Besting the tract home : a software-based bricolage approach to affordable custom housing

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.