Currently, making building chunks in a factory deploys all manner of numerically controlled cutters, routers, cranes, panel bridge nailers, butterfly tables, and conveyors to increase offsite construction's capacities and value. Uptake in all sectors of construction’s industrialization is being stimulated and directed by these digital tools and techniques along with their underlying data. The principles of factory production applied to architecture can reduce waste at all levels of the building process functioning in a climate and quality-controlled environment. The invisible hand supporting factory production is standardization. Replicable elements and processes increase scalable efficiencies. Cutting, organizing, assembling, and packing in a covered space stresses how Fordisms and Toyota-isms (lean construction) can be arranged for producing edifices.
While the tools have been updated with the objective of increasing productivity, the primary elements of a factory remain the same. The Ford Motor Company factories as designed by Albert Kahn at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries promoted an open system, with spanning elements supported by small and vastly spaced vertical bearing elements. Reinforced concrete, steel and timber examples all traced a similar path; the roof or covering plays a fundamental role in orchestrating a malleable choreography of materials, machines and people to achieve a streamlined process from receiving components to the delivery of value-added assemblies. Logistics are comprehensively protected from climate and other contextual difficulties imposed by conventional job sites.
The factory can be permanent or temporary (flying factories) structured by the posture of protection and an ideal of adaptability. While the interior arrangement of equipment can change, the building system itself is a generic support structure where a robust slab supports floor equipment and robust beams or girts suspend tools, creating ideal horizontal planes delineating a secure manufacturing environment. The architecture produced in these environments is normalized and of greater quality than projects built onsite as systems, details, assemblies are perfected gaining knowledge from product to projects. Cleanliness, organization, process geared spaces of production are an important part of construction culture, whether prefabricated or site built; iconic temples of mass production hangars protect and generate efficiencies for better buildings.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
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