Exploration 2: How to design a timber building that’s easy to make in a factory | by Cara Eckholm | Sidewalk Talk | Medium

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Interior rendering of the ground foor in Proto-Model X, Sidewalk Labs’ prototypical timber building. (Image: Michael
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Exploration 2: How to design a timber

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building that’s easy to make in a factory
In the second part of our series, we explain how we modifed the design of our tall
timber proto-model to support manufacturing and assembly.

Cara Eckholm
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Jan 24, 2020 · 5 min read

This post is the second of two exploring lessons learned from designing a tall timber
proto-model, PMX. We suggest reading the introduction and part one frst.

Once we stabilized the design of PMX at 35 stories, we turned our attention to taking
advantage of timber’s potential for use in of-site manufacturing.

Using a computer-directed cutting machine, timber can be spliced into a variety of

shapes and sizes, in contrast to concrete and steel, which have to be cast or extruded
in custom-built molds. It can then be trucked to a development site, with each truck
packed to the brim, as there’s no risk of exceeding the truck’s weight limit. To realize
these efciencies, architects have to proactively consider how to create a building
design that lends itself to factory production, an efort known as Design for
Manufacturing and Assembly.

The mass timber buildings that Sidewalk is planning will be produced in a factory
that turns out standardized parts, which can be combined to form many diferent
types of buildings. Everything in this “kit of parts” has to be modular and

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Exploration 2: How to design a timber building that’s easy to make in a factory | by Cara Eckholm | Sidewalk Talk | Medium

interlocking, including infrastructure like plumbing. Standardization of the parts

enables the manufacturing process to be faster and more predictable, and their
interlocking nature enables easy on-site assembly. Collectively, these traits speed up
construction, making buildings cheaper to complete and driving afordability for
builders and tenants.

Representative images of the kit of parts that form the PMX building. (Image: Michael Green Architecture)

The LEGO Group’s production and design process is a close and helpful analogy.
When developing a new LEGO set, the company’s designers must choose from a
comprehensive library of bricks and other small plastic components that must click
together. Some customization of color, size, and shape is allowed, but creating too
many unique pieces causes costs to balloon. In fact, LEGO’s failure to control its piece
count in the early 2000s — the number of unique pieces doubled to 12,000 — nearly
bankrupted the company.

Optimizing the “foor cassette”

If the basic unit of design for LEGO is the brick, for PMX, it’s what we call the “foor
cassette.” The shell of each cassette is made of wood panels with acoustic and
insulating layers. The interiors of each cassette house pipes and wires that are part of
the building’s mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems. Cassettes are slotted one
by one into the envelope of the building, linking up to one another to form new foors.

Using cassettes to construct foors is very diferent from how foors of high-rise
buildings are constructed today. In a typical site-built building, steel or plywood
scafolding is constructed to form the basis of the foor, with concrete poured on top
— a long, arduous, and carbon-intensive process. Even in prefabricated buildings,
which are few and far between, foor pieces are usually just basic concrete slabs, and
the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing equipment has to be secured in place
separately.

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Exploration 2: How to design a timber building that’s easy to make in a factory | by Cara Eckholm | Sidewalk Talk | Medium

Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing equipment is placed into the foor cassette in the factory. The cassettes
are then brought to site for insertion into the building. (Image: Integral)

For the cassettes to lend themselves to efcient factory production and on-site
assembly, we needed to drive down the number of unique cassettes on PMX, as well
as the time it would take to produce each cassette in a factory. That meant the
cassette-based approach had a couple of substantial implications for the design and
the material choices on PMX.

First, the column spans on PMX had to squarely ft standardized cassette modules, or
else we would have to create expensive, customized fller pieces. A uniform grid that
neatly fts identical cassettes is also useful in construction. When each cassette is
interchangeable, you no longer need to keep track of the specifc sequence in which
parts should be placed into the building.

Second, the choice to use foor cassettes infuenced what materials we used. In a
typical building, concrete is poured and left to cure on site over multiple days. But
producing cassettes in a factory meant we needed to use materials (such as stone
wool) that could be cut and applied quickly to keep the process moving. The cassettes
in PMX can be produced in 25 steps, with each step taking 25 minutes on an
assembly line — and we’re continuing to drive down those fgures through process
improvements and ongoing R&D.

Standardizing the building’s envelope

Some people still associate the “prefab” aesthetic with the post-World War II housing

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Exploration 2: How to design a timber building that’s easy to make in a factory | by Cara Eckholm | Sidewalk Talk | Medium

boom, when factories turned out cookie-cutter suburban homes. One of the goals of
the PMX project was to defy that history, showing that prefabrication can still yield
interesting architecture.

Much like all other elements of PMX, the building’s envelope needs to consist of a
series of panels that can be produced by a factory. But the envelope can be “skinned”
with panels of any shape, material, or design, so long as they meet building code
requirements and follow a standardized modular pattern.

In the case of PMX, we began with a very basic module, consistent with what one
might fnd on a typical downtown condo in any growing city — a metal panel with 40
percent window coverage, accompanied by a balcony for each unit. (If 40 percent
coverage feels low, it’s actually a refection of energy-efcient building design trends,
which call for less window area and better insulation to reduce heating and cooling
needs.) The team then explored a number of highly expressive designs, with the
intention of showcasing a very wide range of architectural possibilities.

The PMX team explored a number of diferent facade skins, which show a wide range of architectural possibilities for
the building.

Through using diferent skins, PMX can transform into countless diferent buildings,
including the four shown here. These skins, or others, can be applied to buildings of

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Exploration 2: How to design a timber building that’s easy to make in a factory | by Cara Eckholm | Sidewalk Talk | Medium

diferent shapes or sizes, all produced in a factory.

Of course, the great promise of manufactured timber is that it should help deliver
buildings far faster and cheaper than conventional techniques. With construction
costs booming in many major cities, timber is one potential solution for delivering
more afordability. But instead of leading to generic high-rises, timber buildings can
form dynamic neighborhoods celebrated for their distinct architecture — not just
their efcient engineering.

If you’re a developer or timber professional who wants to work together on

advancing tall timber building design, contact Sidewalk’s buildings team at
factory@sidewalklabs.com.

Pmx Series Architecture Engineering Manufacturing Building

363
363

WRITTEN BY

Cara Eckholm
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Buildings @SidewalkLabs. Pas @NatGeo Explorer and

@Princeton @WilsonSchool grad, focused on cities.

Sidewalk Talk
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Where technologiss and urbaniss discuss the future of cities.

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