| Title: | Besting the tract home : a software-based bricolage approach to affordable custom housing |
| Author: | Plewe, Thomas Clayton |
| Other Contributors: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. |
| Advisor: | Terry Knight. |
| Department: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. |
| Publisher: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Issue Date: | 2008 |
| Abstract: | Tract housing has earned its position as the overwhelmingly dominant paradigm of home building and ownership in America because it's such an efficient and therefore cost-effective system. Custom-designed housing has provable benefits over a one size-fits-all approach, but has remained unreachable for the vast majority of home buyers (or at the very least not worth it) due to the price/time/hassle disadvantage of its inefficient production systems. In attempting to make customized housing competitive with the tract home on a price/time/hassle graph, this thesis searches for efficiency through using bricolage; nonstandard, ambiguous components; the principles of object-oriented programming; and the consumer-centric standard practices of e-commerce. A paradigm and accompanying software are created to allow a custom house to be designed in hours rather than months, enabling architects to design by arranging pre-designed multi-room components, as selected from a searchable database, into a single structure that uniquely fits a client's needs. Sample houses are designed and economic estimates are made to gauge the potential competitiveness of such a system with tract housing, as well as the system's potential effect on the overall economy of architecture. |
| Description: |
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 65). |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/47897 |
| Requires | System requirements: CD-ROM drive. |
| Keywords: | Architecture. |
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