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At a factory in Austin, a startup recently finished its first prototype: a row house it plans to replicate in cities nationwide to help with the housing shortage. Row housesnarrow, multistory homes that share walls with neighbors on each sideare ubiquitous in older neighborhoods from Brooklyn to San Francisco, but arent commonly built now. The American Housing Corp., wants to bring them back. Row homes are an underbuilt category in the United States, says Riley Meik, cofounder and CEO of the American Housing Corp. The company has developed a kit of parts that can be quickly manufactured, shipped to building sites in dense urban neighborhoods, and assembled, helping shrink construction costs. While the price of an American Housing Corp. row house will vary, some of the first row houses in Austin will sell for around $750,000. From left: American Housing Corp. founders Riley Meik, Bobby Fijan, Harris Rothaermel, and William Davis [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] The U.S. is actually good at building single family homes on the outskirts of townyou look at the numbers that Lennar or D.R. Horton does, they are building over 150,000 homes a year,” Meik says. “But they are never going to build in the cities where people already live and want to live. The challenge of the missing middle Meik, an engineer who previously cofounded a rocket company, started thinking about housing during a stint at SpaceXs former headquarters near Los Angeles. On his way to work, passing through single-family neighborhoods, he looked at the houses and wondered why more of them werent starting to be replaced with duplexes or fourplexes. Like many cities, large swaths of the greater Los Angeles area had zoning laws for years that restricted construction to single-family homes. Then a 2021 state law that changed that, allowing lots to be split for duplexes. Still, few developers were building the projects. [Image: The American Housing Corp.] Meik knew that building more missing middle housingbuildings like row houses that are bigger than apartments but smaller than single-family housescould help begin to fill the enormous housing shortage in cities like L.A. I started tweeting about it, and saying, Its legal. Why arent we doing it? he says. He connected with his eventual cofounders online. We met just kind of screaming into the voidthis is a problem that needs to get solved in this country, and we want to work on it, he says. That brought us all together. It’s something we’ve all been obsessed with for a very long time. So it wasn’t hard to convince each other that we should jump off into the deep end together and build this thing. They saw that a challenge for missing middle housing was the cost of construction. There were probably hundreds of projects that I was seeing where someone had the approvals in hand, they were fully cleared, but the construction costs were too high and they couldnt start the project, Meik says. [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] Shrinking construction costs To help reduce costs, the startup turned to prefab construction. The concept isn’t newbuilders have been making housing parts in factories since Sears houses were shipped on trains in the early 20th century. Basic manufactured homes, formerly known as mobile homes, now often look more like conventional houses but cost significantly less. Other startups have tried to scale up prefab construction for apartment buildings, backyard guest houses, or higher-end homes. Some have failed spectacularly, like Katerra, which raised more than $2 billion before going out of business. [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] To avoid one of the pitfalls that some other builders have faced, the American Housing Corp. designed all of its components to fit inside stndard shipping containers so that they can be moved cost-effectively. The shipping containers can travel affordably by rail, rather than on a truck, from the factory to a city. I think one of the things that has held back prefab to date, specifically volumetric modular, is it is incredibly expensive to ship those modules, Meik says. They’re oversized loads, and you get into the tens of thousands of dollars per module to ship them. We can be at less than $5,000, all-in, to ship a unit from Texas to California. [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] Factories can be expensiveKaterra spent $150 million on one before it closedand if they need to be built near each market, it makes the product uneconomical. (Cosmic, another startup that has been rebuilding homes in the L.A. area after the 2025 wildfires, takes a different approach to this problem, building low-cost microfactories at each site.) [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] The American Housing Corp. designed a new kit of partsfrom floor and wall panels to fully assembled kitchens and bathroomsthat can be built in an automated factory and then shipped to a site for quick assembly. The core materials, like steel and fiberglass reinforced cement panels, are more common in automotive or aerospace than housing, he says. Designing a system for multistory homes was a challenge. “I think most people thought we were crazy for choosing to build a three-story home as our first,” says Meik. “The structural engineering, assembly process, and equipment required are completely different than building something as simple as a backyard home. But we believe that the only way to solve the housing crisis is by building missing-middle housing at scale. And we felt that row homes were the obvious choice.” [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] A new manufacturing model The company started building a minimum viable factory last summer to begin testing its manufacturing process, and then started building a prototype house. They deliberately took it slowlydesigning and building one floor, learning from it before building the second floor, and then refining the process again before building the third floor. As the team experimented with the first house, the total manufacturing time took weeks, but as it begins operations, it will move much more quickly. The company is now planning a new factory that aims to build one home per day. Right now, the early factory is churning out building parts that are being sent to Intertek, a certification company, for testing. After certification, the company plans to begin building homes in its first factory this year, while the new, larger factory is under construction. [Photo: The American Housing Corp.] When the parts are delivered to a building site, theyre designed to be assembled with a crane in days. All of this shrinks costs enough that projects can pencil out, Meik says. The company also plans to act as a developer, working with partners to buy land on empty lots in dense neighborhoods, so that it can handle the entire process. “Our biggest learning from other [prefab] companies is that in order to have full control of what you build and how you build it (and truly be able to innovate in the way homes are built), you need to be both the prefab company and the real estate development firm,” Meik says. “Vertical integration has given us the freedom on the engineering side to redesign the home from the ground up in order to make it mass-producible in a factory setting. We don’t use two-by-fours, drywall, or hammers and nails. Our homes are designed to be built with machines.” Using density to lower housing costs For consumers, the biggest reason that the homes can be more affordable is density. Land is the most expensive thing in the areas that we want to build in, Meik says. So the only way that we can really decrease cost for the end customer is by fitting as many homes on a certain piece of land as we can.
Category:
E-Commerce
The humble tripod is an unheralded but essential part of any film or photo shoot. It’s the key to making shots level and pans smooth, and as a piece of equipment it’s seemingly about as simple as can be, with three legs and a mount at the top. But as any photographer or filmmaker knows, setting up a tripod properly can involve dozens of moving parts, clamps, pivots, and adjustments. A new tripod system from Italian camera equipment maker Manfrotto turns this setup into a single fluid motion. [Photo: Manfrotto/Layer Design] The Manfrotto Ones unique design allows for all three of its legs to be deployed simultaneously, extending out to the desired length in concert, each locking in place with a single lever. Thanks to a ball-based hub at the top of the tripod, the camera can be leveled in another single motion. And a custom-designed mount makes it possible to swap out cameras within seconds. [Photo: Manfrotto/Layer Design] The idea was to adapt this essential piece of gear to the way content creators are blending their media types. It’s increasingly common for content producersfrom social media amateurs to film and photography prosto quickly move from still cameras to mobile phones, toggle between photo and film, and alternate between horizontal and vertical frames. Designed by the London industrial design studio Layer, the Manfrotto One tripod was reconsidered from every angle to be easier to use and more adaptable to dynamic conditions. “Much of the brief was around quickness,” says industrial designer Benjamin Hubert, founder of Layer. “You’re quickly moving or panning a camera, then you’re able to snap it off and do some handheld shots, and then [you can put the camera] back on and quickly reset the height or the angle of the setup. It’s those transitional elements that allow for speed of use and as frictionless interaction as possible.” Seeing the One as a once-in-a-decade flagship product, Manfrotto has made an eight-figure investment in this new platform. It’s partly an effort to meet changing user needs, but also to stay ahead of the competition. “They’re seeing a lot of people enter the space, a lot of inexpensive products, a lot of commodity, a lot of things out of China and other parts of the world,” Hubert says. “They needed to move the needle and create something that was a big step forward.” [Photo: Manfrotto/Layer Design] Designing a new tripod Despite the seemingly simple makeup of a tripod, it’s a highly complex piece of equipment, and redesigning it to function quickly was far from straightforward. Manfrotto reached out about two years ago to Layer, known for its conceptual and product work ranging from airplane seats to wheelchairs to cryptocurrency wallets to dog toys. Hubert and his team broke the tripod down to what ended up being hundreds of individual components and reconsidered what made them work smoothly. “All the adjustment levers, all the attachment points, all the joints, everything is there because it has to be there from a functional point of view,” Hubert says. “Managing all of that noise and that amount of elements became one of the biggest challenges.” [Photo: Manfrotto/Layer Design] After churning through hundreds of prototyped components and narrowing them down to a series of viable options, Layer presented its designs as a kit of parts, with interchangeable elements and a shared logic. Combining the best bits, they dialed in on what became the One. Prioritizing how quickly the tripod could unfurl and how easily users could swap cameras on and off, Layer’s design focused on the size and placement of its key levers, making sure they could be manipulated almost effortlessly. The designers rethought th tripod’s conventional telescoping legs and created a system for the legs to extend both up and down from a central shaft, allowing the length to be controlled by a single lever. And rather than hiding parts or masking the functional elements of the tripod, Layer opted to accentuate the most critical moving parts in its overall form factor. “It’s like a skeleton constantly on display,” Hubert says. With the Manfrotto One tripod system’s retail price starting at $499, this may not be the gear for the average TikTok user. But the Ones clever design and adaptable use may even have amateurs looking at their old tripods with an unexpected level of scorn.
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E-Commerce
The record-breaking Falcons Flight roller coaster starts out slow, but don’t be fooled. Seconds into the ride at the new Six Flags Qiddiya City in Saudi Arabia, passengers are jolted into a high-speed journey that ascends mountainsides, passes through dark tunnels, and then does it all over again. The ride reaches a height of nearly 640 feet, lasts for nearly 3.5 minutes, and travels more than 2.6 miles. It’s the largest, longest, and fastest roller coaster in the world, reaching peak speeds of about 155 mph. To make it, a European design and manufacturing company used the most powerful electro-magnetic propulsion system on the market. Though Saudi Arabia just killed plans for the Line, its futuristic 150-mile-long city, it now holds records at its park, including the world’s tallest inversion on a roller coaster and the world’s tallest pendulum ride. [Photo: Six Flags Qiddiya City] Falcons Flight holds the speed, height, and length records for roller coasters, according to Intamin Amusement Rides, the Liechtenstein-based company that designed it. Founded in 1967, the company’s work spans from monorails in Moscow to an observation tower in Argentina, and includes what it claims was the world’s first giant drop ride in 1995. It says its newest roller coaster is part of “a commitment to pushing boundaries.” Intamin’s linear synchronous motors (LSM) drive system gives Falcons Flight an edge in terms of engineering. LSMs use electro-magnetic propulsion to move the ride forward through permanent magnets on the coaster train and electromagnets on the tracks. That’s different from other methods, like an old-school chain lift pulled by a motor, or a hydraulic launch. With LSMs, a moving magnetic field pulls the train forward. LSMs debuted on two Intamin-designed ridesSuperman: Escape From Krypton at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California, and the Tower of Terror II ride at Dreamworld in Australia, both of which opened in 1997. Today, it’s a popular way to build roller coasters because it’s more efficient and cheaper to run. It’s also super fast. Intamin says Falcons Flight was was always intended to break records; the bird-shaped trains were designed to be aerodynamic, with windshields “engineered to pierce through the air,” not to mention save riders’ eyes from all that wind. The Six Flags Qiddiya City opening late last year came after the November closure of Six Flags America just east of Washington, D.C. Six Flags announced later that month that more closures are forthcoming for underperforming parks. The Quiddiya City park is its first outside the United States.
Category:
E-Commerce
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