jeimei shen & huan miao khoo

a selection of work from our students at university of sydney digital architecture research studio.  the work presented here is an image from each students design proposal in relation to their brief which aimed to investigate digital design and fabrication techniques specific to environment and location through composite strategies.

The footprint of a prefab construction impacts far less on the building site compared to a traditional building foundation.  As this method also employs off-site fabrication and assembly, there is a significantly reduced impact on the site with regard to disturbance, run-off and waste. It is much easier to control waste streams in a factory, as waste can easily be separated for recycling at the point of creation on an assembly line than on a building site, where experience tells us, material separation is often difficult to achieve. From required building material, up to thirty to forty percent of building material waste generated from conventional building ends up in landfill, compared to as little as two percent waste achieved through prefabrication methods.

This work focuses primarily on pre-fabrication and kit assemblage of individual dwellings through digitally fabricated timber construction methods.  Through the investigation of parametric design & fabrication students looked at implementing these alternative ‘advanced’ geometry & organizational strategies for a more architectural response: housing units.

We see the prefabricated or off site kit variable assembly as the future mediation between low budget one size fits all modules and one off  high end boutique architecture.  Whereas the prefabricated process is governed by efficiency of space often complying with minimum area requirements and replication of unit type we are interested in the potential spatial variations possible both internally (double height volumes, overhangs), externally (courtyards, terraces) and on a neighbourhood scale that modern fabrication processes allow for.

claire hosking

yao ma & wei shi

nicola strange & justine simpson

xiao wen qian & ni wen

thomas pinyon & maryam boroumand

connie si jia zhang & simon lien

melissa koronel & raymond tam

matt gallagher

maria orellana & nisha shankar narayan

andrew woodward

sarah iskander & christine kiriacos

Tags: design, university of sydney

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 2:21 pm and is filed under design culture, projects, techniques, theory, we like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.