Conservatory builder Joseph Paxton’s experimentation with prefab elements to assemble the Crystal Palace for London’s world exposition (1851), Henry Clayton’s brick making machine for Atlas Brickwork (1855), and exporting rolled corrugated iron kit houses to various British colonies, Great Britain, the birthplace of industrialization developed first manifestations of manufacturing harnessed for building construction. With the success of mass production and commodification, it’s astonishing that conventional construction has not implemented higher levels of prefabrication. Housing shortages, post war rebuilding and redirecting war economies towards construction drove prefabrication between and after the two world wars. Innumerable prefabs were commanded in the years following World War II. Much has been written about these explorations and their non-traditional construction methods. Like housing, school construction to serve burgeoning communities was also identified as an outlet for British prefab systems. Suspect detailing, lack of weatherproofing with porous envelopes deepened prefabrications’ enduring negative connotations. Only about 7% of new homes use comprehensive modular or industrialized building systems. Schools and houses are once again a priority for increasing construction’s productivity as the affordable housing crisis is a global challenge requiring heroic approaches.
The UK has remained a figurehead for prefab’s theorization even with marginal practical applications of modern construction methods. Bryden Wood’s Bridging the Gap between Manufacturing and Construction published in 2017 established the firm and the UK as contemporary trendsetters redirecting effective manufacturing concepts such as Design for Manufacturing and Assembly towards building processes. The firm explored platform theory’s potential to cross-pollinate building types, their assembly details and mass manufacturing with supply chains by comprehensive centralized data management to streamline design, fabrication, assembly and building operation. This construction 4.0 take on renewing prefab is driving a veritable industrialized building renaissance. A sign of current attention to the UK’s market, after 60 years in the Japanese sector, Sekisui prefab homebuilder has introduced Shawood, a skeletal timber version of their housing system designed specifically for the UK. Partnering with Urban Splash’s modular housing division, Sekisui’s enduring chassis model was directly in line with platform, modularity and customization concepts more than half a century before Bryden Wood’s manifesto.
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Crystal Palace (left) ; Bryden Wood's systematization (middle); Shawood detail (right) |
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