecture nearly enough.
MANUFACTURING BECAME THE ENEMY
For much of my working life, there has been an uneasy relationship between architecture and manufacturing.
Mention factory-made housing and people immediately imagine rows of identical boxes.
Cheap.
Temporary.
Soulless.
Some of that criticism was deserved.
Early attempts at industrialised housing often tried to manufacture the house.
And once the house itself became the standardised product, architecture inevitably became repetitive.
Same wall.
Same window.
Same roof.
Same box.
Again and again.
So architecture recoiled.
Understandably.
But I think we may have learned the wrong lesson.
The problem wasn't manufacturing.
The problem was what we chose to standardise.
WE STANDARDISED THE HOUSE
Look at much of manufactured housing today and you can still see the legacy of the transportable building.
The truck became an invisible architect.
Buildings were designed around what could fit down a road.
Rectangles became convenient.
Widths became fixed.
Rooms were packed into transportable boxes.
Manufacturing didn't liberate architecture.
It constrained it.
And so the architect was left with a fairly miserable choice.
Design freely and accept expensive conventional construction.
Or manufacture efficiently and accept architectural restriction.
For decades we have treated those two things as opposites.
I don't believe they are.
WHAT IF THE HOUSE ISN'T THE PRODUCT?
This is the question that eventually changed the way I thought about Diamond Weave.
What if manufacturing didn't produce houses?
What if it produced architecture's building blocks?
Not tiny Lego pieces.
Not an endless catalogue of identical rooms.
Not another proprietary box that architects have to disguise with cladding.
A larger structural system.
A repeatable manufacturing language.
Something capable of being produced accurately and economically while leaving the architecture itself open.
That distinction matters.
Because once the underlying system becomes repeatable, everything built from it can begin to become free.
Different climates.
Different cultures.
Different landscapes.
Different families.
Different architects.
Different materials.
Different countries.
The manufacturing system can remain disciplined while the architecture remains human.
THE CAR INDUSTRY ALREADY UNDERSTANDS THIS
A modern vehicle contains thousands of standardised components.
Nobody complains that every car therefore looks the same.
Manufacturing actually enables enormous variety.
Different bodies.
Different interiors.
Different performance.
Different price points.
Different markets.
What sits underneath is a highly organised industrial ecosystem.
Thousands of manufacturers contribute parts to a common system.
Nobody expects a single company to make the tyres, glass, electronics, seats, bearings, paint, wiring and steel.
The industry works because manufacturing is distributed.
Housing largely does the opposite.
We transport dozens of materials to a block of land and ask a coordinated team of skilled trades to effectively assemble a small factory outdoors.
Then we dismantle that factory and start again at the next address.
Perhaps the remarkable thing isn't that houses are expensive.
Perhaps the remarkable thing is that we still make them this way.
DIAMOND WEAVE STARTED WITH A DIFFERENT QUESTION
I began trying to reduce the cost of shelter in 1988.
For a long time I thought the challenge was simply to design a better building.
It isn't.
The larger challenge is to design a better way of making buildings.
That distinction has become increasingly important.
Diamond Weave is not intended to become another company producing every component of every house behind one factory gate.
Quite the opposite.
I want the system to create manufacturers.
Large manufacturers.
Small manufacturers.
Regional manufacturers.
Specialists.
People currently locked out of industrialised construction because entering the housing industry at scale requires enormous capital.
If a component can be defined, engineered and manufactured accurately, why should one enormous corporation have to own the entire process?
Why couldn't a regional business manufacture part of it?
Why couldn't another company develop a better interior system?
Why couldn't an architect develop something we never imagined?
That begins to look less like a housing company.
And more like an industry.
STANDARDISE THE SYSTEM. NOT THE SOUL.
There are things worth standardising.
Interfaces.
Connections.
Dimensions.
Structural rules.
Services.
Tolerances.
Digital information.
Manufacturing protocols.
These are not the things that make a family love a home.
Standardising them does not have to diminish architecture.
It may do the opposite.
Because if we can reduce the enormous amount of effort currently consumed solving the same construction problems again and again, architects may finally have more freedom to concentrate on the things architecture was supposed to be about.
People.
Climate.
Beauty.
Landscape.
Culture.
Light.
Shelter.
Belonging.
Local soul. Global architecture.
PERHAPS MANUFACTURING WAS NEVER ARCHITECTURE'S ENEMY
Bad standardisation was.
The box was.
The truck width was.
The belief that efficiency required sameness was.
There is another possibility.
Manufacturing might become the thing that finally separates architectural freedom from construction cost.
Not by replacing architects.
Not by replacing builders.
Not by replacing trades.
Not by replacing manufacturers.
But by giving all of them a better set of tools.
That possibility interests me enormously.
Because after nearly forty years trying to make shelter cheaper, I have come to believe something quite simple.
We don't need to industrialise architecture.
We need to industrialise the difficult parts so architecture can become human again.
And if we get that right, manufacturing may not imprison architecture at all.
It may finally set it free.
NEXT WEEK
For generations, one of the great symbols of Australian life wasn't inside the house.
It was behind it.
The Hills Hoist.
The shed.
The vegetable garden.
A tree large enough to shade the house.
Kids playing cricket.
A dog with somewhere to run.
A place to build something.
Plant something.
Make a mess.
A place where children could disappear outside...
and still be home.
Perhaps the most Australian room of all.
The room without a roof.
So what happened to it?
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