1:1
Making The Digital House
6 March – 20 March 2007

A new method of building houses that harnesses digital design technology and low volume production methods is the focus of a new exhibition at The Architecture Foundation’s Yard gallery. 1:1 Making the Digital House, gives the public a unique opportunity to see a prototype of the Digital House, as a cross-section of an actual house is constructed in full public view. 

As a major advance in the construction of house building, 1:1 Making the Digital House demonstrates to house builders and the house buying public a bespoke, high quality, well designed and more sustainable alternative to traditional housing.

The Digital House is the accumulation of two and a half years of research and development by the architects Bell Travers Willson, and made possible by funding from the London Development Agency, with the aim of engaging with traditional house builders to develop ways to enhance new housing construction using digital technology.

The Digital House utilizes the advantages of hi-tech production, such as speed (five times faster than ordinary build programmes) and quality, and the advantages of on site activities such as a flexible labour force with low overheads.

So how is this possible? The Digital House is produced using a detailed 3D computer model that contains all of the construction elements including every wall and screw hole which are pre-determined before the construction. This information is transferred to a CNC Router (Computer Numerical Control) which rapidly cuts out elements in engineered timber. These are assembled into lightweight hollow cassettes like big bricks of Lego, which can be filled with recycled newspaper to achieve a high level of insulation and air tightness.

The technology behind the Digital House allows every part cut to be different than the next, so that houses can be customized to each individual’s requirements. This moves away from standardisation that has previously been an economic driving force in prefabricated systems that are criticised for being inflexible in their designs and visually repetitive.

The public will have a unique opportunity to see a prototype of the Digital House from the 6 – 20 March as a cross-section of an actual house is built at The Architecture Foundation’s Yard Gallery.

Nick Willson, Director at Bell Travers Willson Architects, said:

“The Digital House offers house builders a real solution to the continued problems of high labour and material costs, sustainability and getting design quality right.

It is hard to believe, but Britain is still using house building methods that go back to the Elizabethan age. The Digital House takes a quantum leap in terms of adopting current technology to construct better designed and more efficient housing.”