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Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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August 2024 #16301 Page #10
Wall Panel Technology, Part V: Whole House Evolution By Joe Kannapell
he dream of having a single person model an entire structure was admirable, but developing the software to do that turned into a decade-long struggle. Five years ago, I chronicled the development saga in my series on Fifty Years of Truss Design, Parts XI – XV. As the story told, the result was workable software, but let’s consider some additional elements in the story not mentioned there. Did these advancements increase productivity in the design effort? Or, more importantly, did they increase sales of components? With the adoption of trusses being nearly universal, whole house software won’t grow truss sales noticeably. But, if viable, whole house software should grow wall panel sales, and the history of wall panel acceptance tells part of this story.
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1950 to 1980 – After the midpoint of the 20th century, whole house packages went into the construction of a considerable portion of home sales, especially in the Midwest. These were efficiently designed, well-built homes that were built offsite and shipped compactly by panelizers like National Homes and many dozens of others. Yet these companies didn’t survive past the 1980s and were displaced largely by onsite framing. In the aftermath, offsite panelization took a hit, except in certain pockets where component manufacturers supplied whole house components, four of which are shown in the image. The demise of panelizers in the period should dispel the notion that there is a sales advantage to supplying whole house packages. 1980 to present – Sinking lumber prices in the early 1980s also shrank the competitiveness of wall panels, as factory labor costs became a higher percentage of the sales price of panels. However, Lenny Sylk initiated a new strategy, emphasizing the value of componentizing the whole house, and underscored his approach by renaming his company from Material Fabrication to Shelter Systems. In 1985, he pioneered what came to be known as Framing the American Dream (FAD), gaining hard data on the cost savings of panelization by erecting a componentized house next to a stickframed house. When the economy began its long march upward in the 1990s, Framing the American Dream was repeated at the International Builders Show for a national audience, encouraging CMs to pursue panelization and the software to support it.
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