According to Metropolis, designers Casey Rehm and Erik Ghenoiu, who teach at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, are experimenting with combining the possibilities offered by cross-laminated timber or CLT with robotics as a way to build affordable housing for the homeless. The high cost of CLT is a disadvantage to expanding its use but the team may have found a solution by letting artificial intelligence work the table saws.
“Right now the industry is manually laying up two-by-sixes into industrial presses, pressing them into panels, and then manually cutting window openings,” says Rehm. Using large-scale industrial robots could transform the manufacturing process so that, as he puts it, “the only waste is the sawdust from the width of the saw blade.”
Supported by grants from the W.M. Keck Foundation, The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation, and The Ahmanson Foundation, the researchers are also working to develop cost-effective CLT panels that can be aggregated into rapid deployment housing.
“We have all the tools to act, so we can either use them abstractly or we can use them on concrete instances of this incredibly pressing homeless problem that surrounds us,” says Ghenoiu. “This is how we can get more skin in the game.”
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