Prefabrication experiments - 477 - Prefab as policy

 

Catalogued designs, uniform platforms, replicable buildings, preapproved prefab micro dwellings - governments are scrambling to test many of these ideas to supplement affordable housing supply faced with a stagnating construction sector. Offsite construction complements these approaches by applying manufacturing methodologies to increase efficiencies and capacity. While some see current crises as prefab's heyday, the possible links between manufacturing, architecture and housing construction already sustained modernism a century ago. 

 

Modern architects explored and elevated prefab to a type of language spawned through material innovation, redirecting architectural production from the onsite fashioning of materials to the streamlined assembly of factory-made components. From relationships with military industrial complexes, governments also underwrote prefabrication as a way forward toward stimulating inventive systems. Prefab’s time came and went in the 1940s, 50s and 60s with each generation explaining why their era was the right time for a robust turn toward industrializing construction.

 

Going from architecture and construction as a cultural phenomenon based on centuries of onsite informalities and peculiarities to industrial production tainted by mass production connotations is a transformation that requires more than simple reforms - it requires a complete conversion of business models for builders that are ingrained in business-as-usual and apprehensive about the expanded economic risks that go along with mass production. These changes are even more tenuous as demand for and successful application of offsite construction as a product-based pattern is constrained to certain relevant building types with repeating organisations. 

 

Iconic experiments like the Lustron House, designed by Carl Strandlund, convey the rich heritage of government support along with ambitious inventors looking to produce coordinated components for easy-to-assemble low-cost housing. Their application was largely obstructed by onsite principles promoted by tract housing developers like William J. Levitt who took simple to build platform or balloon framing and democratized onsite mass production processes that were ingrained with complete flexibility.  Lessons from both production methods tell the tale of prefab's marginal uptake and consumers' enduring need to feel that their home is a one-off process, even though all its components and properties are mass-produced.

Onsite construction using mass production principles