Prefabrication experiments - 275 - fabricating worlds - 06 - From Midget house to Green house

Reinventing housing often comes in response to crises. The episodes following wars, natural disasters or political turmoil drive demand for rebuilding and for dwellings that are affordable and quick to build. Industrialisation made it possible to reimagine housing production specifically in difficult times applying the mass production model successfully applied to commodities toward architecture. A prime example was the massive investment in industrial development in Japan after the second World War creating a type of prefect storm for a country whose vernacular already included modularity and standardized components. Many prefab house producers were established during this period including the iconic Daiwa. Nubuo Ishibashi founded Daiwa Housing Industry, or the Daiwa House Group today, in the early 1950s to produce affordable dwellings on a massive scale. The Pipe house in response to a destructive Typhoon in the region of Kansai and later the Midget house in response to the baby boom helped the company become one of the most famous and prolific house producers in the history of prefabricated houses in Japan and beyond.

 

Today the company remains well known in its field and has expanded to include all areas of housing production and continues to promote an ideal of resilience in their housing systems development. In response to another global challenge, the demand for fresh produce, the company has allied their knowledge for housing with novel agro-production techniques to create the Agri-cube, a compact 5m x 2.5m volume-unit. The marketing pitch: the cube fits in a regular sized parking spot. In lieu of a polluting vehicle, the spot is transformed into a fresh-produce making device. According to the company the hydroponic greenhouse can yield 10 000 servings of fresh food per year. Delivered as a turnkey product, the Agri-cube requires little maintenance for its lighting and hydroponic mechanical distribution. Constructed on a steel chassis frame, the floor, wall and roof panels are insulated. The cube can be moored to a simple granular foundation requiring minimal site work for infrastructure hook-ups, plumbing and other services. Completely self-contained with solar panels, the Agri-cube placed over a parking spot could transform any strip mall lot into large-scale urban agriculture production.

Midget House (left) Agri-cube (right)

Prefabrication experiments - 274 - fabricating worlds - 05 - Reforming modernism

The first half of the twentieth century could be characterized by partnerships between architects and industry fostering new materials and mass production to conceive affordable housing. As the century progressed, architects worked with a drastically different modus operandi using industry to develop representations, either utopian or dystopian. In both cases the paper trail is both rich and inspiring. The space race, concern over latent nuclear war, the overwhelming rise of economic emancipation in industrialized countries nourished architects’ speculation on how social and political developments would influence housing and architecture. Bubble houses, the promotion of plastics, Archigrams collage comic book representations or even Lebeus Wood's dystopian visions, drawings and speculative representations became the expression of a generation, a type of guidebook for living in future cities dominated by technology. 

 

These original and creative visions had little to do with pre-World War II modernist architects who, in a way, saw functionalism as a tool for developing a new way forward for architecture. The 1960s, 1970s, and 80s were reactionary years. Architects attempted to shed the abstract purity and whiteness of modernism while endeavoring to reconnect and rebrand architects as city builders. The metabolist movement in Japan that harvested and synchronized industrial developments with representation became ground zero for this type of architectural propaganda.

 

Future Systems founded by radical Czech architect Jan Kaplický explored this type of speculative architecture. The firm’s system-based architecture integrated highly sophisticated materials with mechanical means to produce what has become known as High Modernism. After stints with offices like Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, Kaplický defined his personal take by designing conceptual schemes that reformed architectural theorems of context and composition by juxtaposing mechanics, aerodynamics with  industrial design requirements like ergonomics, prototyping, and mobility. The Peanut Project 124 is a prime example of the combination of machines with the micro living spaces made famous by Japanese prototypes like the Kurokawa’s capsule tower.  The speculative nature of Kaplicky's architecture symbolizes at once the canyon that had developed between everyday practice and architectural theory and the conceptual distance that architects had taken from more conventional manufactured architecture and its representation.

Future System's Peanut Project

Prefabrication experiments - 273 - fabricating worlds - 04 - The Fun Palace

Sometimes referred to as twentieth century cathedrals, skyscrapers spanned precipitously and used materials to their limit states, in the same way the ribbed vaults and flying buttresses of the middle ages did. Technology evolved significantly during the first half of the twentieth century making possible the construction of commercial buildings at never before seen scopes and scales. New materials and methods offered potentials for a burgeoning service economy demanding agility and flexibility. The open and free planning of floor plates resulted directly from the removal of load bearing walls replacing them with distanced slender posts and beams. Moreover, spans made from mass produced, repeatable and scalable components could be expanded in all directions. The tall buildings’ modular skeletons were adaptable to any use and inspired new urban visions based on office blocks as great evolving machines for a serviceable urbanity. 

This type of programmable urban and civic infrastructure inspired even further reflection on technology’s role in the construction of civic infrastructure. Cedric Price's Fun Palace is perhaps the emblem of using technology to shape adaptable social interactions free from classic civic conventions. A metallic cathedral erected to unite folks to learn and experiment with developing techniques and theories. Even its name denotes great exhibit palaces of the 19th century; The Crystal Palace (1851), a conservatory showcased the way forward for modern building culture. In the Fun Palace, Price along with theatre director Joan Littlewood conceived an open framework for exploring and communicating knowledge.  

Cedric Price argued for a common architecture that reformed archaic civic and social conventions. In Price's work, technology was the backdrop, an open building framework for stimulating spatial and social possibilities. The Fun Palace's reticulated skeletal megastructure was proposed as a completely open plan that could be assembled on any suitable site and disassembled to be erected later in another context. The prefabricated kit-of-parts contributed to constructing the ideal of adaptable structures: flexible, malleable and mutable. The Fun Palace's skeletal structure was a complete revolution and foreign from the massive and classic civic buildings of the past; architecture was stripped of its permanent monumentality and represented a way forward to adapt to a constantly shifting world.

Cedric Price's Fun Palace rendering

Prefabrication experiments - 272 - fabricating worlds - 03 - The Eden Biomes

Prefabrication embraces many topics: simplifying construction, making processes more efficient, coordinating practises in a factory setting and standardizing materials or systems. Among these themes, making building systems lighter engendered and continues to motivate innovation. Both architects and engineers have designed frameworks outlining optimal material use. Examples of optimum structures have repeatedly addressed spanning across great expanses with a symbiotic relationship between, shape, geometry and matter. Arches, vaults and domes are three building and geometry archetypes that illustrate the potential for shaping structural performance. The upward curvature imparts a vertical thrust that reduces tensile and horizontal stresses, making it possible to develop an efficient relationship between vertical rise and horizontal spans. 

 

Grimshaw and Partners’ Eden project, a series of interrelated domes, showcases two of architectures enduring strategies to cover architectural space. Inspired by geodesic domes and inflatable structures, the architects designed a prodigious conservatory programmed for biosphere teaching and discovery. The structural concept by engineer Anthony Hunt was dictated by local weak soil bearing capacity; the greenhouse cupolas pose themselves daintily on sloped earthworks. Conceptually related to masters like Fuller and Nervi, Hunt argued for maximum result with minimal effort. The Eden domes employ a double shell triangulated truss construction repeating a tessellation of hexagonal shapes braced by ties and node anchors.  The central argument for the use of geodesic domes continues to be small, light and easily transportable parts, and in this case, each component was modeled and calculated for their streamlined production. 

 

Keeping the domes weathertight, luminous air-filled pillows add relatively little weight to the overall building. The greenhouse structure is entirely covered with a translucent skin composed of triple-layered inflated pads. Made of a state-of-the-art plastic foil, ETFE Ethylene tetra fluoro ethylene, the inflated casings’ edges are melded to create a perimeter border or lip that is inserted, sandwiched and compressed into a skylight type aluminum frame attached to the geodesic lattice.  A network of gutters follows the underlying framework collecting water and directing it to perimeter collecting units. 

 

The Biomes (bio domes) launched in 2001, pursue the same basic goal of answering Fuller’s famous dare: How much does your building weigh? 

Conservatory structure and skin detail

Prefabrication experiments - 271 - fabricating worlds - 02 - Bubbletecture delivery

 Prefabrication’s basic definition is about anticipation. Anticipating site challenges, labour or workforce shortages or delivery constraints, to suggest simplified building methods that consider onsite construction’s perceived obstacles. Anticipation can also relate to technical processes like cutting, folding or boring a component in advance of its use to calculate and determine how it will be assembled on site. This type of calculation and prediction underlines the architect's role in detailing a building by foreseeing problems and proposing solutions. Prefabrication, industrialized building systems and Offsite construction proponents argue for systems that at the very least address building system resolutions. 

 

Some prefabrication experiments go even further projecting entire narratives for design, construction, assembly and scalability over time. Architects at times have even devised instructions or guidelines for a system’s livability. The 1960s and 1970s, reflecting the era’s optimism arising from space exploration and the democratisation or adaptation of wartime advances applied to civilian use, were a fertile time for speculative architectural and prefab experiments. Predicting major transformations in how people would live in cities, proposals, their environments, their applicability and their comprehensive adaptability circumscribed a type of architecture that could be applied to any context.

 

An emblematic vision of these architectural worlds and their impending colonisations, Pascal Haüsermann, a Swiss French architect applied his knowledge of composite shell structures to develop what has become referred to as bubble architecture. The cellular and organic shapes of Haüsermann's architecture were tailored from developments in reinforced concrete or polymers both suited to monocoque shell systems. Meridian sectors and segments of these circular dwellings would be produced as complete floor, wall and roof elements and assembled into modular elliptical volumes. 

 

In his proposal for a city of 1500 dwellers, the pattern-based housing system illustrated the potential for a multidirectional arrangement. Arguing for construction’s industrialisation, Haüsermann’s vision of transportation predicted the delivery of buildings as commodity kits and packages. Representing the use of helicopters, parachutes and trucks, Haüssermann posited multimodal transportation of buildings anywhere one earth. If the same proposal was drawn-up today, he most certainly would have added a computer controlled giant drone as a way of simplifying architecture’s distribution. 

Haüsermann's vision of delivery

Prefabrication experiments - 270 - fabricating worlds - 01 - Undersea Island

 270 – fabricating contexts – 01 – Undersea Island 

 

Prefabrication is in its most basic definition is contemplating something before producing it. Controlling every part of an architectural thing before connecting it to its functional context or environment. This ideal of a manufactured product in architecture has always sat of a fragile limit between architectural idealistic visions of outlining a complete work and a more pragmatic posture stemming from mass manufacturers perspectives.  As the twentieth century progressed, the conceptual divide between architects’ speculations and mass-produced prefabrication increased to a point where the disparate fields rarely interact. Further architects moved from an early construction / technical based prefabrication linked to making to fabricating made up worlds. Creating or fashioning new contexts or artificial settings addressed a two-fold objective: reframing architecture and reinventing cities. The experiments of Archigram, a group of speculative architects, are typical of this era symbolizing the architect as social constructor. Many architects elaborated their visions disconnected from the idea of context or place as we know it or refer to it in architecture. 

 

Projects were developed for extreme polar climates, under water or in extreme environmental conditions; the architect could imagine beautiful and creative communities even in the most challenging conditions. Largely represented and published, most shared the idea of integrating communities through innovative building systems. In the 1960s many such proposals involved a robust colonisation argument showcasing that people could live in any context and architects would show them how and why they should accept these visions.  

 

Speculative experiments were often spawned from parallel industrial examinations as was the case for Bucky’s submersible. Buckminster Fuller patented an undersea island in 1963 (US patent 3 080 583). The underwater oil platform would protect equipment and workers from storms or unstable weather. Stabilized by tension anchors and kept afloat by buoyant caissons in the cylindrical structures, the megastructure section showcases a multi-functional and environmentally controlled interior space. This type of architectural conditioning of architecture sought to create new building potentials arguably inspiring other imaginary settings for dwelling. The next nine blog posts will look into this idealized view of prefabrication not as way of resolving technical production but as a way of modeling novel living conditions. 

Undersea Island Section

Prefabrication experiments - 269 - Connectors - 10 - Pattern Buildings or Platform Building

 

Context and setting in architecture habitually refer to a site, a building’s staging area, or a geopolitical place where an edifice is moored. This concept implies the singular notion of anchoring. A building’s attachment to place speaks to its regional connection to an infinite number of factors. Industrialized building in this sense must address the generic with the specificity of site. How can Off-site construction create a unique product that relates to different settings and contexts? Is it possible to industrialize building construction considering the necessary interaction with particular topography, climate, social conventions, etc.? 

 

As globalization and information technology reaffirm industrializations basic principles of making quality products affordable and accessible, construction's industrialisation is once more being touted as a way to reform construction, with one major difference: If twentieth century prefab could be described by industrial driven proprietary models or one-off architectural designed experiments, a new generation of architects is tackling the generic / specific issue to bridge the two conditions. Whether inspired by open-source and crowd sourced business models, a shareable architecture is taking hold based on the same principles being applied in parallel industries. This new setting for architectural production based on industrialized systems is «platform or pattern» based. 

 

Platform here refers to automobile production or other industrial production models where a number of differentiated objects, products or models can be created from a predetermined set of modular, interoperable and coordinated components, not unlike a programmer who defines an application from a shared language and syntax. While certainly not unique within this conceptual framework, 369 Pattern Buildings is the work of a cooperative of professionals and academics proposing a modular timber chassis applicable to varied building types.  The basic modular component is analogous to an ISO container arranged with timber edges and braced by ribbed plates/slabs that are assembled with steel corner or vertex connectors. The sectional volume can be stacked and juxtaposed to define a plurality of arrangements. Facade elements, dividing wall elements, mechanical as well as plumbing systems can be designed and fabricated according to underlining modular dimensions to easily fit into the overall platform. While the system remains marginally applied, its setting is truly contemporary as it allows anyone to download and iterate generic components into a personalized architectural product.  

Basic room module from https://patternbuildings.com/projects/m6-prototype/

Prefabrication experiments - 268 - Connectors - 09 - Sip Panel Joinery

 

Stressed skin panels, either stud-framed or laminated with an insulated core, were developed through research at the beginning of the 20^th century. They are a successful segment of industrialized building construction. The flat-packed panels used for walls, floors or roofs can be assembled in simple box frame configurations. Three most common forms are: wood frame and skin, skin and core, or composite materials. Every type of panel used as a shell component integrates a loadbearing layer, an insulating layer and in some cases a protective waterproof layer. Even with the important structural and insulating properties of each dimensionally coordinated panel, total performance hinges on the weathertightness and accuracy of the connecting joinery. Particularly for structural insulating panels or Sips, weathertight connections are essential for reducing heat loss and maintaining structural integrity. 

 

Systems are designed to achieve an uninterrupted insulating core by using a type of tongue and groove assembly which overlays a portion of insulation between two juxtaposes panels.  Openings for windows and doors can be milled in the factory. Panels arrive on site to be assembled as the large-scale pieces of a 3d puzzle. With the exceptions of greater assembly accuracy and more stringent dimensional tolerance this type of building panel has not really changed since the beginning of the twentieth century. 

 

Murus is an American company producing a SIP panel which in all respects seems like a fairly standard panel. However, to increase both precision, weathertightness and structural robustness, an interlocking cam connector has been patented and included in the proprietary panel. The hardware is in the panel's core and once two panels are juxtaposed aligned and put together, the connector can be rotated locking the panels in place from the outside of the panel with a key-like locking device. 

 

The panels are available in modular sizes and thicknesses with optional composite layering materials from oriented strand board, to plywood. Although not marketed to be disassembled and reused, it is easy to imagine this type of panel, assembled, locked, unlocked and disassembled to be reused.  Depending on the composite assembly specified, a 150 mm panel could range from a R value of 23 - 28. This value is uninterrupted by studs as would be the case for traditional timber framing.

Murus SIP panels with a joint connector

Prefabrication experiments - 267 - Connectors - 08 - Ikea's Better Shelter

Focused on the design, fabrication and marketing of affordable furniture, Ikea has also developed housing concepts looking to expand their business model from commodities to affordable mass housing. Bloklok is their modular housing concept, which has had marginal success but has not been able to transfer Ikea's design zeitgeist to housing. The source of the multinational's success is the democratization of good and contemporary design at an affordable price. Transferring this knowledge to architecture is a complex undertaking since edifices incorporate many more parts, systems, subsystems and cultural criteria when compared to furniture. Developing the same type of Design for Assembly approach to buildings leads to less holistic concepts. 

 

The Ikea foundation has recently developed a shelter for refugee camps or climate emergencies, which uses a small number of components to assemble a temporary dwelling. Considering the fact that most transient dwellings need to endure a service life of more than the few months accorded by tents, the Ikea foundation's better shelter offers a lifespan of three years and could theoretically be disassembled a few times and relocated during its lifespan.

 

A galvanized tubular frame shapes the basic geometry of the archetypical shelter. The frame is stayed and braced in place by steel anchors and crossties. Analogue to similar temporary tent shelters, the tubular frame is far from an original proposal. The plastic wall and roof panels are fastened to the structure using simple brackets, bolts and rivets. Flat-packed in a cardboard box and delivered to any location, the structure can be nailed, screwed or tied to any surface with its adjustable and levelling strut and plate connector. The anchor is tied to a depth of 250mm into local soil to prevent horizontal movement. A tension tie is inserted to a depth of 700mm to prevent uplift. Familiar to Ikea's furniture designs is the minimal number of components and their intelligible nature reducing specialized labour and promoting self-build.  The shelter's dimensions of 3,3 m x 5,5 mm x 2,8 m in height and its structure organizes an unobstructed interior. The floor tarpaulin and envelope panels are connected to the galvanized steel structure ensuring weathertightness and adequate resistance to wind, rain or snow.

connectors and components from better shelter.org

Prefabrication experiments - 266 - Connectors - 07 - Hauserman's moveable partitions

Modernism and its manufacturing advances pointed to facilitating assembly as a definite way of increasing productivity in building construction. The specification of identifiable elemental layers and systems also simplified procurement, management and on-site component sequencing. Construction was reformed into Taylor(ed) and streamlined tasks by manufacturing dimensionally stable and coordinated elements and pieces. Merging design for assembly with idealized mass production reduced the need for specialized labour onsite. Modernity also implied new functions, utilities and mechanical devices increasing building complexity making it important to normalize construction strategies. 

Further, with the advancement in the service economy, flexibility, mobility and adaptability in spatial organisation became a prerequisite for every building type from office to commercial spaces. Designing for assembly with coordinated systems implied that disassembly would also be possible, making it conceivable to organise and reorganise office arrangements multiple times during a building’s service life; The era of the open plan office space with moveable partitions was born. 

 

In 1913, inventor, industrialist, E.F. Hauserman acquired a material supplies company. He began contracting interior steel framed partitions and expanded in other markets because of major wartime defense contracts. The company’s well-known products were part of Ezra Ehrenkrantz’s school construction system in the late 1960s. The systemic separation and independence of movable partitions and parts made them ideal for schools’ design flexibility and adaptability at the heart of Ehrenkrantz’s philosophy. The partitions invented for the school construction system combined a cold-formed steel stud profiled with diamond shaped connectors on either side onto which variable panels could be clicked and friction clamped in place. The vertical studs were clipped in the same way onto ceiling and floor tracks. Telescoping sections included on the stud’s extremities allotted for structural deflection and ensured independence of the partition’s support system. The panels could be sheathed in any material from simple gypsum board for acoustical applications, chalkboard or corkboard for interactive partitions. The patented vertical stud symbolizes the type of dry construction methods that modernity assimilated from automobile and other commodity production.  Partition Systems such as DIRTT in the lineage of Hauserman’s developments are common in today’s marketplace and have become suitable for any type of interior partition system that requires many changes over time. 

Clipping stud connector