The Architecture Today Mass Customisation round table discussion was held in partnership with Origin, a UK manufacturer of bespoke aluminium bi-fold doors and windows. It asked how technologies that offer both the economy of mass production and the benefits of custom-making might open new horizons for developers, manufacturers and architects

Round Table Participants

The concept of mass customisation in manufacturing – that new technology can combine the economic benefits of streamlined mass production with customisation to individual needs – has been discussed since the 1990s. We are now reaching the point where mass customisation has become a possibility in the design and construction of buildings. What does that mean for the ways architects think about design, about their role, about what they might be doing in ten years’ time, and about the roles of other players in the construction industry?

An AT Round Table, convened to consider these questions and organised in partnership with Origin, ranged across ideas for the mass customisation of housing, from a Tinder-like scheme to match homes with buyers to 3D-printed houses and robot planners.

In Cornwall, HTA Architects has partnered with architect Ash Sakula on Heartlands, a project of 54 custom-build houses for Carillion-Igloo. Here, different chassis types have been developed and costed within a design code that permits some external freedoms and a number of internal choices. The system is scaleable, with the potential to create thousands of homes, and to involve small builders and suppliers that are local to the site, but using a standard factory-made, mass-produced chassis. The architects have looked at how local supply chains can produce crafted components such as door handles and kitchen worktops.

There is a perception, suggested some panelists, that offsite factories tend to make wall-to-wall modular solutions that can be repeated but not customised. It was also observed that the offsite manufacturing industry poses a big challenge to the employment of local labour in construction, but mass customisation could provide opportunities to redress this through ‘flying factories’ – temporary manufacturing or assembly facilities.

Robert Sakula suggested that a local workshop set up on site could in itself become a community facility. Such a workshop could both reduce transport costs and enhance local employment, while the advent of CNC cutting, digital fabrication and 3D printing can facilitate the adaptation of purpose-designed products.

The discussion continued around a distinction between standardisation and customisation – redefining and pushing the standard to make the basic product better, then looking at the degree of customisation that is still achievable. Russ Edwards remarked that Victorian terrace houses, which were often ‘mass produced’ and customised on a street-by-street basis, are a popular housing model that, thanks to their inherent internal flexibility, have endured. Whether it’s to meet geographic, environmental or demographic requirements, technology and manufacturing can be an opportunity to customise a repetitive model more efficiently.

Turning to the role of ‘process’, Dale Sinclair argued not for the standardisation of the design but of the design process, primarily because the current model is predicated on traditional construction methods. Architects are taught to think in three dimensions but to communicate in two-dimensional drawings that clients can’t necessarily read. Rather than plugging new technologies into traditional design processes that can be long and slow, architects should be able to link their work to the machinery that makes buildings, and compress the design process.

Robert Sakula raised the difficulty of managing client preference within custom build, which Ash Sakula has tried to achieve with an online interface for its Lightbox House custom-build product. But how do you define the level of choices that can be made? The means for this could be using the aggregated power of the web, not just to communicate with people but to get them to register an interest and gather sufficient aligned interests in order to proceed.

Josh Graham suggested that by collecting data points about different types of housing from architectural practices and housing manufacturers, you could automatically start to match up people’s preferences, like a ‘Tinder’ for houses and buyers.

More discussion focused on the need for a cultural shift both in manufacturing and the architectural profession, the role of the architect as maker, and vertical integration. Xavier De Kestelier cited WeWork, a company that in some respects has built only one project, a co-working space, but one that it has replicated 250 times. WeWork is vertically integrated, so it is the developer, the financier and the architect. Its own team scans the spaces, captures the data and puts it into Revit. And, suggested De Kestelier, WeWork could easily apply its model to other sectors, becoming ‘WeLive’, for example. By bringing everything under one roof the current tender process can be short-circuited.

According to Dale Sinclair, intellectual property is becoming a blocker, and architects can’t continue to design every single building as a prototype. With Open Source even small companies can make the code for the base model available and the customer or end-user pays a license fee, and adapts the base model to their own requirements, then finds someone to make it.

AECOM is currently involved with the BRE in investigating the 3D-printing of a building, but many questions arise. How do you validate the printer heads, and how do you validate the materials? What environmental conditions are needed to print on site? Is it 30 degrees, ten degrees, minus ten, is it raining? The necessary production conditions can be very different for some of these technologies. But if it’s possible to 3D-print a motorbike in your garage, then architects should be looking at how communities can get together to make buildings.

Modular schemes can take half the time of a traditional build on site, which means that the designer and developer can move on to their next project and twice as much can be built. Automated planning consent could also transform the industry. Josh Graham cited a housing group that is looking at an automated planner that would draw on planning laws in different areas and digitise them into data points. For Louise Palomba, offsite represents high quality control and savings in materials that contribute to a holistic, sustainable approach. Modular schemes can also feed into the circular economy by being designed for demountability and in using reusable or recyclable components.

Russ Edwards recounted a recent talk with a group of year-9 schoolchildren who envisaged being able to buy houses through Amazon. For a current young generation ownership is to some extent an abstract concept, but the homes they will live in are being designed today by an older generation with different values. Mass customisation could well offer a way for architects to respond to the real needs of the customer – and if they don’t seize that opportunity then their whole profession could well find itself redundant.

Responses by participants