Suburban Americans suffer from homes built with: a low standard of craftsmanship, poor efficiency of construction, excessive use of material resources and a disregard for their site. Architectural diversity is at a low, driven by a consolidation of homebuilders and fewer floor plans. The current home production workflow from commission to build pales in comparison to the automotive industries solutions. Influenced by heavy machinery and hot swappable computers, ideas are born for a better way to build houses. These ides evolve though understanding the principles of several successful vehicles, analyzing census data, and studying floor plans. The flexible autonomous systems house (FASH), involves a 900mm x 900mm framework and a kit of parts that engages our industrial ability and maintains architectural values of space, form, materiality and site specificity. FASH is about bringing a logic and simplification of technique to building that allows quality and reuse to become reality.

A prefabricated timber frame house previously built by Villafabriken AB has been modeled in Autodesk Revit Architectural, a 3D-program based on BIM-technology. This has been done tosee if it’s possible to produce the publications that Villafabriken demands from the designengineer’s work, and examine which possible extra values that may arise compared to traditional 2D-CAD drawing.BIM is short for Building Information Modeling. Everything is stored in a single database and a change in the project file is automatically updated across the project. BIM provides more than just drawings since information from the model can be retrieved in various ways such as lists and quantity schedules.It was possible to produce the publications that Villafabriken demanded using Revit, but BIM doesn’t only mean a new way of drawing, it also require a change in the company’s process were the information from the model is being used.

This master thesis will be focusing on prefabricated temporary houses and settlements in Kocaeli &ndash / as a place-making process &ndash / throughout post disaster reconstruction period of 1999 Marmara Earthquakes. Main stimulant for this research is the lack of acknowledgement of transforming urban and social environments under the overwhelming forces of disasters both in academic and professional domains in the country. Appropriation and self-identification of temporary accommodation is a way of adaptation and a reaction to disruption caused by forced relocation due to disasters. Personalization process transforms the houses into homes, spaces into places. This transformation is to be analyzed within the framework of altering urban areas, disasters and adaptation processes of householders for the resumption of home. Case study will be based on temporary housing settlements &ndash / prefabricated houses &ndash / in city of Kocaeli. The aim of this work is to understand the effective forces operating during post disaster temporary housing periods, to improve reconstruction and planning processes with the information generated out of the research and to provide data for the policy-making authorities and academic field.

<p>A prefabricated timber frame house previously built by Villafabriken AB has been modeled in Autodesk Revit Architectural, a 3D-program based on BIM-technology. This has been done tosee if it’s possible to produce the publications that Villafabriken demands from the designengineer’s work, and examine which possible extra values that may arise compared to traditional 2D-CAD drawing.BIM is short for Building Information Modeling. Everything is stored in a single database and a change in the project file is automatically updated across the project. BIM provides more than just drawings since information from the model can be retrieved in various ways such as lists and quantity schedules.It was possible to produce the publications that Villafabriken demanded using Revit, but BIM doesn’t only mean a new way of drawing, it also require a change in the company’s process were the information from the model is being used.</p>

Drainage methods for liquefaction remediation have been in use since the 1970's and have traditionally included stone columns, gravel drains, and more recently prefabricated vertical drains. The traditional drainage techniques such as stone columns and gravel drains rely upon a combination of drainage and densification to mitigate liquefaction and thus, the improvement observed as a result of these techniques cannot be ascribed solely to drainage. Therefore, uncertainty exists as to the effectiveness of pure drainage, and there is some hesitancy among engineers to use newer drainage methods such as prefabricated vertical drains, which rely primarily on drainage rather than the combination of drainage and densification. Additionally, the design methods for prefabricated vertical drains are based on the design methods developed for stone columns and gravel drains even though the primary mechanisms for remediation are not the same. The objectives of this research are to use physical and numerical models to assess the effectiveness of drainage as a liquefaction remediation technique and to identify the controlling behavioral mechanisms that most influence the performance of sites treated with prefabricated vertical drains. In the first part of this research, a suite of three large-scale dynamic centrifuge tests of untreated and drain-treated sloping soil profiles was performed. Acceleration, pore pressure, and deformation data was used to evaluate the effectiveness of drainage in reducing liquefaction-induced lateral deformations. The results showed that the drains reduced the generated peak excess pore pressures and expedited the dissipated of pore water pressures both during and after shaking. The influence of the drains on the excess pore pressure response was found to be sensitive to the characteristics of the input motion. The drainage resulted in a 30 to 60% reduction in the horizontal deformations and a 20 to 60% reduction in the vertical settlements. In the second part of this research, the data and insights gained from the centrifuge tests was used to develop numerical models that can be used to investigate the factors that most influence the performance of untreated and drain-treated lateral spread sites. Finite element modeling was performed using the OpenSees platform. Three types of numerical models were developed - 2D infinite slope unit cell models of the area of influence around a single drain, 3D infinite slope unit cell models of the area of influence around a single drain, and a full 2D plane strain model of the centrifuge tests that included both the untreated and drain-treated slopes as well as the centrifuge container. There was a fairly good match between the experimental and simulated excess pore pressures. The unit cell models predicted larger horizontal deformations than were observed in the centrifuge tests because of the infinite slope geometry. Issues were identified with the constitutive model used to represent the liquefiable sand. These issues included a coefficient of volumetric compressibility that was too low and a sensitivity to low level accelerations when the stress path is near the failure surface. In the final part of this research, the simulated and experimental data was used to examine the relationship between the generated excess pore water pressures and the resulting horizontal deformations. It was found that the deformations are directly influenced by both the excess pore pressures and the intensity of shaking. There is an excess pore pressure threshold above which deformations begin to become significant. The horizontal deformations correlate well to the integral of the average excess pore pressure ratio-time history above this threshold. They also correlate well to the Arias intensity and cumulative absolute velocity intensity measures. / text

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

Shifting demographics and economic factors have recently necessitated the export of prefabricated homes. With respect to trade in the global market, home manufacturers can greatly benefit by using E-commerce and digital networks to communicate with their foreign clients. / The author proposes a software application to assist Canadian home prefabricators and manufacturers of building components to display their services and products in an interactive and electronic format. This tool would help these companies by increasing the size of their potential client base and the speed of their business interactions. / The study concludes that specialised software to facilitate the export of prefabricated homes can easily take advantage of the Internet's speed and accessibility as a download or Website as well as be available on CD-ROM.

Within the prefabrication industry, Kit homes have had a long history of success within the twentieth century. Kit homes are houses whose components are manufactured using a panelized or pre-cut prefabrication system, are numbered, packaged and shipped to the building site for erection. Among the different strategies in purchasing a manufactured house, buying a house as a kit has a great potential for self-help assembly. Since about one third of the cost of construction is labor costs, the author has investigated the option of self-help building using Kit homes, to eliminate the labor cost and thus further reduce the construction cost. / In order to study the Kit home potential and costs when bought from, and assembled by the manufacturer, four manufacturers of prefabricated homes who offer Kit homes were visited. In order to study the Kit home potential and costs when assembled by the buyer, the building process of a self-helper was researched and documented. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

The housing shortage in the United States at the close of World War II led President Truman and his National Housing Expediter, Wilson W. Wyatt, Sr., to enact the Veteran's Emergency Housing Act. Enacted in the spring of 1946, one goal of the V.E.H.A. was to encourage the production of prefabricated and factory-built housing units.The Lustron Homes Corporation, founded by Carl Strandlund, was a subsidiary of Chicago Vitreous Enamel Products Company which received over $37 million from the Federal Government between 19461950, in order to manufacture standardized all-steel houses.This creative project explores the wartime and postwar housing situation across the country, and specifically, in Louisville, Kentucky. An interview with Wilson W. Wyatt, Sr. is included.The production, assembly, and sales practices of the Lustron Homes Corporation are explored through research, and through an interview with the regional salesman who represented Kentucky. Documentation and photographs of Louisville's Lustrons are included. / Department of Architecture

Thesis (M.Arch.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-164). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.