l. Modular Steel Housing
Air and Built have played with applying steel to housing projects by designing with modular containers. These are reliant on a steel skin over a steel frame, which has felt inefficient at the scale of a single house. This has led us to formulate the idea of making a composite structural skin, which would gain its strength from being a continuous surface. Initially looking at sheet pile walls we wanted to form a flat 25m thick structure. All openings would be formed from laser cutting 3 sides and folding on the fourth to provide both lateral strength and solar shading , cills, lintols etc. This in turn led to thinking of the envelope as a rain catcher collecting water from both horizontal and vertical surfaces along the ground plane, no longer at the eaves. The steel sheet could be laser cut into forming a 5mm groove to act as a route for controlled tracking of water beads to avoid discolouration under windows and doors and make for a less industrial appearance to the building by applying pattern to the surface, more appropriate to the personal nature of housing.
However we feel that the cost of this would be more appropriate to a bespoke house. For Living Steel 2008 we want to research structurally insulated panels using steel. Insulated steel panels exist but are only used as cladding. We were concerned about cold bridging through intermediate floors and this led us to design single storey housing. This feels appropriate to the site reducing issues of wind uplift and retaining the impressive tree line as the horizon line.
The research will require understanding the extent of the spans possible, the thickness of the steel, that is required internally & externally, the extent of the size of openings possible to cut from a continuous skin, the application of steel to a climate with extreme temperature differences and the application of steel materials to the domestic market allowing for a poetic interpretation of the product.
