Prefabrication experiments - 163 - Building Kits - 04 - Mobile classrooms

Along with housing, educational buildings have long been a testing ground for industrialized building systems. Their repetitive nature in matters of space requirements and organization historically made a persuasive argument for their mass production. While school interior spaces remain fairly straightforward, classrooms, gymnasiums and a myriad of services from libraries to swimming pools and cafeteria, the capacity to receive and serve a varying number of students has often been addressed by modularity in matters of design and construction. As the need for housing is linked to demographic fluctuations so is the need for school buildings that are malleable enough to adapt to the varying needs. Among other comparable strategies, Ezra Ehrenkrantz’s SCSD system developed in the 1960s spoke to the requirement for change by deploying a dimensionally coordinated systemic approach to school building construction.

Prefab classrooms have repeatedly popped up adjacent to school buildings as a reaction to swiftly changing populations. This ability to rapidly supplement a classroom space in any context was the basis of many experiments throughout the 20th century. Challenging the emergency approach of crudely adding a box, professor Theodore Larson from the University of Michigan propositioned a steel-framed reversible modular kit of parts in 1951 based on the Unistrut building system. The simple steel skeleton covered in a smartly orientated glass curtain wall defined the very essence of the modernist zeitgeist: the flexible and adaptable open plan.

Recently Los Angeles-based Studio Jantzen have developed a related concept. Using a timber post and beam structure, the project endeavours to redefine an aesthetic potential and intends to be a more sustainable version of an almost disposable building typology. The series of rigid frames echoes what Larson had proposed. The large roof overhang defines a canopy to control interior lighting while offering an uninterrupted relationship with the outdoors. Both projects from different eras critique the container-type classrooms, which offer little spatial and environmental quality. Studio Jantzen’s modern details including floor to ceiling glass, sloping roof spaces, and exposed structure further relate the two projects tectonically and reveal the simple modernist axiom of interior/exterior links allowing the classroom to be more of a setting rather than a set space concentrated in one direction.

Left : Larson's project (1951) - Right : Studio Jansen's kit (2017)