Many parts of the world are experiencing a housing crisis, with demand in urban areas often outpacing supply, leading to soaring prices.
In countries including the UK and the US, an aging population of builders combined with a drive to fill the housing shortage means there is a need for more construction workers. The UK’s Construction Industry Training Board found that the country will need 250,000 more workers by 2028 to meet building targets but in 2023, more people left the industry than joined.
UK technology company Automated Architecture, or AUAR (pronounced “our”) believes it has a solution. It makes portable micro-factories that can produce the wooden framing of a house — the walls, floors and roofs. Co-founder Mollie Claypool says the micro-factories will be able to produce the panels quicker, cheaper and more precisely than a timber framing crew, freeing up carpenters to focus on the construction of the building.
Despite the focus on automation, Claypool insists she is not trying to put anyone out of work. “Automation isn’t replacing jobs. Automation is filling the gap,” she told CNN.
AUAR charges a developer by the square foot to produce the timber panels of a home. To begin, architects send AUAR the building plans, and its software, Master Builder, uses AI to calculate how many panels are needed, and exactly how much timber the developer needs to buy.
The micro-factory fits into a shipping container which is sent to the building site along with an operator. Inside the factory, a robotic arm measures, cuts and nails the timber into panels up to 22 feet (6.7 meters) long, keeping gaps for windows and doors, and drilling holes for the wiring and plumbing. The contractor then fits the panels by hand.
One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical house in about a day — a process which, according to Claypool, would take a normal timber framing crew four weeks — and is able to produce framing for buildings up to seven stories tall.
Claypool launched the company in 2019 with Gilles Retsin, after working together at The Bartlett School of Architecture, part of University College London, where they focused on automation and technology in architecture.
She says their service is 30% cheaper than a standard timber framing crew, and up to 15% cheaper than buying panels from large factories and shipping them to a site.
It is also more environmentally friendly, Claypool claims. “Timber is a natural material, which means it has bends, it twists, sometimes it has bits taken out of it, it has knots,” she explained. The micro-factory responds to flaws in the wood and calculates how best to work with the available material, reducing wasted wood.
She adds that the precision of the micro-factories means that the panels fit together tightly, reducing the heat loss of the final home, making them more energy efficient.
AUAR currently has three micro-factories operating in the US and EU, with five more set to be delivered this year.
Knock on wood
David Philp, chair of the Chartered Institute of Building’s digital and innovation advisory panel, who isn’t involved with AUAR, told CNN, “these innovations were an opportunity a few years ago, but now they’re a necessity. They’re not a nice‑to‑have anymore — they’re key to any construction business model.”
The UK government pledged to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029. In the 2024 to 2025 financial year, there were 208,600 net additional dwellings in England, according to the government — a 6% decrease compared to the previous year.
To meet the demand, Claypool says that the UK will have to turn away from traditional brick houses, to wood-framed
Building a timber framed home produces 20% less greenhouse gases compared to brick, according to an assessment by Bangor University, in Wales. They are also quicker to build.
The UK government says it plans to “incorporate timber into the construction sector through innovative modern methods of construction,” and plant more trees to provide a supply of wood. However, it found that builders and developers were reluctant to use wood as they thought it was not as durable as brick, and more susceptible to fire.
Only 9% of houses built in England in 2019 were timber framed, compared to 92% in Scotland, where Philps says there is a tradition of using wood to build houses.
One of the big challenges for new technologies like AUAR to scale in the UK will be countering negative perceptions, both with consumers and the industry, Philp said. “The technology and standards are there — the real barrier is culture. We’ve got deeply ingrained traditional ways of working, so the challenge now is people and change, not tools and processes.”
Other companies have developed similar approaches. London-based Facit Technologies makes micro-factories that produce wooden components for construction projects on site, while US-based Cuby Technologies produces modular units that each manufacture different elements for a home; these units are combined to form much larger setups.
AUAR has raised £7.7 million ($10.3 million) to date, and is expanding into the US, where a lack of housing and preference for using wood makes it a large potential market. Ninety-four percent of single-family homes built in the US in 2024 were timber-framed, and the housing shortage is estimated at between 1.5 and 5.5 million homes. A report by Goldman Sachs found that this shortage was driving house prices up and was “the root of the affordability problem.”
AUAR partnered with Rival Holdings, a US based investment company focused on the construction industry, in 2024. A representative for AUAR said it is in a “growth phase in the US and have several more new partnerships,” but did not disclose further details. Rival Holdings did not respond to a request for comment.
AUAR says it has 600,000 square meters (6.5 million square feet) of panels in production, equating to hundreds of homes, and Claypool hopes to have 1,000 micro-factories on sites by 2030, producing 200,000 homes a year.
For her, the problem of housing is not just one of logistics, materials and funding.
“Good homes are not just a construction problem. It’s a social problem,” Claypool said. “When homes are scarce and we’re slow to build them, everything else suffers.”
