Brown’s Future Adaptive Building

Future Adaptive Building (FAB) is a reconfigurable infill system for an ageing population, developed by John L. Brown during his PhD dissertation (Brown, 2016), and is largely based on his professional experience. The system is composed by FABmodular, a system of prefabricated modular cabinetry, FABstudio, a web platform for interior design, social interaction, house management and health monitoring and FAB+, a set of medical addons that can be integrated into the FABmodular system (Figure 5-6).

120

Figure 5-6: (Left) The components of the FAB system (Right) the contexts to which may be applied. (Brown, 2016)

It follows the open building tradition of separation of support and infill (Figure 5-7) and shares many of the traits of Habraken’s Matura Infill System, with some important exceptions.

In the Matura system, the infill includes all the interior partitions, floors, services (water, electricity, and sewer), doors, kitchens, and bathrooms. In the FAB system, there are two “time layers” of infill, one that is fixed: bathroom, kitchen, floors and ceilings, and another that is reconfigurable, the FABmodular cabinetry that defines all the remaining interior spaces.

Brown claims his system can be adapted to either existing houses or new ones of any type:

apartments, townhouses, or single-family houses. Yet, it is likely that the system generality is limited to the Canadian context composed largely of prefabricated buildings. To renovate a unit, like the Matura precedent, it is necessary to strip the interior of the preexistent infill and to prepare it to receive the new adaptive system. In the Netherlands, this step proved difficult to implement in practice, requiring a perfect leveling of the support to receive the new fit-out (Kendall, 2015a). Also, the system does not resolve the issue of non-orthogonality of the spaces.

While in the north American context these issues might prove not to be a problem, the applicability of the solution to other contexts becomes questionable.

121

Figure 5-7: (Left) Concept of the infill system (Right) Plan of a possible apartment layout showing the placement of the infill cabinetry and the service points (Brown, 2016)

The FAB system by itself, as an infill system, only partially changes the traditional stakeholder roles. The typical design-bid-build procurement process of the AEC industry may be kept or not for the support: the structure, façade, roof, infrastructure, and bathrooms; but introduces a reversed system in the infill. This is a logical option since the system is meant for interior renovation (Figure 5-8).

Figure 5-8: FAB system envisioned stakeholder roles

Evidently the end-users of the framework, i.e., the instance designers, are the inhabitants of the house whether they are their owners or not, which will ultimately become the elderly living in-place. What is unclear is who changes the layout? Does the elderly move the cabinetry around? Or is it a service that is provided? Brown does not explicitly define this but since the instance designers will eventually become elderly, one could assume that future renovations will be provided as a service.

122 5.1.4 WikiHouse

The Wikihouse project was created in September 2011 by Alastair Parvin and Nick Ierodiaconou, of Architecture 00²⁶, as a 3-axis CNC router cut construction system. The aim was to disrupt “architecture’s economic equation” (Parvin, 2013, p. 94) that prevents a large chunk of the world’s population from accessing architectural services.

The original system had many resemblances with Larry Sass Instant House and Wood Frame Grammar, with the structure reduced to repeated interlocking sections of plywood, interior and sheathing panels. As such, it suffered the same limitations as Sass’s system. Firstly, components can be disassembled and reassembled but reuse in other contexts is hard and only partly possible due to dimensional customization. Furthermore, it shifts the complexity from the fabrication to the assembly stage, requiring a good knowledge of the system to be able to assemble it. In countries like Portugal, where conventional construction is cheap, labor costs are lower than the EU or USA average, and plywood is expensive, the system is only cost-effective if it is partially or totally self-built. Parvin acknowledged this limitation and stated that different vernaculars might be needed for different contexts (Cicero, 2013).

Wren or Wikihouse 4.0 was introduced in 2014 and is the currently available version of the system (Figure 5-9)²⁷. It increases modularity compared to previous versions, which is a step forward to solve some of the previously stated issues and uses a stronger structural system suitable for 2-storey buildings. In May 2019, Blackbird beta or WikiHouse 5.0 was publicly announced by the Open Systems Lab Foundation, the system was made more modular, moving away from the previous section raising strategy to a more traditional post-and-beam approach.

Yet, development eventually stopped on the beta stage and was abandoned in favor of a new design codenamed Skylark still in alpha stage.

26 Initial contributors were Momentum Engineering, Espians and Beatrice Galilee.

27 Although it is the latest “stable” version with publicly available files it is no longer being actively developed.

123

Figure 5-9: Model of Wikihouse 4.0 or Wren by Clayton Preston 2017

The first attempt to provide an interface for users to customize the system was a Sketchup plugin. This would allow an end-user to download a model from WikiHouse repository and perform some dimensional customizations. Eventually, this workflow was replaced by Grasshopper parametric model which is still available on GitHub.

Around 2017, there were some developments in the direction of creating an online customization interface, Buildx. A simple interface that could provide dimensional customization directly on a browser, foregoing the need of knowledge and access to software required to run computational models. Some of these files have been made available at GitHub but have not been updated since and a simplified version is still accessible²⁸.

WikiHouse platform (Figure 5-10) compared to the goals set by Ratti is still rudimentary.

The designs, the CAD files and grasshopper parametric model are available online, but they still require technical know-how on CAD and parametric modelling. The Buildx website is still a prototype and cannot be used to generate a real solution. Furthermore, it can be challenging and confusing for a generic user, or even an architect, to customize a design or even access the information of previously built prototypes.

28 https://demo.buildx.cc

124

Figure 5-10: wikihouse.cc online platform as of February 2019.

Since the end of 2018, the WikiHouse Foundation was replaced by Open Systems Lab Foundation, with a business model that is closer to Opendesk. Open Systems Lab became the open-source R&D team responsible for developing Wikihouse construction system, parametric model, and online configurator. The stated ambition is to reverse the building procurement process by predesigning the construction system. In the process, it is creating a new category of designers/engineers, the meta-designers, that in effect develop a customizable product for other architects/customizers, the instance-designers, to customize together with their clients (Figure 5-11).

Figure 5-11: Wikihouse envisioned stakeholder roles

125 Wikihouse is being developed like the kernel of Linux: the templates are freely distributed;

improvement suggestions can be submitted by anyone but are ultimately included in the canonical version by the foundation. This is still not an MCC system in the original sense but a digital model that can be customized and locally produced. The advantages are that the system success is not tied to its industrial scalability and may be improved by anyone, conversely it will likely be more difficult and expensive to procure by a client than an industrially produced mass-customized alternative.