Prefabrication experiments - 2025-26 - Joyeuses Fêtes | Happy Holidays

 

Prefabrication experiments - 494 - Postwar Prefabs at the Tate (1944)

 

Separated only by a narrow portion of the Atlantic, two allies in the Second World War, France and Great Britain, developed similar government-driven postwar rebuilding programs with a focus on prefabrication. Concrete became the go-to material in France whereas the UK promoted a diversity of systems sometimes referred to as non-traditional construction methods. Even before the war was won, the UK was dealing with a critical housing shortage; efforts were made to support new methods and policies aimed at increasing productivity and encouraging budding industrial models.

 

In 1942, the Burt Committee, part of an Interdepartmental Committee on House Construction, was formed to “consider materials and methods of construction suitable for the building of houses and flats, having regard to efficiency, economy and speed of erection”. Sustained by these attempts regarding prefabrication, Winston Churchill promised 500 000 new homes beginning in 1944 to absorb shortages and provide affordable options for young servicemen returning from the front lines once the war was over. The Tate Gallery held an exhibition of prototypes in the same year - the Exhibition of Prefabricated Houses - to increase knowledge about the potentials of these new building methods.

 

Along with some international examples, UK's industry presented the Portal's Palace, the Arcon, Uni-seco,  and Tarran bungalows as non-conventional or non-standard systems. Traditional construction methods for housing in England relied on brick and mortar, stone load-bearing walls and tile roofs. The new building methods employed steel or aluminium, and new materials like asbestos, which were largely foreign to vernacular approaches. The Pheonix is a notable example of light steel components being used to quickly assemble a house that was meant to last 10 to 15 years. Most of these systems were intended as basic emergency dwellings and earned a bad reputation as they were evaluated by standards and criteria different from those for which they were designed. The exhibit also showcased the AIROH houses, also known as the Aluminium Bungalow, proposed by Aircraft Industries Research Organisation for Housing which was to redirect aeronautic infrastructure and production capacity used in the war effort toward home building. 

Top left: Tarran Bungalow structure; Top right: Tarran Bungalow; Bottom left: Exhibition at the Tate; Bottom right: AIROH house section

Prefabrication experiments - 493 - Exhibiting Prefab Potentials

 

Architectural pedagogy established during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to a new type of specialized architectural practice influenced by production methods and material innovation. Within this context, production and industrialized construction were considered as either the enemy of the traditional artisan or the future of more efficient architectural processes promoting rational planning. As industrialization evolved and was envisioned for building, architect-driven prefab narratives defined some iconic prefab experiments. Modern architects inspired by these inventions supported the collective mediatic dissemination of prefab systems toward innovative affordable housing.

 

Architectural prefab exhibits presented projects and prototypes communicating how these new processes were becoming mainstream and rerouting production from on-site to off-site. Precedents range from marginal organizations to large-scale artistic interpretations. Progress of Prefabrication (March 9-28, 1944) was staged by the Architectural League of New York. Founded in the 1880s the League was a focal point for progressive architects initiating debates and discussions around the evolution of their contemporary architecture’s tools and methodologies. The exhibit showcased models, drawings, and company catalogs to portray what was to become the future of design for fabrication and simple site assembly. 

 

The Built in the USA (1932-1944) series presented at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) also provided an optimistic vision of prefabrication's potential and its contribution to an American modernism. This tradition of promoting USA's role in advancing prefab ideals in architecture through rich exhibits and accompanying literature was reaffirmed at the MoMA from July to October 2008. Home Delivery, Fabricating the Modern Dwelling curated by Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen combined a rich historical narrative with a series of prototypes to illustrate a renaissance of prefab theory linked to advances in manufacturing. These are only three examples of a long and rich history of using exhibits to increase uptake in prefab interest and improve its credibility to inform efficient practice. The Progress of Prefabrication put on nearly 80 years before Home Delivery, addressed some of the same challenges of bringing architectural prefabrication to market as its conceptual foundations are sometimes more representational than practical.

An excerpt from Built in the USA (1932-1944)

  

Prefabrication experiments - 492 - The Turning Point of Building

If precast reinforced concrete panels epitomized prefab production in the 20th century, flexibility and adaptability emerged as two symbolic theories developed by architectural pedagogy as a way forward for linking mass production’s required repetition with architecture’s ingrained culture of bespoke designs. Iconic explored this tension through the systemic potential for industrialized elements to accommodate various functions and organizations based on a set number of configurations and parts. 

 

Literature on this type of modularity is broad with flagship architects like Konrad Wachsmann arguing for a radical change in building construction.  From airplane hangars to universal spaces and connectors for houses, his book published by Reinhold in 1961, The Turning Point of Building outlined a variety of strategies for modernizing structures and design. Predominantly articulated to rigorous grids with replicating joinery at each intersection to deploy thick surfaces in every scope and scale, Wachsmann's explorations were inspired by furniture making, Mero connectors and by Buckminster Fuller's octet trusses for packing and spanning spaces. The publication establishes the space frame as an efficient strategy for a myriad of arrangements and large open spans. The open-plan concept, above all others relates modern architects' view of innovation in architecture to skeletal building systems. Using the universality of grids and their joints, Wachsmann argued for simple connections toward an infinite number of aggregating and tectonic affirmations.

 

The elimination of bearing walls and the reduction of weight to the bare minimum required for structural performance would optimize both adaptability and rationalize costs. Today, these principles first explored in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are providing a renewed framework for industrialized building systems. The exploration of grids and modularity still represents a large portion of architectural theory as well as practice and pedagogy, aiming to bridge the gap between mass-produced components and customizable arrangements. Identified as platform theory applied to architecture, the ideas expressed by Wachsmann as a turning point are again being highlighted as ways to increase prefab's social acceptability by reinforcing systemic production without the echoing connotations of subpar designs. 

Excerpt from The Turning Point of Building

Prefabrication experiments - 491 - From precast concrete plates to « Flying Panels »

 

Above all other systems, one embodies industrialized construction’s input on mass produced serial architecture. From the mid 1940s and throughout the decades following the second World War, the precast concrete panel manufactured to shape hives of dwellings from similar slabs and walls was deployed in Europe and in the Americas as a symbol of construction reform as well as innovation. 

 

Its plainness is at the root of its prolific and large-scale application; sheets of concrete cast in standardized thicknesses, with window openings and facing materials were produced in factories to be delivered and stacked in repetitive organisations. Either dry assembled or bonded with mortar over continuous and extending steel reinforcements knotted in a monolithic framework, the «Panelki» panel building asserted the application of centralized policy frameworks to architecture. 

 

Flying Panels, a recent exhibit, showcased the concept of this building system, lifted buoyantly into place, increasing output on a war-ravaged continent becoming synonymous with post-war prefab. Opened in 2019 at ArkDes, Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design, the exhibit was accompanied by a catalogue including a variety of texts reinforcing the sheer scale achieved by concrete panels. Researched and curated by Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, the project elegantly portrayed the globalized use of these artificial stone plates inspiring offshoots in diverse countries that faced similar challenges in the supply of affordable dwellings. Models, publications, and posters, all relate the attraction and dissemination of a controlled procedure for producing communities. The almost choreographed movement of cranes raising and setting panels horizontally and vertically multiplied identical arrangements, adapted to their contexts through a varied patchwork of facing materials or panel geometries. 

 

While reinforced concrete, in today's carbon conscious construction environment has designers searching for alternatives, the Panel Block’s role in modernity is undeniable as is its contribution to developing our current base of industrialization strategies in other materials. The case in point is mass timber (cross-laminated timber) which is being proposed in an analogous type of sheet and surface-based strategy toward affordable housing. 

An image from the exhibit