Hours, not months

House in a Day is an underexposed part of how Refunc actually works: the one place where the method has to prove itself under real pressure, instead of just being described. A project that runs for months lets an idea sit in a drawing before it costs a real cut; a day removes that buffer entirely. The idea and the material meet each other directly, in front of whoever is in the hall, and neither gets to hide behind the other. That is the experiment, and it is a real one, not "does this style of building work", which was answered years ago, but whether the method itself holds up with no rehearsal and no scale model.

What the deadline actually does is worth tracing hour by hour, because "less time to think" undersells it. At nine there is more material in the hall than anyone can properly evaluate, so the first calls get made on almost nothing: a shape, a weight, whether two edges look like they might agree once they are next to each other. By midday those first calls are already built into something, wrong ones included, and there is no draft to revert to: a cut that turns out wrong gets answered with another cut, in the same afternoon, by the same hands that made the first one. The fix is not a redesign. It is simply the next decision, made faster than the one before it, because there is less day left to make it in.

By mid-afternoon the group is not really choosing any more so much as reacting, and that is the actual mechanism at work, not a side effect of running out of time. Perfectionism is a way of postponing a decision until you feel certain enough to make it, and certainty is exactly what a few hours cannot manufacture. Take the hours away that it needs and a different kind of judgement takes over, one built from what is actually standing in front of you rather than from what you were hoping for. None of this is metaphorical pressure, either: the house has to stand by evening because people are going home, the trailer has to leave because it was borrowed for the day, the light changes because the sun does. It is close to compressing the last week before a graduation show, the one where the thesis stops being precious and starts being finished, into a single working day, except nobody is handing out an extension.

Design for succession

One day is not long enough to invent a question. House in a Day answers one that has already been asked, hundreds of times, of hundreds of materials.

The question

Since 2006 Refunc's design laboratory in The Hague and Berlin has been asking one question about every material it finds:

What else can this be?

House in a Day is that question run at full speed, in public, with whoever showed up that morning. A trailer arrives empty. By evening a fridge door is a window panel, an IBC cage is a wall, a heap of pallet wood is a roof, and the answer, a house, on wheels, lit from inside, is standing in front of the people who found it out. The day does not slow the question down; it compresses years of the same argument into one afternoon, so the argument can be watched happening rather than read about afterwards.

The material behind that question is not folklore: it is kept, a running matrix of materials against the verbs they have been asked to perform, built up project by project since 2006. It is called the periodic system, and it is browsable, not theoretical. House in a Day is one row of it, built at full scale, in a day.

Screwed, not glued

Nothing you build here is a final state. Every part arrived from an earlier use and is on its way to a later one, so you build it to come apart again: screwed rather than glued, clamped rather than welded. The house is one afternoon in a much longer life of the material.

Which is why nothing here gets disguised. The tank stays a tank: original colour, printed markings, the scratches and the wear left exactly as they were found. Nothing is repainted, nothing is sanded back to something neutral, and nothing is made to look old on purpose. It is cut and bolted, and it goes on saying out loud where it came from.

So the question in front of a heap of material is never what is this made of. It is what can this, as it is, be asked to do next. Functions are verbs: to carry, to close, to keep the rain out, to sit on, and a verb can be answered by almost anything that happens to be standing there. Waste is simply a resource that has not been asked yet.

The same day, after dark

The last photographs of that first day were taken between half past seven and ten to eight in the evening. The house is finished, everyone is inside it, and the panels that were fridge doors in the morning are lit from within.

Two people sitting inside the house, looking out Someone framed in the round window, a washing machine drum The house glowing in the dark hall The finished house at the end of the evening
The finished house standing at the quay under the cranes