House Block was designed and built using AUAR’s discrete housing system consisting of a kit of parts, known as Block Type A. Each block was CNC milled from a single sheet of plywood, assembled by hand, and then post-tensioned on site. Constructed from 270 identical blocks, there are no predefined geometric types or hierarchy between parts. The discrete enables an open-ended, adaptive system where each block can be used as a column, floor slab, wall, or stair—allowing for disconnection, reconfiguration, and reassembly (Retsin 2019). The democratisation of design and production that defines the discrete creates points for alternative value systems to enter, for critical realignments in architectural production.

This work questions the role of precision and fidelity in our experience and representation of a “real” physical environment. On the one hand, the resulting VR environment is less complete and has lower fidelity than digital environments created through traditional modeling and rendering workflows. On the other hand, because each point in the point cloud is literally sampled from the actual environment, the resulting model also captures more of the noise and imprecision that characterizes our world. The result is an uncanny immersive experience that is less precise than traditional digital environments, yet represents many more of the unique physical characteristics that define our urban experiences.