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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

When I watch crews build a house, I am struck by how resistant this activity has been to automation and mass production techniques.

A truck will drive up to the site with a stack of lumber on it. Workers will individual measure, cut, and fit the pieces together. Wiring is all eyeballed by the electrian, and custom fit. The same for plumbing. Finish carpentry is all done piece by piece, by skilled craftsmen, and all hand fitted (and are a huge component of the expense of a house).

It all seems ripe for a revolution.

I'm not suggesting that houses be all cookie-cutter identical. But a custom design could largely be built in a factory, trucked in, and then you'd just have final assembly done on site. The result would be higher quality and lower cost (and less labor).

You can see some of this with roof trusses today, which are custom built in a factory and then trucked to the site.

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Buckminster Fuller did a lot of work in this area, way back when. He's probably best known for the geodesic dome, but did a lot of other stuff as well. One of his other projects was a preformed, all-metal (copper, I think) bathroom in which all the surfaces were smoothly curved (no corners to catch crud) and which had the plumbing hookups in standard locations (a bolt-on, as it were). Then there was the Dymaxion House, designed to be mass-produce in the same factories that were producing aluminum-bodied aircraft.

There are numerous problems with innovation in construction -- building codes and trade union resistance being two of them. Building codes are often written in such a way as to exclude nonstandard materials altogether. "Component X must be made of 2x6 lumber" (a "prescriptive" building code) rather than "component X must be capable of withstanding a load of Y pounds with a safety factor of Z" (a "performance" building code). An advantage of that is that building inspectors don't have to be engineers. The disadvantage is that it's hard/expensive/impossible to do something that isn't in the book.

Another problem is that there's still something of a "trailer park" stigma associated with prefab construction.

Unions probably have a lot to do with this in the United States.

I seem to recall footage of a building-erecting robot in Japan. Basically it was a frame that went up and down on four pillars, with an armature that could move in two dimensions on the frame, almost like a "UFO catcher" or crane game machine.

I am Bender. Please insert girder.

Unions haven't really impacted the residential home building market. I don't think onsite automation will help much. Most of the easily automated steps (foundation laying, framing, roofing, sheetrocking) are actually outsourced by the general contractor to specialized subcontractors. They can frame out a house in a week easily and are very efficient. It's simply not worth all the effort of programming computer manufacturing instructions and setting up a machine to automate the construction of a house becuase it doesn't take long. The painful/expensive/time consuming part of building a house is the 'finishing'. Hanging windows, installing the kitchen, doing plumbing, etc. Making a machine do all of that just isn't worth it.

(Some offsite automation like bringing in pre built roof supports or foundation forms makes sense, but that is already happening.)

On the commercial side, unions are heavily entrenched. You absolutely can not build a sky scraper without heavy involvement from the metal workers trade union, the electricians union, etc. There is a lot of waste there.

I could see automation on the commercial side, but not really on the residential side.

Also working against you - construction workers are cheap right now. The unemployement is due to lack of demand, not the cost of building. We can't even fill already built buildings.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=manufactured+homes&l=1

less snarky answer: mobile/prefab homes are more common where the land is cheap, and places where a lot of people live, the land isn't cheap. I've never seen one where you can't tell (or have I?!? but seriously, probably not,) but I've been living in the city for years.

This is exactly it. The cost of new construction in urban environments is dominated by capital, not labor. So there's no reason not to design a custom house or building vs. buying a prefabricated one. And that drives down the volume of manufactured housing, which drives up its cost and hurts competitiveness further.

I know that prefab homes have a reputation for poor quality.

But I see no fundamental reason why this must be true. Automation in every other industry increases quality, and certainly predictability. In current home construction, quality varies erratically all over the place, even in the same home, even in expensive homes.

"Manufactured homes" are widely available, but have a reputation for low quality and are viewed as one step up from a trailer. I'm sure the industry could benefit from more more automation, but the focus has to be on design and longevity to change a deeply held bias.

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