According to New Hampshire builder Tedd Benson of Bensonwood Homes “we have a crisis of entanglement in our buildings.” In this 2010 video presentation to the College of the Atlantic, Benson discusses his Open-Built® Strategy for creating sustainable housing, and other buildings, that he expects to last several hundred years. Thanks to Andy C at Algonquin College for forwarding me this link.
Benson’s key messages include:
- disentangle and reorganize layers and systems on our houses to make change and modification easier and less wasteful
- separate the building envelope systems from the infill – the longer lifespan components and systems from those with a shorter lifespan
- build houses that can flex with the evolving needs of their residents and not require major construction to meet those needs
- marry the highest quality architecture with technology and craftsmanship to make high performance building shells that will last for several hundred years
- concentrate on creating a high performance, highly durable shell and add amenities as you can
- building a house on site is the worst place for control – employ BIM software for a virtual build, build modular components off site, assemble the building on site
- apply a 3D grid to design for ultimate customization with predictable costs and build time
I am particularly enamoured of his BIM software and electronic pattern library, “pre-fabricated pieces”, as he refers to them. Design is done on a 3D grid that allows houses to be designed virtually, and virtually immediately, by clicking and dragging the pieces from the library. It’s not unlike playing with electronic Lego to come up with a truly custom-designed house without the Herculean design challenges and costs attached to the usual labour-intensive approach to custom work. As Benson explains in the video, it enables the company to accurately predict costs and build times, as clients choose to custom build using components from the library or introduce some measure of unique design work. For example, homes built entirely from library components have a cost factor of 1.0 and a build time of x+0 months. A home designed with 80% standard and 20% custom has a cost factor of 1.25 and a build time equal to x+2 months, and so it goes up from there. From both a business planning and client management perspective this is a brilliant way to manage expectations. Once the designs are virtually modelled and approved by all team members, his fabrication equipment turn out the pieces that are used to create the construction elements and the craftsmen go to work. These are then flat-packed from their manufacturing facilities, loaded onto a truck and shipped to site where they are assembled by the Bensonwood team.
Being exposed to this building model has ‘ruined’ me forever. Conventional on-site stick framing seems breathtakingly inefficient and old school by comparison. So now what?