Tag: arcCA Journal

Richmond Civic Center Revitalization

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“We are living in an age of clear and well diversified objectives, and architecture must meet these objectives. We are now living in a mechanical, rational, abstractly imaginative age and our architecture should bear the imprint of the age.”

Thus proclaimed the 1930 proposal for “A Civic Center for the City of Richmond,” by the Architectural Group for Industry and Commerce (AGIC), a collaboration of planner Carol Aronovici and architects Richard Neutra and R.M. Schindler (left, top). Interrupted by the Great Depression and World War II, the development of the Civic Center did not proceed until 1945, with a new design (left, bottom), by Timothy Pflueger, renowned architect of Oakland’s Paramount Theater (1931) and San Francisco’s Castro Theater (1921), Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Building (1925), and Pacific Stock Exchange (1928). The ensemble of City Hall, Hall of Justice, Auditorium/Art Center, and Public Library was completed in 1951 under the direction of Plueger’s younger brother, Milton (Timothy Pflueger had died in 1946), with landscape architects H. Leland Vaughan and Adele W. Vaughan.

The first phase of a comprehensive revitalization of the Civic Center, under a master plan developed by Perkins + Will, has recently been completed by Nadel Architects with site design by WRT. The City Hall and former Hall of Justice, now known as 440 Civic Center Plaza, achieved LEED™ Gold certification. The Civic Center Fine Arts Collection, implemented under Richmond’s Percent for Art Ordinance, comprises eight specially commissioned, site-specific works by Archie Held, Gordon Heuther, Daniel Galvez, John Wehrle, and Marion Coleman, and fifty-six additional works by Bay Area artists. 

 

. . . and Counting

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California as of 2008

36,756,666 people
13,393,878 housing units
155,959 square miles
www.quickfacts.census.gov

California by 2025

Will gain between 7 and 11 million new residents.
Latinos will be the largest racial group.
The number of seniors will double.
Inland areas will grow faster than coastal areas.
www.ca2025.org

California and Global Warming
Summers will become warmer.
Demand for water will increase.
Changes in precipitation, not temperature, will have the greatest impact.
Alfalfa, cotton, and grapes will be too water-intensive to be profitable.
Rising sea level will invade irrigation fed by groundwater in many places.
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu

A Fine California Futurist

Peter Schwartz (b. 1946) is a futurist, author, and co-founder of Global Business Network, a corporate strategy firm based in San Francisco. His first book, The Art of the Long View (Doubleday 1991), is considered by many to be the seminal publication on
scenario planning.
http://en.wikipedia.org

Future Train

Projected schedule for California High-Speed Rail:
2009 public scoping meetings
2010 route options published procurement process begins
2011 federal deadline for environmental review finalize design build contracts
2012 federal deadline for construction start
2016 testing trains on tracks begins
2017 federal deadline to complete construction
2019 passenger service begins on regional segments
2020 passenger service begins between SF and Anaheim
www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov

California Transportation Policies
1967 California Air Resources Board created
1990 Low-Emission Vehicle program (LEV l) Zero Emission Vehicle mandate (ZEV)
1998 Low-Emission Vehicle program (LEV ll)
Transitional Low-Emission Vehicle program (TLEV)
Ultra Low-Emission Vehicle program (ULEV)
Super Low-Emission Vehicle program (SULEV)
Partial Zero-Emission Vehicle program (PZEV)
Advanced Technology Partial Zero-Emission Vehicles (AT-PZEV)
2002 Clean Cars Law
2006 California Global Solutions Warming Act
2009 Low-Carbon Fuel Standard
www.next10.org

Change Observer
“It turns out that it takes 30 years for a new idea to seep into the culture. Technology does not drive
change. It is our collective response to the options and opportunities presented by technology that drives change.” —Paul Saffo, futurist
www.saffo.com

Booking the Future

A few books with visions for California’s future:

Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990)
Mark Baldassare, California in the New Millennium: The Changing Social and Political Landscape (UC Press, 2000)
James Flanigan, Smile, Southern California, You’re the Center of the Universe: The Economy and People of a Global Region (Stanford, 2009)
http://library.cca.edu

Futuristas

“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people. Those who let it happen. Those who make it happen. And those who wonder what happened.”
—John M. Richardson, Jr.

www.american.edu

 

Quiet Contrasts for the Landmark Oakland Museum

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Photo by Tim Griffith


From the aspirations of California’s first settlers to the rise of its iconic industries—motion pictures, aerospace, and information technology — California’s history is steeped in the promise of the future. The Oakland Museum of California, as an institution and a work of architecture, captures a particular moment in this history. The landmark complex, designed by Kevin Roche of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates and completed in 1969, embodied the public consciousness of the time. In imagining an institution that would unite the city’s independent collections of art, history, and natural sciences, the museum’s original champions also saw a place that could bring Oakland together.

Unprecedented in its merging of architecture and landscape and its interconnected assembly of indoor and outdoor spaces, the cast concrete museum signaled a civic and social purpose beyond unifying the museum’s collections. Roche, working with landscape architects Dan Kiley and Geraldine Knight-Scott, layered the three galleries with intimate landscapes and devoted nearly half of the museum’s four-block site to a secluded yet public courtyard. Although the museum took a firm stance toward the city, multiple entries and a series of open-air stairways, walkways, and terraces scaled the building’s topography and invited the community to explore its gardens and galleries.

Over time, ad hoc responses to security concerns, weather, and expanding programs encroached on Roche’s vision, and in 1999, the museum began planning for a renovation and expansion—just completed by Mark Cavagnero Associates—that would restore the building’s original clarity and strengthen its presence.

Two courtyards at the top level, unused for decades, have been enclosed to create new galleries capable of housing larger artworks. A series of new canopies frames the museum’s main entrance and unifies the stairs and walkways into a central lobby—still open-air and daylit, yet protected. The lightweight, glass and stainless steel enclosures contrast with the mass of the concrete structure, while their pure forms complement the original building’s simplicity. The steel’s soft luminosity merges with and counters the concrete’s changing presence in the shifting daylight. Bold environmental graphics, designed by SOM’s graphic design studio, mark the renewed museum’s place within the city and the 21st Century.

Each gesture is small relative to the building’s monumental scale, yet through their precision and consistency in form and materiality, their cumulative presence enlivens the powerful structure.

 

Parametric Design: a Brief History

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Frederick Kiesler with model for “Endless House,” c. 1960, photograph by Irving Penn, © 2010 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna

The form of the house is not amorphous, not a free for all form. On the contrary, its construction has strict boundaries according to the scale of your living. Its shape and form are determined by inherent life processes. —Frederick Kiesler.

Parametric design is not unfamiliar territory for architects. From ancient pyramids to contemporary institutions, buildings have been designed and constructed in relationship to a variety of changing forces, including climate, technology, use, character, setting, culture, and mood. The computer did not invent parametric design, nor did it redefine architecture or the profession; it did provide a valuable tool that has since enabled architects to design and construct innovative buildings with more exacting qualitative and quantitative conditions.

By the time of a conference held by the Boston Architectural Center in 1964, it had become clear that the electronic era would have a dramatic effect on building design. The aerospace industries were using computers to calculate complex warped surfaces and animated flight path simulations, which fascinated architects. [opposite page] As UCLA student Raphael Roig predicted in his unpublished master’s thesis, The Continuous World of Frederick J. Kiesler, “It would only be a matter of time before computer technology would be able to reduce to constructible terms the inherent intricacies of forms similar to Kiesler’s multiple-warped surfaces.” [opposite page] Kiesler and other artists and architects—including Antonio Gaudi, Erich Mendelsohn, Frei Otto, Kiesler, and Kiyonori Kikutake—had conceived and modeled complex structures and forms with varying degrees of technical proficiency, and Roig in the 1960s recognized that new computer technologies could assist their design and construction.

It was not, however, until the 1980s that breakthroughs in parametric design became useful to architects. Advances in the quasi-scientific field of plant and animal morphology supported innovation that could be applied with ingenuity to tectonic practices.

arcCA 10.1 parametric design

Boeing Company, Computer Drawings, c. 1965

Nature had long since developed structural systems of nuanced complexity that architects and designers had applied to structure building shapes and urban organizational patterns. Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Sir Patrick Geddes, and others, were influenced by the morphological writings of Goethe (Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790), E.S. Russell (Form and Function, 1916), and R.H. Francé (Plants as Inventors, 1920). Yet, despite important analytical advances made in D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form of 1917 (revised 1942), alongside subsequent mathematical models for shaping biological patterns developed by Alan Turing in 1952 and Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968, morphology had become a sleepy science throughout the mid-twentieth-century. As with Kiesler’s flowing forms, it had proven too difficult to measure and draw with detailed accuracy the evolving structures and intricate patterns of organic life. But between Benoit Mandelbrot’s 1982 study in The Fractal Geometry of Nature and K. J. Falconer’s 1990 developments in fractal theory, the computer emerged as a tool for simulating the generation of biological forms (morphogenesis). Coral, sponges, and other simple marine and plant life developing and performing in response to a limited set of measurable criteria—light, ocean current, nutrition, etc.—could be analyzed and reconstructed using parametric design models in the computer. Applying similar morphological simulations in architecture, designers in the late 1980s to mid-1990s began to use the computer alongside software developed for aerospace and the moving picture industry to “animate form.”

Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn became the foremost theorist and designer to use the computer to generate what became his notorious “Blob” and “Fold” architecture. His book Animate Form (1999) studied the history and set the guidelines for architecture that could be calculably grown using genetic systems and codes—if only virtually in the computer. The “spline” proved most relevant for its simple and concise parametric capacity. It could be pushed, pulled, stretched, and manipulated in coordination with a set of data to produce a continuous curve that surmised an average of multiple vector information. [Images 1, “spline geometry,” from Animate Form, 1998; and 2, installation, 3D animation diagram, in Folds, Bodies, and Blobs, 1998]

Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos Studio published the 1995 “Rubber-Mat Project for Rotterdam, 2045,” which outlined how to use computational tools to conceive large urban infrastructures by inputting a range of parametric criteria—set to time and motion with animation software. [3, (c) UNStudio]

Peter Eisenman’s Musée Du Quai Branly project of 1999 provided the image of what might be possible using these design techniques, and UN Studio’s 1998 trilogy Move showcased an evolution of complex forms from design to construction, now possible using advanced CAD/CAM-CNC milling machinery alongside new rapid prototyping technology.

The limit to these parametric studies being pursued primarily by students and faculty at Columbia University, the Architectural Association, and other graduate schools—were the forms themselves, which appeared grossly inarticulate, undefined, and too difficult to construct. Besides Lynn and UN Studio, several architects began to deepen their research to engage a more detailed building scale: William Massie, Mark Burry, Mark Goulthorpe, Office dA, SHoP, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Asymptote, Jesse Reiser, Zaha Hadid, and Ocean North are only a few of the most original architects to pursue design and fabrication techniques that investigated ideas relevant to parametric systems.

The Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory (AADRL) and Emergent Technologies in Design (EmTech) programs were perhaps the center of international research and development on the subject. Yusuke Obushi, now at the AADRL, presented a remarkable thesis, “Wave Garden,” at Princeton University in 2002, embodying the principles of parametric design by creating an occupiable, energy-generating surface correlated to the movement of an ocean current. [4]

Jason Payne and Heather Roberge of Gnuform invented a similar if more “hairy” installation in 2003 at Ohio State University, called Man-o-War. [5]

Michael Hensel of EmTech and Ocean North produced some of the most comprehensive texts on parametric systems and morphogenetic design practices in Architectural Design (AD)—a magazine that provided a rich forum for the most innovative developments of the past fifteen years. “Architecture and Animation,” “Versioning,” and “Morphogenetic Design” were among the more important editions of AD.

UN Studio’s UN Fold showed how parametric design could be advanced on an urban infrastructural scale. [top left four images] (Neil Leach, who contributed to UN Studio’s publication, would eventually develop similar urban growth strategies as a faculty member at USC.)

Perhaps most important, Foreign Office Architects (FOA) completed the Yokohama International Port Terminal in 2002, proving that complex building forms correlated to a series of imagined or perceived parameters could be organized and constructed on a grand scale with dynamic, real-world results. [6, photo by Satoru Mishima]

California architects and educators consistently contributed strong, innovative leadership within this developing field. SCI-Arc and UCLA provided a rich environment to advance new computer and fabrication technology. Highlights of the work of their faculty include David Erdman and Marcelyn Gow of Servo’s “Lattice Archipelogics” lighting installation (2002) [7]; Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich of Patterns’s “Element” vacuformed installation (2005) [8] and “Rooted Flow” large scale urban proposal (2005) [9]; Hernan Diaz Alonso’s evocative botanical images and structures [10]; and Gnuform’s sensual NGTV floral bar (2005) [11]. With these design inventions emerged ample debate surrounding concepts of “beauty” versus the “grotesque,” as architects clamored to adjust their aesthetic sensibilities to the qualities and sensations inherent to these newly emerging, computer-designed images and forms.

In the Bay Area, architects Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott developed the Jelly Fish House (2005), which aligned plant and animal morphology with detailed structural study of tessellated building systems and patterns, correlated parametrically to changes in building stress and strain. [12]

Hoping to make his designs similarly more constructible, Tom Wiscombe of Emergent Architecture in Los Angeles began to exploit D’Arcy Thompson’s studies of dragonfly wings to produce patterned, cantilevering spatial structures for his Paris Courthouse design (2006) and SCI-Arc gallery installation (2007). [13] Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues’s of Ball Nogues Studio, in addition, produced the phenomenal “Maximilian’s Schell” (2005) out of a vortex of 504 parametrically fabricated, laminated mylar, petal-cut sheets.

Tessellated patterning systems soon became fundamental to structuring complex organic forms, and complementary aesthetic theories on ornament, decoration, and elegance began to dominate architectural discourses. Works and texts by Ali Rahim at PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania and Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Farshid Moussavi of FOA, now respectively at Princeton University School of Architecture and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, fueled these discussions—alongside developments in computer programming and scripting to facilitate a wide range of detailed structural tiling and patterning sequences. Designers inspired by Stephen Wolfram’s formative programming research in A New Kind of Science and Mathematica developed a wide variety of “Voronoi-esque” tiling scripts to create varied ornamental structures and/or purely decorative, “skin deep” motifs. Thom Faulders of Faulders Studio and CCA captured this moment in history most succinctly in his screen façade for Studio M’s Airspace Tokyo of 2007, shown here. Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch described, developed, and published these scripting procedures in their Tooling (Pamphlet Architecture #27, 2006). [14]

Ultimately, on the scale of constructability, Gehry Partners and Morphosis have proven to be the driving forces behind building innovation on the West Coast in the last twenty years. Investing in CAD/CAM technologies since 1989, Gehry proved that architects could take the lead not only in design, but also in managing the techniques of advanced building systems and their detailed construction. By 2002, Gehry and Partners created Gehry Technologies, a research and technology team committed to supporting advances in the field. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997) and the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2000) demonstrated how well these techniques could be implemented. Delivering the new Caltrans District 7 Headquarters (2004) to downtown LA in record speed, Thom Mayne and his team at Morphosis also proved it was possible for architects to design innovative, environmentally conditioned buildings that could be constructed more cost-effectively by working directly with manufactures and fabricators. The computer proved useful not only for design, modeling, and fabrication, but for construction administration, as well. Morphosis’s Phare Tower may very likely prove to be the most advanced building to date to use parametric design technology and fabrication processes to achieve built form. [15, photo of physical model by Michael Powers]

Offshoots of these larger firms have made notable contributions to parametric design on a much smaller scale. Margaret Griffin and John Enright (formally of Morphosis) working with Dr. Anders Carlson—a structural engineer educated at Caltech—exploited CNC milling processes to invent and construct curvilinear plywood “I” joists to produce complex building structures. SPARCHS, working with Rogan Ferguson (formerly of Gehry and Partners), also alongside Carlson, investigated similar plywood CNC milled structures in addition to continuous tension shell technologies to build a series of roof planes correlated parametrically to shifting environmental conditions using Computer Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA) software for their Seadrift House (2004) [16, 17].

The speed at which the architecture profession has been developing within the field of parametric design has been phenomenal. Much of this success can be attributed to the synergy occurring over the past fifteen years between the schools—UCLA, SCI-Arc, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly, USC, and CCA, among others—educating students with the skills needed for experimental practice, and the vanguard firms.

Not everyone, however, is enamored by computer design or the promises of parametric systems. At the same conference at the BAC in 1965, Christopher Alexander, then an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, warned that architects might “fatally distort the nature of design by restating design problems solely for the purpose of using the computer.” He did not believe that there were design problems—environmental or architectural—so complex that they required a computer to solve, and he was not convinced that architects would not oversimplify design complexity to meet the limited input and operational capacities of their computers. The computer could not keep pace with the facility of human intuition for inventing architectural forms and deriving design solutions for complex problems.

Mathematical parametric and algorithmic procedures most often have proven far too rigid to productively engage the complex cultural, societal, economic, and political projects facing architects today. Designing buildings and cities using parametric and scripting design tools may often appear visually stunning, but for the most part these designs tend to incorporate far too many blind assumptions to be able to respond with nuance to real world situations.

Today, many leading designers who engaged in parametric design over the past ten to fifteen years would to some extent agree. Moving away from the delimiting input techniques used to derive building forms and urban topologies, the design vanguard has begun focusing more on the performative and affective qualities of architecture design and its practice.

 

Learning by Doing

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Douglas Tom, architecture, San Francisco, Salinas, Envisions

Photo by Ragina Johnson

When I was growing up in Salinas, California, a family friend—a local architect—said that architects know a little bit about a lot of things, without being masters of any one thing. I still think that there’s a lot of truth to that. Since becoming an architect myself, I’ve come to see how that aspect can make architecture a valuable tool in general education. It’s a perfect fit for project-based learning—an instructional approach that teaches students to learn by doing.

In traditional learning, instructors start by teaching students skills, concepts, and information. Only later do students apply what they learned. In project-based learning, the reverse is true: students are asked to solve an open-ended question or challenge that has real-world relevance. They learn what they need to achieve their goal. Although the projects are carefully structured, students collaborate in small teams, defining the tasks, discussing and reflecting on their values, critiquing each others’ work, and coming together to create a finished product or presentation.

Architectural projects lend themselves well to project-based learning. They involve not only designing, but also engineering, financing, managing client relationships, and integrating environmental sustainability. In addition, architecture is collaborative by nature. And while students learn about design, engineering, and construction, they’re also building math, science, and communication skills and gaining insight into broader issues of political science and public policy. Architecture and project-based learning share a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to problem solving well suited to the pedagogical shift underway in higher education today (particularly in the sciences) toward interdisciplinary teaching/learning and research.

My first real sense of what project-based learning can do came out of the development of the Build San Francisco Institute in the 1990s. Around this same time, my wife and I were trying to decide whether to send our kids to public or private school, so I was immersed in the topic of quality education. I was a member of the board of the Architectural Foundation of San Francisco, and I found that my fellow board members shared my interest in helping the profession support e credit for these afternoon sessions through the school district.

The program exposes students to real-world projects led by mentors and full-time teachers. Students collaborate in small teams and produce videos, models, drawings, and other tangible things that reflect what they’ve learned. They often present these in public forums. One year, students from six San Francisco high schools worked together to design and create sixteen ceramic tiles for San Francisco’s Pier 14, which the city was restoring for public use. Students had ten weeks to come up with a theme, make a proposal to the Port of San Francisco Commission for approval, create the designs, glaze and enhance public education. Together, we launched the Build San Francisco Institute. Initially an after-school program, it has evolved into a full partnership with the San Francisco Unified School District, various public agencies, and more than fifty professional design and construction firms acting as mentors.

On average, twenty-five San Francisco high school students pair up with mentors, who work with them two afternoons each week throughout a semester, exposing them to the workings of their practice. The other three afternoons, the students are in a classroom downtown hearing visiting architects and other professionals speak, doing classroom assignments, and learning the latest software, like AutoCAD and even Revit. They earn college-accepted coursed fire the tiles, and deliver them for installation. The commission sent the students back to the drawing board after their first presentation to refine and focus their initial concept, replicating the back- and-forth dialogue that is an integral part of real world projects. When the revised design was approved, they felt a greater sense of pride and accomplishment, and they had an authentic sense of the realities of professional life. Other projects that Build San Francisco students have been involved with include the San Francisco Ferry Building renovation, Pac Bell Park, and the renovation of Piers 1-1/2, 3 and 5.

One student I mentored through Build San Francisco a few years ago was a former
gang member. He has told me that his intern- ship with our firm turned his life around—he went on to graduate from high school and was accepted at San Francisco State University. Last I heard, he wanted to transfer to the architecture program at UC Berkeley.

My positive experiences with the Build San Francisco Institute led to my becoming involved with another educational endeavor that incorporates project-based learning. In 2002, I was introduced to the founders of Envision Schools, a charter school organization in the Bay Area whose mission is to bring high-quality college preparatory education to underserved urban youth, particularly those who will be the first in their families to attend college. At the time, Envision was just getting off the ground and didn’t yet have any sites for the five schools it was planning to launch. I was intrigued by Envision’s focus on combining academic and project-based learn- ing, using the arts and technology to enhance student learning. I helped put the school in touch with contacts in the finance, construction, and development worlds and scouted potential school sites. In the end, the schools were provided buildings from each local chartering school district, as mandated under California law, but by that time I was hooked by its vision and had become a board member.

Currently there are four Envision Schools in the Bay Area two in San Francisco, one in Oakland, and one in Hayward—serving approximately 1,200 students. Envision’s curriculum involves the same elements as Build San Francisco: research, analysis, discussion, and portfolio presentation. It has received national recognition as a model for public high school education. More than 93% of Envision graduates are attending either a two- or four-year college, compared with 40% of all California high school graduates. Envision Schools is one of a small handful of charter school man- agement organizations in the country to be funded directly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, receiving several million dollars to help create high- quality options for high school education in California. In 2005, the United States Department of Education named Envisions’ City Arts and Technology High School as one of twelve exemplary schools in the country.

I’ve seen the difference Envision Schools makes in the lives of its students. At the end of their senior year, students must develop a final defense of their work, a public presentation that is attended by their fellow students and parents. A successful presentation is a requirement of graduation. They spend a month and a half working intensively with their teachers to prepare these portfolios, which tend to be highly creative and address substantive issues. Recent examples include a presentation on land use in San Francisco; a study of banned books in the United States; and a multimedia “museum” about the Holocaust, blending digital design, theatrical performance, sculpture, graphic art, and radio broadcasts.

Seeing the Envision students present their portfolios, much as architecture students present their design work in school, has left a profound impression on me. Not only has it convinced me that project-based learning enables a student to learn a subject from many points of view, but it also has given me great hope for the prospect of transforming public education.

Build San Francisco and Envision Schools show that engaging students in real-world projects is a great motivator—it builds enthusiasm and provides a reason to learn. With a concrete problem to solve, students have to bring together information and approaches from multiple disciplines, dig deeper into what they’ve been taught, and acquire new skills. They retain knowledge longer than with traditional education, they gain confidence in making presentations to adults, and they learn to work together more effectively. Architecture is not just a profession for creating buildings; it can also shape an educational process that motivates young students to excel, become educated citizens and consumers of architecture and perhaps even professionals themselves.

 

Wind Power, Distributed

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Photographs courtesy of Tim Culvahouse, FAIA


I am fond of the corps de ballet of the Altamont Pass wind farm, one of three such grand arrays in the state—the other two are Tehachapi and San Gorgonio—row upon row of giant pinwheels, tracing the ridgelines and spinning in rhythmic counterpoint. Altamont was the first of the three and a pioneering endeavor in renewable energy production. It has its problems—of the three, it has proven the least kind to raptors, whose optical systems (I’m told) don’t process the rotation of the blades, seeing them instead as fixed disks, apparently ideal perches for surveying the landscape for prey. Slower turning turbines or turbines in other configurations will address that problem, as funds are available for replacement.

The big problem, though, is that Altamont is there, and I am here. Like the electricity generated at fossil fuel plants or nuclear plants or hydroelectric dams, the electricity from Altamont must be transmitted long distances to those of us who use it. And transmission involves loss. Transmission and centralized production are also big business, which tends to work against more local solutions.

Which is why I’m encouraged to see wind turbines cropping up singly and in pairs or threes in the Central Valley (those shown here are at a Safeway Distribution Center and Teichert Aggregates near Tracy). Less transmission loss + less dependence on large-scale (i.e., government subsidized) infrastructure should = something folks all along the political spectrum can get behind.

 

Can CAD Be Saved? Preserving Digital Designs

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ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, 1946 - Photography courtesy of the US Army. U.S.

is Harder Than You Think

In 1963, the very first interactive CAD software—SKETCHPAD—emerged from MIT and enthralled designers across a wide range of industries, quickly reaching architecture and now established as the default tool for modern building design. AutoCAD, Revit, Digital Project, Microstation, Rhino, Maya: the list of software products that architects depend on is long and growing. In particular, 3D CAD parametric modeling was the enabling technology behind a wave of creativity. From Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum to Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower, any complex shape imaginable could be attempted with the help of software that encodes the laws of physics. But while using 3D CAD may have sparked a revolution in building design and a new era of creativity, it has a down side. Writing CAD software is not something an architect learns to do in school; it requires incredibly sophisticated programming. In fact, there are only a handful of geometric modeling kernels underlying all the hundreds of available 3-D CAD software systems. So CAD is an incredibly powerful tool for architects but creates a new dependency on the companies that create and sell that software. CAD is a highly competitive industry, and therefore highly secretive and proprietary. Having a better, faster technique for translating shapes on a screen into geometric formulas is what sells one software product over another.

An even more insidious side effect of CAD use in architecture is found in the world of architecture libraries and archives. Architectural practice aspires to constant innovation, but begins by understanding the past. Libraries and archives have always stood guard over the collective history of architecture and design, stewarding millions of drawings, plans, elevations, blueprints, images, correspondence, project records, and so on. These archives are used to train each new generation of architects and document the history of the profession. Architectural historians and researchers from a wide range of disciplines depend on these archives. While the need for these libraries and archives is unchanged, their ability to steward the records of the digital era is under enormous pressure.

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top, U.S. Institute of Peace, Safdie Architects, photo by Timothy Hursley / bottom, Ray and Maria Stata Center, MIT, Ghery Partners, photo in the public domain

When records are digital, preserving them involves saving bits rather than atoms. But successfully saving bits isn’t enough, because every digital document depends on software to make use of it. Looking at a twenty-year-old digital article or image is often frustrating, since the software needed to open it is long gone—remember WordStar or VisiCalc? How would you study a SKETCHPAD design if you happened to find one? The challenges of preserving digital documents are as complex as those of creating the software in the first place, especially complex software like CAD.

For many firms, a typical building project archive now consists of a hard drive containing tens of thousands of digital files: 3D models, 2D drawing sets, emails, spreadsheets, images, videos, RFIs, ASIs, and more, all in their original formats and lacking any tags or metadata to help identify the files or relate them to each other. One 3D CAD model might consist of a dozen interrelated files, named by whatever convention the 3D software product happened to use. Figuring out which files belong together and how to open them takes insider knowledge that usually stops with the project architect.

And since the software products are usually upgraded every few years, a CAD model created just a few years ago may not open with the current version of the same software. Even software that provides tools to migrate a model from an older to a newer version may unintentionally introduce changes to the design object. To illustrate what can go wrong with CAD software versions, in 2006 the Airbus A380 airplane was delayed by a year at a cost of $2.5 billion due to use of different versions of CATIA in the design process by different divisions of the company. The versions were incompatible, so that designs for the wiring system done by one group couldn’t be integrated into the 3-D model produced by the other group.

As architecture libraries and archives have begun to get digital records for building projects, they are starting to work on strategies to cope with some of these challenges. At MIT, we conducted a two-year project called FACADE (Future-proofing Architectural Computer-Aided Design) to study the problem of what to keep from the project hard drives, how to tag them for future discoverability, and how to preserve the 2D drawings and 3D models for posterity. With the help and inspiration of the late Bill Mitchell at the School of Architecture and Planning, we collected records for three notable buildings that had made heavy use of CAD as our research collection. The oldest was Morphosis’s Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in LA (Bentley), followed by Frank Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT (CATIA), and finally Moshe Safdie’s U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington D.C. (Revit). These project records collectively provided excellent examples of the digital preservation problems, and with them we were able to work through a number of possible approaches to saving digital archives for posterity.

While the strategies we developed weren’t simple, we found that there are things that can be done to improve the chances of survival of these records, and that they’re worth saving.

First, keep everything in its original format, and the software used to create it. While it’s likely possible to find a copy of Microsoft Word 2007 in 2017, copies of specialized 3-D modeling software will be harder to come by. Keep in mind, though, that a lot of CAD software runs on desktop computers and requires a license key to open. Those keys normally expire when you stop renewing your license or when the company publishes a new version and deprecates the old one. So keeping the software is a good idea, but you may have difficultly using that software when you need to open the file.

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Screenshots from the FACADE Project

Next, for really important documents from the project, like the key design files, save copies of them in a standard format. For CAD, the best options are IFC or STEP, depending on which CAD program was used and what export formats it supports. Making these standard-format copies is a manual process, requiring knowledge of both the CAD software and the particular model being exported. The FACADE project employed graduate students from the School of Architecture and Planning for this work, but many firms have CAD experts who could do this. And while the CAD files are probably the most at-risk and problematic type of files you’ll want to archive, don’t overlook key files in other proprietary formats. For example, key documents created in Microsoft Office tools like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can be saved in the Adobe PDF/A (an archival version of PDF) or as plain text files, which are much more likely to last than the undocumented formats that Microsoft uses internal to their products.

Third, put pressure on software vendors to do a better job of supporting long-term archives. CAD companies should help create good standards for archiving CAD models and support those standards in their products, especially companies that specialize in tools for the AEC industry. They should be open to escrowing copies of their software with trusted organizations (e.g. the Library of Congress, National Archives, or AIA). And they should also do a better job of documenting their internal data formats so that new software could be written in the future to read those files.

An interesting twist to this story is BIM. The vision for BIM is that it’s a living document, never “finished” and evolving over time alongside the physical building. That’s a great vision for the IPD and ongoing maintenance process, but poses the question of what the “design of record” should be for the future architecture student or historian. BIM is, in a way, a database that changes all the time, and in the field of digital preservation dynamic data of that sort is a big problem: what should be kept for the historical record, and how to do that. Should we make snapshots of the model at key points? Will there be standard file formats for those snapshots as reliable as those we’ve developed for other formats over the years? What if the library or archive doesn’t even get the BIM until twenty years after construction? BIM professionals are aware of these questions, but what we have here is a collision of interests: the best technology to preserve the actual building competes with the best technology to preserve the building’s history.

A last consideration is the growing use of project information management systems like Newforma. These products conveniently collect together all those project documents we now get on the hard drives, including the models and drawings, but they aren’t designed as long-term archives, nor do they typically provide support for exporting project records to digital archives. What was formerly a tedious manual process of combing through files on a disk is now a much harder process of extracting information from a proprietary tool that itself changes every couple of years. So, again, the potential for improved efficiency in building projects may lead to decreased efficiency (or complete inability) in saving the records of those projects for future use.

Why is digital preservation relevant for practicing architects and their firms? Mainly enlightened self-interest. If there’s ever a need to refer to an old design, consult a change order or ASI from a completed project, or consider an addition to an old building, you need usable digital archives. The best time to prepare digital records for archiving is while they’re young and healthy, not decades later when the firm is closing down. And while libraries and archives will do what they can to save the records they get, developing better tools and processes for the designers themselves to do this may mean the difference between having a historical record of architecture or not.

 

Architecture and Enterprise: Potential and Pitfalls

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Crissy Field Center, San Francisco - Photograph courtesy of Project FROG

Lessons and Opportunities from the Experience of Project Frog

The Entrepreneurial Accident
Our great architect-as-entrepreneur experiment started out by accident. The genesis of Project FROG, arguably the nation’s leading clean modular building technology company, arose from a desire for a bit of PR.

In 2005, we met with the publishers at Metropolis magazine regarding the suitability of our firm’s work for a high profile issue on education. The increasingly glazed look of the editor indicated that my pitch (for a story about what I thought were the most exciting architectural projects the world needed to know about) was not working. With the tone of her “Got anything else?” I knew I was running low on options. I ventured, “There is a more confidential assignment that we are working on…but it has never been shared.” The editor looked up and leaned forward. “We have been working on the problem of 300,000 classrooms in the US, and we have a prototype that looks like this (sketched furiously on a hotel stationery pad).” She was in, granting us good coverage if we published with them first. The only problem: we had no images, only basic research, and a bit of brainstorming by the office over beers on a Friday. We had thirty days before the reporter with a deadline was to visit our office.

The resulting article brought attention and inquiry from around the world. We were excited. We dodged, bought time, researched, and sketched more. The New York 2012 Olympic Committee called, we sketched a bit more. Then came the tsunami in Indonesia followed a few months later by Katrina, and we realized that we were in the center of a global problem with no viable solution.

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Ilima Elementary School, Oahu - Photograph courtesy of Project Frog



Transforming Concept into Company
In 2006, we realized that we were well out of our safe range. Fortunately, we reached out for technological and business advice. On the technology front, our saving grace was the connection with two brilliant Silicon Valley talents: Manley Tantuico, an industrial designer, and Bekir Begovic, a metal fabricator. After they recovered from their amusement at our overly complex architectural approach, they patiently explained the obvious benefits of an industrial design approach: strive for a clean, simple, and repeatable solution made of as few distinct parts as possible, then organize the product into pieces, parts, components, and assemblies. Though obvious to an industrial designer, this was revolutionary to us. Soon to follow was the introduction to relevant software tools that support this methodology.

Financially, we were in even more foreign territory. The “problem” (i.e. the Market) we were addressing was large. We had a mission supported by the passion of some very talented creative minds. But we had the financial capabilities of a modest-sized, first generation architecture firm. So we did what came naturally to us: we sold units. Within a few weeks, we had two big contracts to build two campuses using our system. The problem was that we had quite a few product elements to finish, very tight project schedules, and understanding yet demanding clients.

We were able to capitalize a new company through a seed funding round of investment capital from a close network of friends, family, and associates. We recruited a very small business team and survived the completion of the first round of contracts. We hung on and were able to raise a large round of funding from Rockport Capital Partners, a Boston and Sand Hill venture capital firm, just as the fall of Lehman Bros marked the country’s decent into recession. I awoke to find myself the CEO of a venture-capital-backed company. The real estate market was collapsing, and we needed to get down to the business of creating project confidence and acting like a proper, growth-oriented, commercial enterprise. My vocabulary had to expand quickly beyond the realm of building to include “liquidation preferences,” “option pools,” “exit strategies,” “pipeline,” “venture debt,” and “optics.” I had to take a Myers-Briggs test, have “key-man” insurance, and see legal fees approach 10% of our annual spending.

We were in a brave new world, but the achievements were compelling, and the enthusiasm of the staff was motivating. Our belief was that we could change the way buildings were built. Energy consumption would drop 40%. Projects could be completed in weeks and months, not years. Schools would be healthier, providing environments that would support and stimulate the brain’s ability to retain and process knowledge. Crissy Field Center (San Francisco), the Watkinson School (Hartford, Conn), and Jacoby Creek (Arcadia, CA) exemplified this vision though the first generation of post VC funding solutions.

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Photo left: Crissy Field Center, San Francisco, CA / Photo right: Center Watkinson School, Hartford, Conn Photograph courtesy of Project Frog

The company was growing, as were the issues. The investors determined that a professionally trained business team could best manage growth and expand funding, so a new CEO was brought in. I began a transition out of operating Project FROG and returned to the leadership team at MKThink.

Strengths of Architects for Innovation
That I am contributing this article, having come full circle from being a consulting architect and dabbling inventor as CEO of MKThink, to serving at the helm of Project FROG, and back again, reflects both the architect’s limitations and potential for driving the entrepreneurial experience. First, the potential: consider this outline of key factors of successful innovation, which are shared with architectural training and practice:

  • Industry ripe for innovation: It starts with our industry, which remains unnecessarily rooted in traditional methodologies. Also, the issues of our era—global connectivity, sustainably economic practices and environmental management— are non-traditional problems that benefit from prescient application of technology combined with social commitment. Other industries have made these connections for huge societal advancement. Broad and deep opportunities exist for industry advancement by applying these lessons to our methods: problem-definition, design process, systems integration, and ultimately architectural product development.
  • The ability to innovate: Solving problems thoughtfully, effectively, and efficiently through creative means is the basis for architecture and also the basis for innovation. Architects commonly focus these skills on a one-off solution that addresses an individual project and then start again for the next assignment. This same sense of investigation, systematically applied to repeating problems, could transform the building industry.
  • Integration of knowledge: Successful architectural practice requires skills in integration of broad fields of knowledge into a coherent and useful result. Applying these skills and knowledge creatively for each commission requires innovation on a daily basis. Taking the step to apply these traits to solve problems that are repetitive, rather than individual, is the main shift that distinguishes a good inventor from a good architect.
  • Problem-solving-through-collaboration skills: Successful contemporary businesses thrive on the collaboration of individuals with solid team-building skills. Leading business schools establish very expensive curricula, and recruiters treasure-hunt for talent with these attributes. Innovation requires a team of dedicated, forward thinking, creative people to work together to achieve a superior outcome.
    This is how architects already practice. The successful integration of designers, engineers, and policymakers into a financially responsible result is at the heart of what we do.
  • Small business skills: Successful innovation is an essential primary ingredient for small business enterprise. Tight budgets, managing vision and risk, an ability to be creative and effective on financial fumes, and motivating teammates with non- financial incentives typify successful innovative ventures. Successfully managing a similar recipe also defines the majority of architectural practices.

Limitations of Architects for Innovation
On the other hand, rather than an automatic gateway to new ventures, our training and wiring as architects give us tendencies—and deficiencies—that must be managed to ensure innovative and entrepreneurial success. Many of the major impediments derive from the business facets of such ventures:

  • Limited experience with investment business practices: Taking the ideas of others and transforming them into commercial success is a profession unto itself. Seldom can innovators, especially new innovators, manage the development of technologies into viable new businesses. There are requirements for capital, intellectual property issues, and legal and corporate procedures different from a service enterprise. The venture capital industry offers high profile and potentially appropriate means to propel innovation to commercial success. Yet, experience and caution are critical, as this road has a unique set of procedures, tendencies, and patterns, refined to serve the investment partners first and foremost. The VC portfolio approach will sacrifice an individual company for the hard realities of the portfolio as a whole.
  • Credibility and partnership with financial backers: Our professional world is not one that has established supporters in the financial communities. The recent history of innovation and entrepreneurial success has been in technology fields, particularly those that are low on capital intensity and high on consumer appeal. The long cycles of building and the lack of consistent investment precedent lack the appeal of software technology or social networks. Also, the independent lateral thinking and confident nature that comes from the experience of an architect (which suit creativity and innovation so well) may be at odds with the control and consistency favored by the equally strong willed investment community. They are fond of claiming that for each successful business venture there are a hundred great ideas, and that the difference between a hit and a failure is in business proficiency. These conflicts commonly characterize involvement with the venture capital process, and may be why so few company founders remain through the growth stages of the companies they found.
  • Financial success becomes the metric for professional success: There is some validity to the contradictions noted in the last point. Architects tend towards broad definitions of success. Investors have one metric of success: financial return. Having worked with investors who present themselves as socially minded, environmentally minded, or otherwise motivated by ideals, I have found that professional investors do not confuse investment with philanthropy. The presentation of “socially-inspired” investors in practice is more a means to organize investments and knowledge around industries of interest. Perhaps some socially minded investors will accept some degree of the “social return” measured in a few percentage point of flexibility, but the similarities to traditional methods are closer than the differences. Architects do not often calculate this way. If we did, we would be in another field entirely. Thus, success in this area requires an artful balance of your priorities with an open-eyed recognition of your investor’s goals.
  • Entrepreneurship takes focus and commitment: The investment community is correct to value not just the innovation, but also the roles that bring those ideas to market. Thus, innovative pursuits by an architect would be difficult if positioned as either the diversification of an architectural practice or a sideline activity. Success through the various obstacles requires total commitment to the end goal while maintaining a willingness to cooperate with very different types of professionals who expect that commitment.

Conclusion
It makes tremendous sense for practicing and trained architects to consider innovation as a structured professional pursuit. There is a need, there is a market, and there is precedent for success. Architects have valuable training and skills. There is an investment and partnership structure available to support certain ideas. If the creative professional has the will and ability to participate with the financial community, there is a reasonable opportunity for success.

As another point of reference: my first initiative upon my full-time return to the leadership of MKThink has been to create a dedicated Innovation Studio, focused on developing next generation building system ideas and technologies into new commercially viable enterprises.

 

California Prefab: Current Market Report

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Silvercrest Homes


Since the financial crisis of 2008, the prefabricated building industry has undergone recession, forcing both well-established companies and venture-capitalist start-ups to reflect on their goals and respond in diverse ways, according to the differing situations of their assets and liabilities.

Historically, affordable manufactured homes have been produced through low cost materials and high volume production. The next generation of prefab companies is applying IT industry approaches to R&D, sustainability and improved quality. Lacking high volume production and still largely funded by venture capital, it remains to be seen which, if any, of the models will succeed.

Six students from the UC Berkeley graduate course entitled “Off-Site Fabrication,” taught by Professor Dana Buntrock, have examined this question. Based on original interviews with management and employees conducted during visits to fabrication plants and constructed projects, the following article is a brief synopsis of three case studies, providing a sample of the current prefabricated building industry in California: Silvercrest Homes, Zeta Communities, and Project FROG. For more on Project FROG, see the following article.

SILVERCREST
When Silvercrest Homes was founded in 1969, most other modular housing manufacturers led a dictatorial marketing campaign focused on high-volume production. Within a market dominated by standardization and uniformity, Silvercrest saw a business opportunity: customized homes to accommodate each market segment’s particular needs. According to Al Whitehouse, Silvercrest/Champion Homes General Manager, Silvercrest at its peak reached a target market ranging from families to the elderly and all homeowners in between.

Silvercrest Market Approach
During the market crisis, the costs of core commodity materials escalated. To survive in these conditions, Silvercrest fixed the budget they allocated to these variable costs and did not absorb the periodic price increases, which material cost erosion necessitated. Silvercrest had to consciously develop a home series that had a lower material content in one form or another and drop down from their original target. In addition, an uncontrollable retail marketing backlash has forced the company into an even tougher financial situation.

In the Silvercrest production process, the customers pull the system. The company only starts to build a house when there is a buyer, usually a developer. Since the market downturn, the company has closed 68% of its plants in 11 Western states, which has also impacted developers such as Sandalwood Estates, who relied on Silvercrest for decades, according to Sandalwood Estates Community Manager Kathy Fiebiger. Since the closure of the Silvercrest Woodland plant, the over four-fold increase in transportation costs is no longer economically viable for this developer.

The market for Silvercrest homes has also reversed. Originally, Silvercrest was the largest provider of modular homes for large private properties. Today, 70% are installed in mobile home parks, and only 30% are on private property.

As a result of all these factors, Silvercrest has been forced to deviate from its original market stronghold of higher quality and more expensive homes. They have developed a product series equivalent to those of their competitors and are selling these homes at even lower price points.

Currently, Silvercrest is also hoping to diversify its market by working on a variety of commercial projects, including offices, churches and synagogues, veterinary hospitals, and daycare centers.

Silvercrest Production
Six years ago, Silvercrest began implementing Lean Manufacturing methods in an effort to improve production efficiency for the future. According to Mike Hutchinson, Silvercrest/Champion Homes Quality Control Manager, they invested heavily in training all personnel and adopting policies of “continuous improvement” to change the company culture.

The new Lean production schedule depends on the plant’s activity, backlog size, and product order urgency. If enough orders are ready, a batch of ten houses is released to production.

Silvercrest has not yet realized the potential benefits of Lean management, but their creative approaches to optimize production efficiency and more collaborative relationships with their supply chain and customers will potentially be a tremendous advantage once the economy recovers. Silvercrest may be capable of offering better quality houses for a low target price.

ZETA
ZETA, an acronym for Zero Energy Technology and Architecture, is a venture capital start-up founded in 2007. Their target market is high production, sustainable, and net-zero energy modular building solutions for mass-market adoption in the United States.

ZETA Co-Founder Shilpa Sankaran notes that, observing the collapse of popular “prefab” companies, it became apparent that a business model focused only on single-family homes was not scalable. After their first successful project in Oakland, California, in order to increase production capacity, they leased a 91,000 square foot production plant in Sacramento.

ZETA Market Approach
ZETA’s target markets are not only multi-family and single-family housing, but institutional and educational facilities as well. This scope requires them to be flexible in both their business plan and production system, according to Sankaran. They have adapted their original business plan to include not only design and production, but also funding sources, planning, zoning, code compliance, and state approvals, in order to facilitate developers throughout the process in adapting to prefabricated systems.

This concept of flexibility raises the issue of standardization vs. customization. Ideally, the product should include as few customizations as possible. The reality, as ZETA General Manager Kara Tarango notes, is different: “You don’t dictate what you are going to build, the market dictates. The only thing you can dictate is how your product will adapt to the market.”

ZETA Production
ZETA originally tried to incorporate IT industry production systems into the modular building industry. However, a modular building company might produce 10 products a day with 10,000 parts, while a computer plant produces up to 10,000 products a day with 10 parts. These fundamental differences resulted in numerous production challenges during the design and construction of their first project. In response, they incorporated traditional factory building expertise and leased a high production capacity modular building production plant.

The new plant consists of a low-tech automated tiger saw, along with insulation, polyurethane glue, and paint spray stations. The rest of the production assembly line utilizes standard construction equipment optimized for labor efficiency. Their designs and materials are high quality, sustainable, and energy efficient. All buildings are “Net-Zero Ready,” allowing customers to add renewable energy to achieve net-zero energy.

Unfortunately, since the production plant was leased, ZETA has not yet utilized their full production capacity; only five buildings have been produced. Due to the fact that ZETA is addressing the residential, commercial and institutional markets, they may have a market advantage over the other companies. Given their flexibility in market approach coupled with a very high production capacity, they are well positioned to be successful.

Project FROG: “Better, greener, faster, cheaper”
Project FROG is a venture-backed San Francisco-based firm specializing in high performance, prefabricated classrooms. Run by business professionals and designers, this company differentiates itself from other modular building companies in its approach and structure, as well as its intended market. From the start, explains Evan Nakamura, Senior Director of Product Development, Project FROG avoided the capital-intensive investment of their own production facilities, opting instead to closely partner with fabricators to develop and produce the building components. The company focuses on developing turnkey buildings with a systematized, pre-engineered kit of parts to achieve efficiency with flexibility.

Project FROG Market Approach
Originally, Project FROG saw its business opportunity in the increasing demand for fast, flexible, and affordable portable classrooms, which until 1998 were required to comprise 30% of the classrooms in California schools, according to the California Portable Classrooms Study (http://www.arb.ca.gov/research/apr/past/00-317_v3.pdf ). FROG classrooms present a healthy alternative for existing portables, but since “FROGs” are prefabricated but not “relocatable,” they have had to follow the same lengthy funding process as permanent classrooms.

Project FROG Production: the Kit of Parts
Project FROG is based on the concept of product development, similar to Apple or Boeing, which through design iterations creates a highly systematized kit of parts, produced by a network of fabricators. One of FROG’s novelties is its implementation of energy and cost modeling to achieve climatic adaptation and precision fabrication through the combination of interchangeable components. The key challenge here is to find the optimal point between manufacturing efficiency and the customization demanded by clients. The kit of parts, which specifies very precise connections and tolerances, requires a carefully managed network of suppliers and transportation schedules. Because of decentralized production, all components are first assembled on the building site, requiring additional costly labor if unforeseen issues arise.

The company has invested significant venture capital in order to explore and implement the customization necessitated by climatic response, clients’ needs, and technological systems. With costs similar to those of traditional buildings, speed and technology seem to be FROG’s primary assets. Selling greenness and technology while keeping prices low remains a tough challenge, especially in this economic downturn.

Conclusion
Since 2008, all three companies have had to reorient their market approach to incorporate greater market diversity and production flexibility. Furthermore, all three are struggling to find the balance between customization and high volume production in order to survive.

While the older establishment has focused on achieving economies of scale more efficiently through the implementation of lean strategies, newer companies anticipate that innovative production tools and IT, as well as higher levels of customization and quality, are key to the future of manufactured architecture.

Another key distinguishing factor is the scope of the companies’ networks in their target market territory. Silvercrest has only limited tools in place for a new market, but can depend on its reputable roots. On the other hand, the start-ups face a more tenuous future; Zeta is having trouble launching, while FROG seems to be only slightly more successful, with lower capital demand and a more template-based approach. Despite their strong sources of capital and firm expectations that architecture needs manufactured production, will they gain enough leverage to become a viable and sustainable business?

This is a challenging time for the construction industry as a whole, and, in spite of its promise, the off-site fabrication community is not immune to this drastic economic downturn. However, California, more than most states, has long been a leader in off-site fabrication practices. Japan, our seismic sister across the ocean, has demonstrated the value of rapid and large-scale production plants as we were completing this article. Several hundred extremely small housing units were in construction within a week of the March 11th earthquake and tsunami. Will our industry be ready when it’s our turn?

Editor’s note: As of press time, GE has led a $22 million investment round in Project FROG and begun construction of one of its prefabricated environmentally sustainable buildings at GE’s Learning Center in Ossining, NY.