Multi-family house design system based on component reusability

Abstract

In architectural field, sustainability issues that aim to save resources, reduce waste, and provide high quality living environment at the same time have recently become the center of public attention. Unfortunately, however, demand for high quality housing inevitably leads to frequent house renewal involving layout adjustments to properly respond to the various and changing needs of the tenants, which make high quality and resource saving difficult to coexist. As an effort to avoid the conflict, there have been many studies on new forms and functions of housing with both durability and adaptability, and Skeleton and Infill system is one of them. SI system is characterized by distinction between structure parts that we refer to as ‘skeleton’ and changeable building parts called ‘infill’ to provide customizable infill part based on tenant lifestyle and to achieve recycling of materials. In direction of SI housing, studies on detachable infill component have been conducted including ones of PANEKYO, NEXT21, Daiken Corporation, and Korea Institute of Construction Technology. However, practical use of housing module components is still in its infancy. One of the most convincing reasons is that few studies have been done on a means of supporting reuse of housing module components although reusability is one of the best assets in employing module components in construction. That is, despite of development of detachable components and interface, tenants in need of house remodeling with components currently have little information available on which component can be reused for their new house layout and how to minimize additional purchase of components. The objective of this study is to give component documentation and reusability check to tenants interactively based on the design changes that they make. In this study, we developed algorithm to decompose apartment unit layout into housing module components developed by Korea Institute of Construction Technol...