The industrialized production of houses and buildings
was the focus of many architecture and trade magazines in the course of the
first half of the twentieth century as manufacturers, designers and inventors
engaged in applying Fordist and Taylorist production models to building and
construction. Predominantly to supply the wartime economy, industrialized
building and mass-production could respond to expanding demand. Building
methods had been influenced by industrialization since the nineteenth century as
catalogued components and pieces began to percolate designs transforming
traditional craftsmen into the sub-assemblers we know today.
A special issue of Architectural Forum in September
1942 entitled The House of 194X detailed
a particularly fertile time for American prefabrication. The issue endorsed
prefabrication as the most significant development in building techniques. All
areas of the construction process were affected and the factory would yield the
post-war house. The editors cited the 73 362 prefabricated wartime units
produced by their contemporary industry as proof of the sector's
proficiency. Applied to every dwelling function, it was the need for
adaptability and personalization which characterized Architectural Forum’s
avant-garde take on a need for a type of «open» prefab capable of achieving multiple
design options based on component standardization and modularity. Sameness was
not an option. If prefab was to succeed it «must be able to adapt to
different needs resulting from changes in family composition as a family grows
«older»». This simple yet lucid posture could easily be applied to today’s industry,
which still overwhelmingly follows a pre-war mass-production paradigm.
Architectural Forum would continue to showcase
industrialized building systems in the years that followed promoting prefab as
cost effective, laboursaving and fast. Steel component based systems demonstrated
the magazine’s open systems approach as components could be assembled to
organize any design. The light steel Bethlehem system (AF: march 1943) composed
of trussed joists and wall studs typified variable prefab as both wall and
floor components could be mass-produced but deployed in multiple variations. As
today’s prefab industry is again promoted as an efficient building strategy, a
century of experiments still raise the enduring question of how to apply the
necessary repetition required by the factory to the singularity demanded by the
house.
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| Bethlehem Light Load Steel Frame (from Architectural Forum, March 1943) |
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