Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Prefabrication experiments - 151 - Open Building - 02 - Ecologic Building System

Since the early twentieth century the discussion surrounding the streamlined use of industrialized building systems followed two confronting trajectories: the benefits of standardization and the horrors of standardization. The acknowledged idea that a certain amount of standardization was essential for easing production was repeatedly challenged with the similarly accepted argument that normalization reduced the potential for a rich built environment. Further, a number of theorists argued that standardization would lead to a small number of producers taking control of the market reducing the potential for a shared building culture leading to quality degradation and monotonous buildings.

Looking to address these longstanding questions, Laurence Stephan Cutler and Sherrie Stephens Cutler argued in 1974 for an open construction strategy, which would lead to an efficient, intelligible and collaborative building system for housing construction. Their Ecologic building system was a reaction to closed loop systems reasoning that open systems based on prefabricated assemblies and components could be distributed objectively. The system considered three progressive scales and deployed grid modularization toward a great number of design variants.  Standardized parts complied with the dimensionally strict and coordinated grid. Building on this idea of system scalability, components were proposed for each project scope: Honeycomb wood structural panels for single-family dwellings, lightweight easy to assemble cold-formed nailable steel framing for low-rise collective housing and a hybrid of off-site and onsite half-tunnel concrete formwork system for large collective housing blocks.  The three basic structural strategies or building blocks were part of a larger conceptual framework evoking an industrialized kit of parts capable of generating quality buildings for the masses. 


Identified as a necessary approach to allow user flexibility and adaptability the authors pursued a form of do-it-yourself language for architecture. Inspired by a particularly fertile time in the development of industrialized building project stimuli (operation breakthrough, In cities technology) the Ecologic system was more of a design process promoting the use of a grid to achieve variable plans. The strict standardization required by the system’s inventors would allow freedom in planning, however the regular components hardly would allow for some sort of material differentiation returning us to same basic debate of how to standardize without dictating form.

Three scales of development - Ecologic Building System

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