The notion of building houses off-site has been gaining ground:
One way to do this is to build with 'cross-laminated timber' - and this blog piece and another from a year ago received some helpful comment from the States:
Here in North America, one might first see these mass timber plates CLT House wooden cross designs and wonder, “Why on earth would I need that big piece of wood to build with?” Well, there are several common misconceptions and myths surrounding the use of wood as a building material, especially these new mass timber CLT panels.
One of the best resources for clarifying the topic is the 2013 US CLT Handbook — the comprehensive guide Modern CLT construction [which] addresses a number of these common misconceptions about wood and CLT.
There are other solutions - including the first '3D build' house:
Tonight's edition of Radio 4's In Business looked at the latest ideas and projects:
Does the house building industry need to change? Manuela Saragosa meets the disruptors, the companies trying to transform how the vast majority of residential property is built. Across the country new factories are springing up - in a bid to manufacture our homes in much the same way as we do our cars. The risks are huge.
Significant investment is required to get things moving and demand for these new homes has yet to be tested. But the disruptors claim that the house building industry must modernise or die. Productivity is falling and traditional skills are in short supply - something that is likely to get worse as immigration reduces. Other countries, too, already build huge numbers of homes off-site, claiming that this results in quicker and cheaper construction. So, just how many of the hundreds of thousands of homes that we need to build might end up being factory produced?
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