why the insistence on cnc?

Have a look at "Design like you give a damn" for ideas. Shigeru Ban did some work on this, too, if I am not mistaken.

Orhan Ayyuce -
Interesting website, thanks. I haven't seen anything like that yet, cnc for plywd res. construction. It's for a fabrication class, and the prof has a cnc mill, router and of course there is the laser. He says no hand tooling...... boo. So the idea is to create panels that could be easily molded later, or something of the sort - we've worked in the past for a non-profit in south america, great opportunity to bring them to NYC.

Schnurrbart -
Thanks also - I just ordered that book, good call - unfortunately it's not in the libraries yet around here, but not too pricy on amazon and I've read about it in the last couple months.
One of the girls in our group worked for Shigeru Ban in Japan and is working on that end of it already....... Thanks for the thoughts!

i wonder what j thinks about this

J? I'm a little detached from archinect (trying to improve that ;-) what about j?

check out Yeh + Jerrard
One of their projects is called the JoT house and its a pre-fab thingy.
Its very cheap to build, easy to build, energy efficient, spacious, and easy on the eyes. They just built a mini prototype in Silverlake. It's very cute.

the subject of j's thesis was that which was mentioned above

Thanks soup, that's a good pdf.

hm...... i hope j has some words of advise for us then ;-)

Does anyone know of any current competitions in this subject?

"We will be cutting the individual (modular) panels on a cnc mill"

just, wow.

Who is your professor and what is their email? If this is a project to address post-disaster situations and a CNC mill was a requirement then it is doomed to fail....

imposing a technology on a community can be a far worse disaster than the original one...

go check out the grip clips (also in the Design Like You Give A Damn book) - screw prefab panels - a component system in the key.

and this competition - changemakers $5k housing comp.

Thanks for the links Cameron. The first article is right along our lines, we're talking about panels that are possibly cut to reduce all waste and to fit a particular shipping container.... just early thoughts though. And the second one I hadn't stumbled across yet either.

And yeah, I definitely should have clarified the cnc thing - the thought of CNC = low income of course crossed all of our minds, not necessarily something that works (at all!) but the idea is that we quickly produce something (testing many options quickly on the machines) that could be hand tooled, or something that could easily be molded with concrete or a similar material in the future.

Also check out the Fab Lab work done at the Bits and Atoms lab at MIT. They are building a Fab Lab in South Africa that might be able to fabricate housing locally.

Also Shigeru Ban (3 structures) and Gans and Jelacic are also covered in the book.

As stated already, I would check out the paper tube log cabins by Shigeru Ban.

Wow thank you guys you just hooked me up with some awesome resources. Thanks!!