Facit Technologies can digitally manufacture a home in your driveway
I have admired this system since 2007 and it is now breaking out of its box.
Twenty years ago, I was struggling to sell the idea of modular prefabricated housing in Ontario, Canada. The company I represented built high-quality modular boxes and shipped them as extra-wide loads to sites where expensive cranes lifted them into place. We used to say, “You wouldn’t build your car in your driveway; why would you build your house in a field?” But building your house in a big, expensive factory and shipping it long distances was not without its problems and limitations. I remember one set where the crane had to work fast as it sank into the mud as quickly as it lifted the box. Many of the economies from building in the factory were lost because of the expensive transport and crane rentals. Sales were limited by range and borders.
In 2007, sister Bonnie discovered an exhibition, 1:1 Making the Digital House in London. I marvelled at how “The Digital House is produced using a detailed 3D computer model that contains all of the construction elements, including every wall and screw hole, which are pre-determined before the construction.” I concluded:
“Imagine ordering a custom house and getting a pile of plywood, cutting it up and banging into into boxes, connecting lightweight, manageable pieces without a crane, living in a house where the framing is furniture quality, and you don't even want to cover it with drywall. This is truly the future.”
You literally got the factory in your driveway. You weren’t shipping big boxes of air hundreds of kilometres. It was brilliant.
Bruce Bell founded Facit Homes to take the concept to market. Usually, they would deliver a shipping container with the CNC machine along with a stack of plywood. The plywood was then cut and assembled into boxes or cassettes, which were light enough for two workers to lift into place without a crane. Plywood boxes are strong, so they use a lot less fibre than mass timber, with a nice big void inside that can be filled with cellulose insulation. Hammer all the boxes into place and you have the makings of a house.
I thought it was a dream come true. In 2007, I wrote, “Since the early days of computer-aided design, the holy grail has been to not simply draw the building, but to build it in the computer and then drive the machinery to build it for real.” There has been a lot of progress since then, but I thought this was truly the first 3D-printed house to go straight from digital to real. Over the years, I looked at what Facit was doing, but it was being used for a few high-end single-family houses while the world went gaga over 3D printing by squeezing carbon-intense cement out of nozzles; I wondered why are they missing this high-fibre carbon-storing digital fabrication happening now?
In the ten years since I saw it, Facit’s machinery has become a lot more sophisticated; a printer puts all the instructions and details that you would see in architectural or engineering drawings right on the plywood, so it becomes much harder to screw up.
Bruce Bell tells me in a note: “The print system is really about quality control - us humans seem to generally be inept at reading drawings and setting items out in the correct location - the makes it foolproof - plus give options for more info- the right specific product info at the location where it is to be installed.”
It almost works like a big photocopier for plywood, feeding sheets in one side and precision-cut panels out the other side. All this automation lets it scale, turning out more cassettes in less time.
And scale they have, with Facit Technologies. They are moving beyond serving individual clients and going B2B (Business to Business), offering flying factories that can be assembled quickly and affordably out of three shipping containers.
Facit Technologies' plug-and-play manufacturing technology is compact and portable, capable of producing sophisticated, engineered timber building components on-demand at any site. Each micro-factory can manufacture up to 100 homes per year at a fraction of the capital cost of traditional factory-built homes, allowing it to manage demand fluctuations effectively while reducing CO2 emissions from transportation by 90%.
Why now? I wondered why this took so long for this brilliant idea to get out into the world. I asked Bruce Bell, and he explained:
“In terms of timing - we have been waiting for market conditions to change, which they now have- specifically the rise of cost of labour pushed the tipping point for our manufacturing to be commercially competitive about 18 months ago, the desire to build homes that save energy is really just since the recent hike in bills, and the change in consumer tastes towards a more modern aesthetic at large is also really the last three years.”
Every house might be different, but it’s the system that permits continuous improvement:
“We envision the home as a single, holistic product where every Facit Home incorporates common components tailored to developers' requirements through our powerful digital design tools. This approach lead to a truly sustainable home with each iteration performing better, costing less than the previous one and ensuring quality detailing throughout.”
One of the problems I go on about with mass timber is how much fibre it chews up, suggesting that good old stick framing makes more sense for low-rise buildings. But in many ways, the Facit system makes more sense; plywood is very efficient in its use of wood, and plywood boxes are very strong, making very efficient use of plywood.
Given the ubiquity of the 2x4 and the carpenters who knew how to hammer them together, it is not surprising that it took so long for Facit to gain ground. But the world is changing; trades are in short supply, and quality construction is critical to avoid air leakage and heat loss. Bruce Bell writes:
“Generally the skills shortage we see as not a problem of training but a problem of incentive- there is no shortage of people, just a shortage of people that want to work in construction as it’s antiquated and combative. If we create new types of jobs using technology that feel modern, safe and productive young people (men AND women) will want to be take part (it is a choice).”
I am excited to think that Facit Technologies might be coming to a wider audience soon; I have admired this system since 2007, and its time has come.
More at Facit Technologies
So that's great, a few comments, and I just want to front load this with I'm Autistic and therefore can come off as blunt and with my autism, but I do generally want to discuss these issues, as I think there are several serious lacks in this, and I don't understand your enthusiasm for this, given other things that I've been reading from you, so I would like to understand. I'm a trained engineer and architect, so I have some insight to the field. But I still hope you'll elaborate on the below points. I'm also dyslexic (and english is not my first language), and so I'm using spelling assistance, but if it and I fail at time, and there are grammar and spelling mistakes, I hope you'll not take it as a sign of my intelligence.
First of, this seems to only support detached single family homes, the type we currently have too much of, and the type that drives up car dependency. Which also seems to go against the notion that: " while reducing CO2 emissions from transportation by 90%.". That's great, but not when all the CO2 reduced savings is used by the houses owner's vehicle(s) within the first year, rather than constructing near public transportation or even better within biking distance. (I acknowledge that some suburbs can reach work areas with public transport and bikes, only if you acknowledge that most doesn't, and even those that do, most still drive).
“The print system is really about quality control - us humans seem to generally be inept at reading drawings and setting items out in the correct location - the makes it foolproof - plus give options for more info- the right specific product info at the location where it is to be installed.”
This seems to wanting to get away from other humans having to have knowledge (so monopolizing it) and to stop communicating, the best way to problem solve is removed, along with agency, and life worth. The worker should be the metaphorical cog in the wheel, not an independent person, that you can't threat however you like, and discard as soon as you don't need them. Seems to make the jump very easy to; You basically need no education or self-worth to assemble this house, and when you're done, FåRK off, I paid you (minimum wage).
The job sites I've been on, when the computer (or computer model) made mistake, and oh boy it did, it was the brilliant workers on hand that fixed it, with dialog and hand sketches now concealed by the finishing paint on the drywall. There's such an wealth of knowledge on a construction site, if you have the right forman that allows for it to come out, and have people that are paid and treated well, so they can do this work. That saves the project from all the things that the computer generating architect couldn't foresee; often without being acknowledged. This sounds like trying to shift the money from paying workers fair wages, to enriching company owners and stockholders.
“In terms of timing - we have been waiting for market conditions to change, which they now have- specifically the rise of cost of labour pushed the tipping point for our manufacturing to be commercially competitive about 18 months ago, the desire to build homes that save energy is really just since the recent hike in bills, and the change in consumer tastes towards a more modern aesthetic at large is also really the last three years.”
Two things, first; cost of labour, it seems again that we don't want to pay our fellow human for a days of work. Why is labor expensive? Does it have to do with rising rents? With over production (billionaire's row is basically empty)? With capital concentration (see the point above of concentration knowledge, and relocation of money from workers to shareholders). The housing market crisis is not a crises of building, it's a political crises of not wanting to make it affordable to people. After WWII, it was proven that the US could provide affordable homes to all it's (white) citizens (if you question the white part then read: The Color of the Law, and tell me who that statement is wrong). We don't need new technologies to do this again, but we do need the political willpower to make sure that we set it up for all the people that are struggling. The technological advancements, the 3D plotting/printing houses, seem all to be enriching the all ready well off silicon valley segment and their hang arounds, not actually help the people that need it, for this plywood "printed" house, still needs to live in the political climate, so I would stop looking for the next technological fix (see above on who gets rich off of it) and pursue political change, if the housing situation is to change.
As for the later part of the quote, we have been well able to insulate house efficiently long before 3D printing came along, its a decision. I grew up in a house my parents semi-build in '92, and it I remember stuffing rockwool under all window sills till my little eight year old fingers bleed (it was kinda child labor, I might also have exaggerated the story, but the house was very well insulated).
"One of the problems I go on about with mass timber is how much fibre it chews up, suggesting that good old stick framing makes more sense for low-rise buildings. But in many ways, the Facit system makes more sense; plywood is very efficient in its use of wood, and plywood boxes are very strong, making very efficient use of plywood."
Two things again. First, how durable is a plywood house? Will it last 100 years? Or will it start to delaminate in a matter of 10-20? And if build in this manner, how easy is it to make repairs or repalcements? Will you need to deconstruct large parts of it to change one of these smaller modules if it's failing? Do you need this Plotter-container to come back to make any adjustments? Or to ship spacial plywood boxes, making you depended on the company that built the house?
And second, if you have written about this in a previous post, please just link to it I'm no familiar with all your writing; but why continue to talk about "how much fibre", when plywood or stick, as a structural system can't produce the density we need to build in a sustainable way for the number of people we are? It would be fine if we were a lot less people on the planet, but we're not. And it's not really mass timber or not, again, it's the layout of our inhabitation that I'm focusing on; which neither the ply or the stick will solve. So it's either looking in the wrong direction or putting our heads in the sand when we discuss it.
Unrelated, but in my Autistic view not; it's a little like when we claim Norman Foster's 425 Park Ave. skyscraper to be sustainable (I've even heard it called the most sustainable in the world but can't remember where). There was a building already! No matter what they did (unless it is pull carbon out of the air as a way to produce energy (now there's a plan silicon valley)), it will never be sustainable, you had to remove an entire building to build it; so if your calculations says it was, I think the calculations are set up to prove the wrong thing. Which is similar here, way argue which of two solutions is less bad, instead of looking at solution that will help us solve the enormous problem in front of us?
I have questions about how well this system accommodates repairs, alterations and renovations, but on a lighter level, my primary thought on this is that what it really needs to complete the process is Bruce Sterling’s talking building materials from his book Distraction that tell the assembler where they go:
Oscar peeled a strip of tape from a yellow spool and wrapped the tape around a cinder block. He swept a hand-scanner over the block, activating the tape...
"I'm a cornerstone," the cinder block announced.
"Good for you," Oscar grunted.
"I'm a cornerstone. Carry me five steps to your left." The construction system was smart enough to manage a limited and specific vocabulary. Unfortunately, the system simply didn't hear very well. The tiny microphones embedded in the talking tape were much less effective than the tape's thumbnail-sized speakers. Still, it was hard not to reply to a concrete block when it spoke up with such grace and authority. The concrete blocks all sounded like Franklin Roosevelt.