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Mass Production for Mass Housing

For everyone, their home is their palace, and they are the kings and queens of their own little palaces. But if we start making palaces for everyone, we will only be building castles in the air. The urgent need of the hour is to build more houses, with fewer resources, in the quickest time, for the many seeking a pucca house.

We will need to create a paradigm shift in the way we design, engineer and construct social housing in India. If we continue to construct our houses and apartment buildings like we have being doing since the past three decades, it will be impossible to reach our intended target anytime in the foreseeable future.

There can be much learned product design and manufacture, including car manufacture. Some of the key aspects that can be directly transferred to house construction are:
  • Modularity: Modularity is a design approach that sub-divides a system into smaller components that can be replicated, scaled, and used in groups or independently. Modularity helps in reducing costs and has been extensively in car manufacture, computer manufacture, etc. Even in the furniture industry, the concept of modularity has been widely accepted as modular office furniture and modular kitchens.
  • Standardization: Modularity can be truly successful only through standardization. Standardization implements uniform technical standards and norms across the industry. This assures, uniformity, quality and ease of repetition.
  • Mass production: Mass production is the process of manufacturing large quantities of standardized products. This frequently utilizes assembly line technology. Mass production is the process of creating large numbers of similar products efficiently. With pre-cast/ pre-fab technology mass production in the construction industry has become a reality.

The concept of “Design for Manufacture Assembly (DFMA)” is gaining popularity in the design and construction industry internationally. The idea combines the two design approaches – “Design for Manufacture” and “Design for Assembly”. The idea is to treat the building as a “kit-of-parts” to be manufactured and assembled on site. It requires a paradigm shift in the way architects and engineers design buildings.

Though pre-cast technology exists, its applicability is immensely limited. Only when mass production is combined with modularity and standardization can pre-cast/ pre-fab have an industry-wide applicability and use, and be truly effective. Mass production has been highly successful in the car manufacturing industry and computer industry because of modularity and standardization.

Another argument against mass production of houses is the lack of uniqueness in buildings and monotony of urban landscape. But, don’t we all own cars that are mass produced and standardized to a great extent? Do we ever complain? Of course, different car manufacturers and different models look different from each other, but we have thousands of each brand and each model on the roads. There is modularity, standardization and mass production behind it.

I will talk about this a bit more in my next blog.

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