The Castle: A Lean Micro-Dwelling

The Castle, a long-term collaboration between the School of Architecture & Design and local youth-service organizations, intends to assist youth at risk of homelessness by deploying micro-dwellings to households experiencing spatial and emotional distress. Responding to a demonstrated gap in the housing market, the brief for The Castle demands a dwelling that is small, mobile, autonomous and spatially clever. Aside from important social and pedagogical agendas The Castle explores ‘leanness’ in timber construction. Three prototypes have resulted in ‘panitecture,’ a highly adaptive construction system composed of CNC-router cut folded plate plywood wall panels integrated with built-in furniture. Panitecture results in an overall reduction in material waste, direct applicability to a low-skilled workforce and opportunities for mass-customisation, accommodating infinite design configurations to be processed without the need for continual redesign. Options are also available for deployment onto site—as a digital file, as individual components, assembled panels, an assembled carcass or as a completed dwelling.