Many components of the world are experiencing a housing crisis, with demand in city areas typically outpacing provide, resulting in hovering costs.
In international locations together with the UK and the US, an growing older inhabitants of builders mixed with a drive to fill the housing scarcity means there’s a want for extra development employees. The UK’s Construction Industry Training Board discovered that the nation will want 250,000 more workers by 2028 to fulfill constructing targets however in 2023, extra folks left the trade than joined.
UK know-how firm Automated Architecture, or AUAR (pronounced “our”) believes it has an answer. It makes transportable micro-factories that may produce the wood framing of a home — the partitions, flooring and roofs. Co-founder Mollie Claypool says the micro-factories will have the ability to produce the panels faster, cheaper and extra exactly than a timber framing crew, releasing up carpenters to concentrate on the development of the constructing.
Despite the concentrate on automation, Claypool insists she isn’t attempting to place anybody out of labor. “Automation isn’t replacing jobs. Automation is filling the gap,” she informed NCS.
AUAR fees a developer by the sq. foot to supply the timber panels of a house. To start, architects ship AUAR the constructing plans, and its software program, Master Builder, makes use of AI to calculate what number of panels are wanted, and precisely how a lot timber the developer wants to purchase.
The micro-factory suits right into a delivery container which is shipped to the constructing web site together with an operator. Inside the manufacturing facility, a robotic arm measures, cuts and nails the timber into panels as much as 22 toes (6.7 meters) lengthy, maintaining gaps for home windows and doorways, and drilling holes for the wiring and plumbing. The contractor then suits the panels by hand.
One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical home in a couple of day — a course of which, in accordance with Claypool, would take a traditional timber framing crew 4 weeks — and is ready to produce framing for buildings as much as seven tales tall.
Claypool launched the firm in 2019 with Gilles Retsin, after working collectively at The Bartlett School of Architecture, a part of University College London, the place they centered on automation and know-how in structure.
She says their service is 30% cheaper than an ordinary timber framing crew, and as much as 15% cheaper than shopping for panels from giant factories and delivery them to a web site.
It can also be extra environmentally pleasant, Claypool claims. “Timber is a natural material, which means it has bends, it twists, sometimes it has bits taken out of it, it has knots,” she defined. The micro-factory responds to flaws in the wooden and calculates how finest to work with the out there materials, decreasing wasted wooden.
She provides that the precision of the micro-factories implies that the panels match collectively tightly, decreasing the warmth lack of the closing dwelling, making them extra vitality environment friendly.
AUAR at present has three micro-factories working in the US and EU, with 5 extra set to be delivered this 12 months.
David Philp, chair of the Chartered Institute of Building’s digital and innovation advisory panel, who isn’t concerned with AUAR, informed NCS, “these innovations were an opportunity a few years ago, but now they’re a necessity. They’re not a nice‑to‑have anymore — they’re key to any construction business model.”
The UK authorities pledged to construct 1.5 million new homes by 2029. In the 2024 to 2025 monetary 12 months, there have been 208,600 net additional dwellings in England, in accordance with the authorities — a 6% lower in comparison with the earlier 12 months.
To meet the demand, Claypool says that the UK must flip away from conventional brick homes, to wood-framed
Building a timber framed dwelling produces 20% less greenhouse gases in comparison with brick, in accordance with an evaluation by Bangor University, in Wales. They are additionally faster to construct.
The UK authorities says it plans to “incorporate timber into the construction sector through innovative modern methods of construction,” and plant more trees to supply a provide of wooden. However, it discovered that builders and builders have been reluctant to use wood as they thought it was not as sturdy as brick, and extra inclined to fireplace.
Only 9% of houses inbuilt England in 2019 have been timber framed, in comparison with 92% in Scotland, the place Philps says there’s a custom of utilizing wooden to construct homes.
One of the huge challenges for brand new applied sciences like AUAR to scale in the UK can be countering unfavorable perceptions, each with customers and the trade, Philp mentioned. “The technology and standards are there — the real barrier is culture. We’ve got deeply ingrained traditional ways of working, so the challenge now is people and change, not tools and processes.”
Other firms have developed related approaches. London-based Facit Technologies makes micro-factories that produce wood parts for development tasks on web site, whereas US-based Cuby Technologies produces modular models that every manufacture completely different parts for a house; these models are mixed to kind a lot bigger setups.
AUAR has raised £7.7 million ($10.3 million) up to now, and is increasing into the US, the place an absence of housing and choice for utilizing wooden makes it a big potential market. Ninety-four percent of single-family properties inbuilt the US in 2024 have been timber-framed, and the housing scarcity is estimated at between 1.5 and 5.5 million properties. A report by Goldman Sachs discovered that this scarcity was driving home costs up and was “the root of the affordability problem.”
AUAR partnered with Rival Holdings, a US based mostly funding firm centered on the development trade, in 2024. A consultant for AUAR mentioned it’s in a “growth phase in the US and have several more new partnerships,” however didn’t disclose additional particulars. Rival Holdings didn’t reply to a request for remark.
AUAR says it has 600,000 sq. meters (6.5 million sq. toes) of panels in manufacturing, equating to lots of of properties, and Claypool hopes to have 1,000 micro-factories on websites by 2030, producing 200,000 properties a 12 months.
For her, the downside of housing is not only one among logistics, supplies and funding.
“Good homes are not just a construction problem. It’s a social problem,” Claypool mentioned. “When homes are scarce and we’re slow to build them, everything else suffers.”