Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning / Associate Professor Lawrence Sass. Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans (Interior). 2008.

MIT / Larry Sass. Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans (Interior). 2008

Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning / Associate Professor Lawrence Sass
Digitally Fabricated Housing for New Orleans. (Interior) 2008 Image courtesy of Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning / Associate Professor Lawrence Sass Audio courtesy of Acoustiguide

Architect, Larry Sass: The model in the center is made of fiber board or very thin wood board. It's all cut with a laser cutter, and the parts of the model snap together in a scaled replica of the building. The parts are all identical, the geometry is identical.

What makes these parts very special is the machine gives us a chance to test at full scale all the connections between parts and the geometry between parts, how the decorative parts may work and how we can snap other parts to the decorative parts of different scales and thicknesses.

You'll notice that there's one section underneath the back window that's clear. You can see right out into the street, but more importantly you can see this interlocking structure behind the sheathing.

Curator, Barry Bergdoll: I think it's very important in looking at this house to think not only New Orleans, it's a house that can be as it were, decorated according to taste or according to region. I could well imagine these going up in rural India, probably filtered through the great digital powerhouse of Bangalore, but then sent out to a place where with a couple of rubber mallets, almost anyone could assemble a house for themselves in a matter of hours.”