Prefabrication experiments - 182 - Exhibition houses - 03 - The Core House

The core-house is a housing concept organised around a basic functional unit planned for adaptability. Constructed as either a central service device, a social hearth or as the starting point of a pliant housing system, the core was used as a strategy for rationalising a dwelling’s basic requirements. In 1929, Gerrit Rietveld, best known for his De Stijl influenced red and blue chair developed a prototype core house surrounding a vertical central hub. As Walter Gropius had discussed before him, the difficulties associated with producing and marketing a completely manufactured house inspired this system for a customizable home; In Rietveld’s core house, the vertical nucleus could be multiplied for individual or clustered dwellings. 

The core is a platform for combining production and individuality and has evolved in the  past decades into a strategy for offering an elementary shelter that quickly serves essential needs. The houses inhabitants can consequently adopt their own housing patterns affixed to the proposed initial construction. Atelier Bow Wow, a Japanese architectural firm established on 1992 by partners Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima, designed a housing concept, in 2013, that envisioned this process for quickly assembled post disaster adaptable shelters.  

The firm’s modular timber structure combines Japanese timber know-how, the no-nails Itakura panel system with a basic one room plan and more traditional elements such as tatami grid and large overhangs to cover exterior spaces. Structured by vertical slotted posts, the panel walls are constructed by simply sliding and stacking horizontal timber boards along the vertical grooves.  Along with facilitating assembly this simple structural system could as easily be disassembled and moved to a different site requiring only minimal earthwork.

Designed for the specific needs of fishermen from the Tohoku coastline, the core-house is a rectangular prism, which provides all the necessary services to address basic needs (sleeping, eating, hygiene). The design’s modular appendages / terraces regulate the manner by which other cores or modular structures are combined and juxtaposed to create larger living spaces responding to a growing family’s evolving needs. Added elements could expand individual units or be used as a basis for a type of expandable village. 

Left: Model of Gerrit Rietveld's core house - Right: Atelier Bow Wow's core house