The site of the former Phoenix Ironworks steel mill in West Oakland, Calif., has been vacant for 35 years, even as a housing crisis has plagued the area and led to accidents like the Shipyard Fire ghost in 2016. But the five acres. The concrete slab will soon become a new home thanks to an effort by Autodesk, Kreysler & Associates, Factory_OS and MBH Architects.
The developers of The Phoenix plan to have 316 affordable units. Partial funding comes from the California Housing Accelerator Program and the Local Housing Trust Fund, which provides incentives for affordable housing projects that can meet tight deadlines impossible with traditional design and construction methods. To meet both their sustainability goals and the tight deadlines for unlocking state funds, The Phoenix team building had to turn to pre-fabrication and alternative materials.
The units have fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) composite facade panels that have an insulating interior of mycelium, the roots of mushrooms. MBH Architects also used Autodesk’s concept cloud tool Forma to make design decisions such as moving green spaces to be more accessible, adding floors and changing individual building heights to assess how sustainability is affected. Revit was used for detailed design.
The 36-foot-long FRP facade panels were developed and are being manufactured by Kreysler & Associates, a facade consultant in American Canyon, California. The mycelium biomaterial is being formed and “baked” into shapes that fit into the panels by Ecovative, a sustainable products company in Green Island, NY. The mycelium inserts sequester more carbon dioxide than the entire production of the panel emits due to the volume of plant material. The mycelium and the specific properties with which it was grown allow the panels to achieve degrees of fire resistance, acoustic, thermal and energy absorption.
Factory_OS is an Autodesk-invested modular builder that builds complete apartments (two- and one-bedroom units) at its factory in Vallejo, California. Factory_OS and Kreysler use Autodesk’s Design and Make platform to coordinate production and plan deliveries.
The mycelium filling of Phoenix panels has insulating and acoustic properties.
Photo by Jeff Yoders/ENR
MBH and Factory_OS have developed over 25 different modular apartment variations that can be stacked like LEGO in various ways for better building orientation or different functions. The team hopes to begin placing them at the West Oakland site in the spring, pending approvals, and have the project completed by 2025.
“I think most people would agree that work on the job is difficult to do efficiently and correctly, unless you’re assembling manufactured products,” says William Kreysler, president of Kreysler & Associates, which has created composite materials for use in art, architecture and industrial applications for 40 years. The goal of getting buildings built quickly and more sustainably with these methods appeals to him, he adds.
“For a facade, conventionally you hire a contractor, build a scaffolding, get a stack of Trespa panels and a bunch of aluminum extrusions and start putting a facade on that set of scaffolding,” he says.
It’s a long process. Kreysler said the incentives will help use systems like the Phoenix. “There has to be an incentive, whether it’s in the state of California or elsewhere, that’s a real driver to try to build buildings quickly.”
