7DayHouse: Fabrication-Aware Design

The goal of the 7DayHouse project is to demonstrate how completely personalized homes can be produced in just a week using industrial construction.

Faced with a global housing crisis and the need for sustainable urban densification, the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector is under pressure to find responsive solutions. Traditional construction methods are time-consuming and lack the agility to rapidly deliver high-quality, customized homes tailored to urban constraints. Enter 7DayHouse, a groundbreaking methodology that delivers a fully customized home within a week, seamlessly blending generative AI and industrial construction. Central to the project is a fabrication-aware design tool that balances design flexibility with supply chain and production data to optimize construction timelines. Our demonstrator envisions a lightweight, prefabricated rooftop extension made from cross-laminated timber (CLT).

Scientific goals:

1. Prototype a new customer journey in Mixed Reality to guide users from preferences to design to fabrication. 
2. Propose a computational framework that integrates construction products and systems into an “Adaptive Kit-of-Parts.”
3. Identify and/or generate a dataset of residential designs suitable to train machine learning generative algorithms. 
4. Develop a fabrication-aware data representation for computational design generation and evaluation, with direct export capabilities to industry-standard Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software.

Economic goals:

• Reduce costs and production time by streamlining the specification process from customer and architectural input to material orders and manufacturing instructions.
• Identify typical rooftop extension scenarios, accounting for the urban context, existing building specifications, and customer requirements.
• Validate market relevance by establishing exchanges with timber manufacturers and other key players in the urban densification market.

The project aspires to catalyze positive change in how we design, construct, and envision the homes of tomorrow.