How URBAL builds
The factory
comes to the field.
A containerised micro-factory arrives on site ready to run — robotic mills and saws cut stone and timber to the building's exact digital twin, and every offcut is recycled back into the town. No waste stream, no idle equipment, no waiting on a supply chain.
The Problem
Built to hit a price. Not built to last.
Downsized lumber. Shaved insulation. Vinyl and foam standing in for real material. A house engineered to survive the closing, not the mortgage — needing constant reinvestment just to keep from falling apart.
The Answer
CNC-cut stone. 500-year design life.
No steel frame degrading from the inside. No siding to replace in year twelve. Built once, engineered to outlast the argument entirely.
[Image: containerised micro-factory on green space, robotic gantries stacking stone]
50 containers
The entire micro-factory ships in and sets up on green space inside the square mile itself.
1.5–3 days
A structural shell and roof, dry-assembled by robotic gantry.
7–12 days
A single building reaches turnkey — dry-assembled, no curing time.
4–6 weeks
A full courtyard block of roughly 32 buildings, start to finish.
Zero waste
Every offcut — stone dust, chips, timber kerf — becomes plaster, paving, or panel.
Sub-millimetre
Every MEP run is resolved in the digital twin and milled in before assembly, not cut on site.
[Image: CNC stone blocks, tongue-and-groove joints, dry assembly on site]
Construction
Built in days. Engineered for centuries.
Dry-assembled, so there's no curing and no waiting. A structural shell and roof go up in 1.5 to 3 days, and a building reaches turnkey in 7 to 12. A full courtyard block of around 32 buildings takes 4 to 6 weeks.
The 50-layer problem
A modern building is a chemical sandwich held together by tape.
Conventional light timber framing wraps a house in fifty-odd layers of synthetic membrane, petroleum foam, OSB and tape. It goes up fast, but every one of those layers is a seam that can fail — moisture enters a cavity and cannot leave, and the wall degrades from the inside.
URBAL removes the layers instead of improving them — fewer seams, fewer failure points, less to maintain.
By shrinking standards to hit a target price point, that market delivers a product that is simultaneously hyper-expensive to buy and remarkably cheap in quality — locking buyers into a lifecycle of endless maintenance for a house that won't outlive its 30-year mortgage without major renovations. URBAL isn't in that situation: fewer layers means less to renovate, and what's left is stone, mass timber, and zinc — materials that age, not degrade.
| System | Light timber construction | URBAL |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | 11 layers — concrete, rebar, vapour barriers, foam, dimple board, French drains, mudsills. | Massive dry-set granite bases. No concrete, no rebar, nothing that can rot. |
| Exterior walls | 12 layers — drywall, vapour barrier, studs, cavity insulation, OSB, continuous foam, WRB wrap, rainscreen, siding. | Post-tensioned CNC limestone. Tongue-and-groove blocks, EPDM gaskets, MEP chases already milled in. |
| Floors & ceilings | 9 layers — drywall, resilient channels, I-joists, acoustic batts, OSB subfloor, glue, underlayment, finish floor. | Solid Dowel-Laminated Timber spans. Exposed timber ceiling below, solid floor above, utility channels pre-milled. |
| Interior walls | 6 layers — studs, acoustic insulation, two sheets of drywall, tape, mud, paint. | Rigid dryboard pressed entirely from the offcuts of our own DLT line. |
| Roof | 10 layers — trusses, blown insulation, OSB deck, ice shield, underlayment, drip edges, asphalt shingles. | DLT structure, wood-fibre insulation, standing-seam zinc that patinates rather than degrades. |
Forty-eight layers become a handful. No petrochemical foam, no glue, no plastic wrap to tear — every material breathable, non-toxic and able to manage its own moisture.
The digital twin
Nobody drills a hole on site.
Before a stone is cut, the building already exists in full as a digital twin. Every mechanical, electrical and plumbing run is resolved in the model — then milled directly into the stone and the timber at the factory, to sub-millimetre tolerance.
Digital twin
The whole building, resolved in BIM before fabrication starts.
Factory chase routing
Conduit channels, service chases and plumbing drops milled into the components.
Snap-in utilities
Pre-made MEP assemblies drop into channels that already fit them.
Zero site cutting
No chasing studs, no smashing through finished walls to correct a clash.
Trade installation time drops by up to 80%, and the clash — the thing that actually delays and inflates every conventional job — is resolved in code months before anyone arrives on site.
The closed loop
Nothing cut from the earth or the forest leaves as waste.
The byproduct of making the buildings is the material that finishes them and the paths that connect them. Not a recycling programme bolted on afterwards — the factory is designed so there is no waste stream to manage.
Stone dust → plaster & paint
Fine limestone and granite dust captured during wet CNC milling becomes breathable lime plaster and slurry paint.
Stone chips → paths
Larger cuttings and aggregate are reclaimed into permeable resin-bound paving for the car-free footpath network.
Timber kerf → dryboard
Every offcut and routing chip from the DLT line is compressed into rigid partition board with no binder added.
The building system
Held up by gravity.
The whole structure works in pure compression — stone stacked so precisely that its own weight holds it together. There is no steel frame, no concrete, and no glue anywhere in the assembly. Every element is milled to specification in a factory parked inside the square mile, then dry-assembled by robotic gantry a few hundred feet away.
01
Walls
Limestone and granite. Pure compression.
CNC-machined tongue-and-groove blocks, sealed with EPDM gaskets and stacked dry.
- No steel frame, no rebar, no concrete anywhere in the wall.
- Mass stone construction has proven itself for centuries with minimal maintenance — and here, that maintenance is automated.
- The same robotic CNC milling that cut each block can rejuvenate it in place, keeping the precision-fit tongue-and-groove joints tight. That is what makes 500 years an engineering statement rather than a marketing one.
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Walls
Limestone and granite. Pure compression.
CNC-machined tongue-and-groove blocks, sealed with EPDM gaskets and stacked dry.
- No steel frame, no rebar, no concrete anywhere in the wall.
- Mass stone construction has proven itself for centuries with minimal maintenance — and here, that maintenance is automated.
- The same robotic CNC milling that cut each block can rejuvenate it in place, keeping the precision-fit tongue-and-groove joints tight. That is what makes 500 years an engineering statement rather than a marketing one.
Post-tensioning
Gravity holds the base. Tension holds the top.
Below three storeys the stone needs only its own weight. Above that, it needs help.
- The top floors carry almost no load, so wind and seismic motion could rock the upper courses and let the gaskets lose their seal.
- Vertical tendons run the full height through 1.5–2 in ducts milled into the block cores — cut in the same factory pass, so no time is added on site.
- Tendons drop in as the robots stack. A jack at roof level tensions them to 20–50 tons per segment and caps them off in about three hours.
- The tendons are never exposed. They run inside ducts milled through solid limestone, so the stone itself is the barrier between them and anything happening in the building.
- This is facade pre-compression, not floor structure. The floors are solid timber; the tendons only hold the upper courses of the walls steady against wind and seismic movement.
- And they are redundant by design. Several run through every segment, so one losing tension reduces capacity rather than putting anything at risk. Nothing here depends on a single element behaving perfectly for five hundred years.
- This does not make the wall a tension structure. It pre-compresses it — post-tensioning is what guarantees the compression system, not what compromises it.
Floors — DLT
Dowel-laminated timber. No adhesive.
Softwood boards friction-locked with hardwood dowels, under a CNC limestone compression face.
- Dry dowel assembly throughout: no screed, no concrete, no glue.
- Nothing is bonded, so every floor can be taken apart and its materials recovered intact.
- A timber core under a stone face gives you mass-timber acoustics with a stone wearing surface.
Interior walls
Machined DLT. No gypsum board anywhere.
Partitions are CNC-machined DLT panels with mouldings cut into the timber, not applied to it.
- There is no drywall in an URBAL building.
- Drywall is what makes ordinary interiors feel temporary — it dents, it cracks, it is thrown away at every renovation.
- A machined timber panel is a finished surface the day it goes in, and stays one.
Roof and services
Zinc cassettes. Harnesses drop down the stone.
The roof arrives as pre-assembled DLT and zinc cassettes rather than being built up in place.
- Across the Inner and Outer Wall, roof space is commercial hydroponic farming — not residential terrace.
- Channels for wiring and PEX are milled into the stone before it leaves the factory.
- Pre-fabricated harnesses simply drop down them. No wall chasing, no core drilling, no patching — the building is never cut into to make it work.
The site factory
The factory comes to the field.
A containerised 50-container micro-factory is parked on green space inside the square mile itself.
- It sits on timber and composite mats over raw soil, so the ground is never compacted.
- Raw quarry blocks and 50–60 ft DLT panels arrive as stock. Diamond wire saws cut blanks; 24 six-axis arms mill the profiles, gasket tracks and service raceways.
- Scanners verify every piece to within half a millimetre before a laser etches its QR code. Nothing travels half-finished, so nothing arrives damaged.
- It runs on grid power, and when the square mile is done it folds onto its own hydraulic legs and leaves within four days — leaving parkland.
Zero waste
The offcuts become the building.
Nothing leaves the site as waste. Every stream goes back into the town.
- Stone offcuts are crushed into 1–6 mm aggregate for courtyard paving and interior terrazzo.
- Stone dust is filter-pressed, ground finer than 45 microns and blended with lime to make the paint and Pastellone plaster.
- Wood chips off the DLT line are pressed into the dryboard that backs the party walls.
- The floor you walk on and the paint on your wall are made from what was cut away to build the room.
Finishes
Bare stone, lime plaster, limewash, azulejo.
A short, closed palette. No synthetic coatings and no cement renders, ever.
- Every permitted finish is vapour-open and repairable in place.
- All of them improve with age rather than degrade.
- The lineage is Fernand Pouillon, who built load-bearing stone housing in Marseille in 1948–53 — though he used lime mortar and friction where URBAL uses CNC tongue-and-groove with gaskets.
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