Timberate - Rethinking housing with Timber

PREMISE

The human movement towards city areas has set off a huge shift of resources pooling in building construction around the world. This propels not only architects but entire humankind to find sustainable ways to re-analyze construction in its life cycle and finding means to make it greener through its life. 

No matter how much we hide, the construction sector is answerable for half of the world’s  CO2 discharge. RCC-based construction generates so much carbon not only while manufacturing, but it is very tough to discard construction waste post its lifecycle. 

Can alternative natural origin ma­terials, for example, wood, can help change the course of global warming caused by excessive construction? Can wood be the real game-changer we had been always looking for?

BRIEF

The proposed challenge is the development of an innovative mass-timber compact urban housing with sustainable carbon-free impact designed to be lightweight, minimal, and compact.

Primary focus on the design of a parametric and prefabricated timber building system for a two-story housing unit where it can be shown the potential for a modular building system for horizontal and vertical expansion.

Utilize digital fabrication technology to achieve high precision fabrication, for easy assembly/disassembly / expandable for upgrading/relocation/end-of-life recycling making it resilient and adaptable to the rapidly changing needs of society. The houses are expected to be machine manufactured and the design hence should be made in resonance to mass-fabrication.

uni.xyz/competitions/timberate/info