© 2007 Francis Loetterle. All Rights Reserved. The need for mass housing and quick delivery in developing countries around the world typically exceeds the capacity of their indigenous residential construction technology. Often there is not enough in country labor, material or equipment to build the quantity of housing that is needed in a politically acceptable time frame. Even when there are sufficient in country resources to build mass housing in a politically acceptable time frame using indigenous residential construction technology, that same amount of labor, material, and equipment. could be used to build the housing quicker and or for less money using modular design and construction. The benefit of modular design and construction is greater efficiency in the use of labor, material and equipment, greater productivity and quicker delivery. Quicker delivery means quicker relief of human suffering and political discontent. Building mass housing for less money should mean that there will be money left to buy and build all of the other infrastructures that are equally critical to the health and sustainability of the society, potable water projects, health and sanitation projects, agricultural; projects, home industry projects, etc. Traditional methods of designing, bidding and building one, or even 100 houses, at a time will not produce thousands of houses in short periods of time. There are almost always insufficient qualified human resources to design and build every housing block or cluster individually. Coordinating design and controlling construction schedules and budgets for thousands of houses using an indigenous residential construction technology is extremely difficult. A modular and seamless design-build process results in improved schedule, budget and quality control, and significantly quicker project delivery. When the common and repetitive elements in a mass housing program are identified, infrastructure and site work as well as buildings, you can design them once, optimally, as prefabricated and mass produced working components of a modular system. Then the labor, material, equipment and components of the modular, design-build, system can be purchased in mass quantities usually at discounted prices, and, having identified standardized schedules and components, just in time supply and inventory control can be implemented. Excerpted from "Speed," an essay in Mass Housing Design Principles and Prototypes. Mass Housing Design Principles And Prototypes, by Francis Loetterle, 118 pages, 55 drawings, $45.00. Click here to order This book addresses the design of efficient and sustainable mass housing. The principles and prototypes presented are the products of twenty-eight years research and practice. The design principles address: Efficiency and Sustainability, Open Architecture and Modular Design, Rational Building Systems, Cost and Affordability, and Speed. The prototypes are comprised of unbuilt projects and hypothetical exercises. Modular planning prototypes for mass housing are presented in addition to single and multifamily modular design prototypes. All of the mass housing prototypes employ light gauge steel construction, modular design, prefabrication and mass-production. Each prototype addresses an obvious and pressing housing problem that has not received much current recognition or tangible solution. Some examples of pressing problems addressed are urban infill and small scale redevelopment housing, low income senior citizen housing, working poor housing, especially in developing countries, war refugee and war recovery housing and disaster relief-recovery housing. The contents of this book should be of interest to all people, worldwide, involved in mass housing; primarily planners, architects, engineers, students and teachers, but also housing and urban development agencies, disaster relief agencies, international development banks, redevelopment agencies, zoning code agencies, low cost housing mortgage lenders, production homebuilders and residential construction component manufacturers. Efficient and sustainable mass housing is a worldwide problem both critical and current. These mass housing principles and prototypes are presented in conjunction with the equally pressing and much larger problem of efficient and sustainable new neighborhoods, communities, towns and cities. The book is not a critique of what is but a series of suggestions concerning what to do instead. Back To Top Built By WebSight design Francis Loetterle, Architect, modular, design, affordable, low cost, mass, housing, schools, classrooms, land use, infrastructure, master, planning, efficient, sustainable, communities, fast-track, delivery, building, systems, components, light gauge, residential, inline, steel framing, pre-engineered, prefabricated, production, project, management, design-build, manufactured, HUD Code, panelized, disaster, recovery, redevelopment, single, multi, family, homes, urban, infill">