Prefabrication expeirments - 155 - open building - 06 - Misawa Homes wall unit service cores

Japanese prefabricated home building flagship company Misawa Homes recently sold control of their company to Toyota Corporation. In an attempt to streamline their activities and restructure their supply chains ahead of a declining housing market. Misawa and Toyota will share technology and information to face a changing consumer base. A mainstay of the Japan prefab housing industry since postwar industrialisation, Misawa pioneered technologies such as ceramic infill (a type of lightweight concrete mixture using air bubbles to replace aggregate) panels and an easily deployed unfolding capsule unit dwelling. The generally recognized Misawa system used the infill panels over their patented light steel framed modular box-unit. 

Beyond their basic modular system, Misawa’s in house research and development team contributed to a future vision of building which was the emblem of Japanese industrialized building systems in the latter half of the twentieth century. The dwelling capsule as an industrialized product; attached, removed and replaced, capsules posited the future of prefab as integrated components fastened to a plug and play infrastructure. Intended for changing lifestyles, new mobility patterns and the technological potential of integrating systemic adaptability, the company proposed mechanical wall-units as predetermined building subassemblies. Each linear service core was approximately the size of a standard closet and was designed as a device for relating to the adjacent spaces without permanently limiting its position.   Misawa offered six dimensionally coordinated modular service wall-units: a storage wall, a bath and personal hygiene unit, a kitchen and food storage unit, a home entertainment / audio-visual unit, an air-tempering unit and a window wall unit. Individual units could be replaced over time but could also be redistributed within the living space's perimeter.  

Component based construction facilitated retrofitting options as each unit was built from dimensionally coordinated parts. Easily transported and connected, the units were designed for any building system, industrialized or not. Showcasing the link between Japanese metabolist design theories, industrialisation and nascent open building theories, Misawa’s modular wall units proposed a type of off-the shelf customization; individuals could plan, adapt and rearrange their homes using integrated industrialized life-size service core building blocks.

Misawa Capsule Units