Project Dom Buildings

Custom Buildings Assembled In An Hour

1. Backstory

Project Dom Buildings is one of the research projects by Asmbld. We develop new concepts to rethink the potential of construction processes. Can we make custom buildings from fully reusable elements? Can we assemble custom buildings in hours?

2. Why Reusability Matters?

Reusability is crucial to making buildings more sustainable. Construction and demolition waste are responsible for 30% to 40% of landfill volume in most of US States. We must re-engineer buildings for the disassembly and reuse (or at least recycling) of all building elements.

3. The Challenge of Rapid Customization

Existing building technologies face a trade-off between customization and construction speed: You either get generic, fast-deployment structures or custom buildings that take weeks to design and build. Even more, most custom structures are rarely made from reusable elements.

4. The Result

To make buildings both reusable and customizable, we combined small reusable modules with robotic on-site assembly. Smaller (50x50cm) identical modules achieve economies of scale without sacrifices in customization. Modules have embedded utilities and custom interior materials.

Traditional modular units are assembled off-site and require separate transportation. Dom Buildings can be transported flat-packed in a single shipment and are robotically assembled on site.

Traditional modular units are constrained by transportation requirements: They have to fit on trucks and under bridges. Dom Buildings can have larger volumes and span since they are robotically assembled on site.

For now, this approach has its own bottleneck: Site preparation. In the long term, foundations could be standardized. How would the real estate market change if it was possible to build a custom building on-demand in a day?