KieranTimberlake is pleased to announce a new book, Cellophane House™

Released in January 2011 as a digital book, it is now offered in paperback, available for purchase on Amazon.com and at select bookstores worldwide including:

AIA Bookstore, Philadelphia
Builders Bookstore, Berkeley
Hennessey + Ingalls, Los Angeles
Joseph Fox Bookstore, Philadelphia
Museum of Modern Art, New York NY
National Building Museum Shop, Washington DC
Peter Miller Books, Seattle
Quimby's, Chicago
RIBA Bookshop, London
Wexner Center Store, Ohio State University, Columbus OH
William Stout, San Francisco

With 110 illustrations and detailed commentary, the book chronicles the design and execution of a five-story, off-site fabricated home assembled on-site in just sixteen days as part of The Museum of Modern Art exhibition, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. Through a series of questions, the book explores several of KieranTimberlake’s ongoing research agendas including speed of on-site assembly, design for disassembly, a holistic approach to the life cycle of materials, and the development of a lightweight, high-performance, energy gathering building envelope.

PAPERBACK | 156 pages | 5.875” x 8.25” | 110 color illustrations | ISBN: 978-0-9831301-3-0 | $20 US | May 2011

Also available electronically on Amazon, iBooks and Google Books. Compatible with iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle, Android, Mac and PC  | $9.99 US | Jan 2011

KieranTimberlake is pleased to announce the release of a new eBook, Cellophane House™,available for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle, Nook, Android, Mac and PC.

Cellophane House™ takes a radically different approach to off-site fabrication, reinventing the way buildings are assembled, what they are made of, and the experience of living in them. It demonstrates an end-of-life strategy that, enabled by an innovative structural frame and variety of connectors, makes disassembly and waste-diversion inherent in the building’s construction.

The book contains a detailed discussion of the house and 105 color photographs and illustrations. The iBooks version contains a time-lapse video of the assembly process.

Available at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks.

Looking for a prefabricated home for an infill location that's moderately priced, factory-built and sustainable? Then look no further than Builder LivingHome, a collaboration between Kieran Timberlake, the American Institute of Architects's 2008 Firm of the Year, and developer LivingHomes. Continue reading...

How well does a plastic building envelope function in the summer heat of New York City?  We attached sensors to the house to collect data on the thermal performance of our Next Gen Smartwrap(TM).  With the 53rd street buildings hovering over the exhibition site, the house is in shade for most of the day, so we settled on monitoring the west elevation - the only location with direct solar exposure - which currently gets about four hours of sunlight. We wired the west elevation with sensors on each of the four layers of the PET envelope. These read the envelope's surface temperatures. Data is routed to loggers tucked discreetly inside the chase wall and all wires are nestled into the grooves of the house's aluminum frame.  Data is logged every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, from July to October.  To add context to the building envelope data, we are monitoring the relative humidity on the third floor as well as solar radiation, ambient temperatures and relative humidity on the roof.  We are also analyzing the airspeed within the cavity space of the building envelope with a digital anemometer, a device for measuring wind speed in low velocity situations, to determine if the thermal "stack" performs as designed.

The data generated will not only inform our research group after the MoMA exhibit is over, but will also provide a more complete understanding of the insulative capacities this building envelope, the efficacy of the thermal stack, and the dynamics between outdoor temperatures and the interior environment of the house.

photo © Albert Vecerka

Cellophane House is a five-story, offsite fabricated dwelling commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, on view July 20 through October 20, 2008. The project is a full scale prototype that confronts several agendas head on: the economy of offsite fabrication, design for disassembly, recycled and recyclable materials, parametric modeling, and the evolution of SmartWrap™, a high-performance building skin.

The project is conceived as a system of building that allows the architecture to emerge from its opportunities and constraints. At its core, the system provides a framework for holding together a broad range of commercially available materials. In this instance, an industrial aluminum frame serves as the matrix for attaching translucent walls, floors, roof and building skin. The height of the structure forms a stack that allows the capture and release of heat from the sun, and provides ample surface area to harness solar power via the building envelope.

The outer walls of the building are made from NextGen SmartWrapTM, an advanced form of SmartWrapTM, consisting of an outer layer of transparent PET – the material used in soda bottles – and laminated with thin-film photovoltaic cells. The transparency allows sunlight to filter through the house, while solar power is harnessed through PV panels, enabling the house to function off-grid. An inner layer of 3M solar heat and UV blocking film lets daylight in while bouncing solar gain back out. A vented cavity between the two layers traps heat in the winter and vents it in the summer, greatly reducing the amount of energy required to heat and cool the house. In addition, the south side of the building features Schüco E² Glazing embedded with photovoltaic cells, promising further energy independence.

To determine the overall performance of the building and help evolve NextGen SmartWrap™ technology, meters on the building envelope and roof canopy are used to measure the capture of solar radiation. Sensors have also been placed in areas of the house to capture the thermal transfer between the exterior conditions of the house and how that affects the interior environment. By using an anemometer, the air flow in the double wall cavity will also be measured to ensure adequate circulation between all levels of the house. All wires for the tracking equipment are hidden in the Bosch Rexroth aluminum frame structure and the chase wall. All data is time stamped and records the weather conditions.

Monitoring will continue for the duration of the exhibition and the data will be analyzed to further refine the technology.

Cellophane House, interior