Aamodt / Plumb was commissioned to design a home for a young family on a beautiful site on Lake Austin with only one catch: an incredibly compressed 12-month schedule. ?12[...]

© Casey Dunn
Aamodt / Plumb was commissioned to design a home for a young family on a beautiful site on Lake Austin with only one catch: an incredibly compressed 12-month schedule. ?12 months is extremely fast!? notes Aamodt. ?Twelve months made us realize that we had to think very differently about how to do this project. What we did was to redesign the process of building a house.?
© Casey Dunn
The architects built a complete Building Information Model (BIM) of the home in Revit before any construction happened. Then, to meet the tight schedule the young architects employed fast-tracking techniques typically used on large-scale projects and adapted them to the residential context where tolerances are much more demanding. They worked with Bensonwood, a high-tech sustainable timber company, to manufacture panelized sections of the house in their factory off-site. At the same time, all of the site-work and foundation work was performed on-site by Austin?s high-performance builder Risinger Homes. This significantly reduced the amount of time to construct the building envelope. Matt Risinger of Risinger homes commented: ?We were able to frame the house in just two weeks. That?s pretty incredible for a 6,000 square foot custom home.? The factory fabrication also meant that the envelope of the house fit...