Prefabrication experiments - 108 - Ready mades, found objects, and the architecture of cast-offs

Artist Marcel Duchamp infamously assembled or showcased ordinary objects by transforming their nature and our perceptions of them. Creating something unexpected, critical or fun from an everyday commodity became regarded as a ready-made. In architecture the idea of a ready-made conveys prefabrication. Since modernism, the concept of a recycled object or an inspirational object has motivated many building and mass housing systems. Buckminster fuller deployed thousands of his Dymaxion deployment units derived from typical cylindrical Butler grain bins, while refrigerated railway cars informed Bertrand Goldberg’s Unishelter projects. Both projects represent classic prefab theory and prototypical ready-made architectures.

Articulated to an object’s potential to serve diverse functions at different scales, architecture created from «found objects» that no longer serve their original purpose can also conserve resources and raw materials. Amassing shipping containers, concrete infrastructure tubing or pipes, used tires, shipping pallets, cardboard tubes, ready-to-use castoffs infuse prefab theory with an artistic reference to the «objet trouvé» or «ready made» while reducing a building's ecological footprint. Reused Dimensionally regulated objects also address modularity: combining similar units in multiple, varying and differing patterns to achieve efficient, economical and an explicitly forceful architecture. 

The standard ISO shipping container is made of steel. It is a strong and durable volumetric building block designed to withstand the rigours of global transport and is employed readily as ready-made architecture. Analogous to manufactured single-wide housing volumes, the freight containers offer similar aggregation and massing possibilities which have been exploited by many designers. The Holyoke, Minnesota weekend house designed by Paul Stankey and Sarah Nordby employs two standard twenty-foot cargo containers as service spaces while defining the home’s served spaces. The two containers are positioned over pier foundations and compose the bearing walls supporting both the timber floor structure and a clearstory roof structure. The containers are used authentically and creatively structuring both their inner space and the outer void created by their juxtaposition.

The containers offer an interior space of about eight feet (2.4m) by twenty (6m) feet, which limit both planning flexibility and structural definition. Does this «objet trouvé» / ready made architecture help prefab's appeal by graphically exposing recycling or does it's marginal application continue to hinder a more comprehensive strategy for prefab as it proposes little architectural variation, adaptability or planning flexibility ?

Exterior photo of the juxtaposed containers