Prefabrication experiments - 497 - Industrialization in the Building Industry

 

With a flattering foreword written by Moshe Safdie and an auspicious introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller, Barry James Sullivan's Industrialization in the Building Industry (1979) encapsulates an era's zeitgeist by composing a comprehensive and optimistic overview of offsite construction presenting its diverse potentials to tackle onsite-building challenges. Called a masterpiece by Fuller, the publication outlines how industrialization of the building industry shifts paradigms in design and construction to develop the built form quickly, more efficiently and with greater quality.

 

Sullivan leveraged knowledge from prewar and postwar experiments, from academic research in California notably on school construction systems, and from the lessons of Operation Breakthrough to present industrialization's state-of-the-art in the USA and abroad. One chapter tells the tale of successful standardisation in the steel industry, relating an evolution that Sullivan defines as a model for collaborative sectoral advances. Metal/Steel building manufacturers like the Butler Manufacturing (1901) deployed a pattern-building approach to coordinate everything from design catalogues to material attributes, span tables and joinery through cross-pollinating founding companies' experiences. 

 

Their shared knowledge, specifications, and modular coordination principles helped the industry grow from a $250M dollar industry in 1966 to a $770M dollar industry in 1974, an incredible growth in less than 10 years. Four basic building frames were agreed upon, the rigid portico frame, the tapered beam, the post-and-beam and finally the truss beam. Everything from panel design, to cladding and insulation types would be included in design-build packages or turnkey proposals to erect buildings cost-effectively, safely and with equivalent performance parameters in any part of the country. 

 

The steel industry as a whole benefited from this normalization and continues to benefit and build on the systemic work done during the 1960s. Shared specifications have evolved to include current criteria, and the same coordination principles that led to model buildings are being included in virtual building configurators, or BIM models, to pursue the same simple streamlined design-to- fabrication-to-site process highlighted by Sullivan's analysis.

left: progression of metal building industry ; right: typical building frames

Prefabrication experiments - 496 - Refabricating Architecture (2004)

 

Manifestoes claiming how offsite construction can inflect productivity and reform construction from site intensive to factory-intensive processes have been written and often reflect different eras’ crises or technological advances, and sometimes both. Henry Ford's assembly line, Toyota's principles of no waste manufacturing, and today’s digital platform giants have all influenced offsite theory and narratives. Progressing from mass production to mass customization and influenced by the post-war building booms offsite construction literature framed and advocated for a better understanding of the rationalized application of manufacturing methodologies in architecture. 

 

Well known for their prototypes, the Loblolly House built overlooking the Chesapeake Bay  and the Cellulose House presented at the MoMA exhibit Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, the team of Kieran and Timberlake penned what is arguably one of the most important statements on prefab theory in the last 20 years, redirecting the discussion toward neoteric analogies for architecture's production. Proposing a narrative based on digital manufacturing methods Refabricating Achitecture compares two historic figures central to construction culture, the « master builder », with the highly specialized contemporary « master assembler » of components. The authors highlight a missing link between these two disciplinary approaches - one defined by a highly integrated process versus the other by a fragmented one. 

 

Elucidating examples of complex industrial objects, planes, automobiles and naval yard management methods the architects portray an architecture potentially assembled from integrated factory-made chunks designed and manufactured to facilitate onsite coordination in favor of greater predictability. These building chunks (modules) are modular sub-assemblies that can include many subsystems completed in a quality-controlled environment to avoid the wasteful entanglement of conventional construction.

 

Explored in both their prototypes and their practice, the authors present a systemic model of three interrelated offsite approaches for structure, skin and service cartridges or cores harmonized in a digital environment to virtually build and coordinate all elements before their fabrication. All components can then be optimally bundled for on-site delivery and sequenced to simplify their setting. The model argues for a new type of master designer/fabricator/manager to bridge design and construction. A veritable «how-to» of DfMA, Refabricating Architecture is one of the strongest expressions of a required paradigm shift in construction in the 20th and 21st centuries combined. 

master builder versus master assembler - Refabricating Architecture (2004)

Prefabrication experiments - 495 - Literature fundamentals

 

Along with exhibitions, literature has played an important role in spreading knowledge about prefabrication. The wealth as well as the depth of narratives outlining the many potentials of industrialized construction have and continue to make the case for higher levels of manufacturing integration in construction to ease recurring challenges: labour shortages, lack of specific trades, waste generation, and low productivity levels. Beginning with Albert Farwell Bemis’ The Evolving House, Rational Design published in 1936, identifying rationalization as an advantage of factory production, many have fostered an ever-expanding catalogue of viewpoints with similar undertones across varying eras. 

 

Burnham Kelly’s The Prefabrication of Houses (1951), Maurice Revel’s La prefabrication dans la construction (1966), Barry James Sullivan’s Industrialization in the Building Industry (1980) which includes a foreword by Moshe Safgdie and an introduction by Buckminster Fuller, Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake’s Refabricating Architecture (2004), and Andreas Vogler’s The House as a Product, all contextualize prefab’s links to industrialization, mechanization, and mass production using similar examples and archetypes. 

 

In 2008, related to the renaissance of interest in offsite construction, the well-known German periodical Detail published a comprehensive treatise entitled Components and Systems -  Modular Construction - Design Structures and New Technologies. The 240-page publication, while informative, strays little from others before it by covering the vast history of iconic experiments before going through the potentials of modular prefabrication by analysing contemporary built projects throughout Europe. The basic principles provided by the authors epitomize how little has changed when comparing this publication with Bemis’ discourse from 1936. 

 

The module, the grid, dimensional coordination, geometric positioning, assembly and setting along with transport still define the rigorous design criteria that offsite construction demands. One diagram presented as a design principle depicts the relationship between modules and grids as positioning devices for harmonising building systems is comparable to Bemis’ definition of dimensional coordination. While digital technologies are marginally discussed by Detail’s special edition, many argue that digital tools are providing the long-awaited inflection point for the industry. However forward-looking this may seem, the fundamental ideals in literature regarding offsite can be distilled down to greater dimensional rationalization.

left: Bemis - 1936 ; right: Detail - 2008.

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

Prefabrication experiments - 490 - Looking Forward to 500

 

The first 10 blog posts (January – April, 2014) acknowledged both iconic and lesser-known prefab experiments, some productive and many flops, with the intention of elucidating promises and challenges related to offsite construction. Twelve years later, the blog will reach a milestone that seemed at the time, highly improbable: 500 posts.  Conferences, articles, publications, research endeavours, study days, and three exhibits have grown out of this ongoing exercise.

 

Looking back at 489 posts retracing the history as well as current experimentation, the challenges to industrialized construction are unchanged. The increased use of manufacturing methodologies in construction again appears inevitable considering lagging productivity, onsite wastefulness, and reduced affordability, however these methods remain marginally applied relegated to certain types of projects, as architectural singularity, outdated perceptions along with outmoded building processes remain the crux of the problem. Research - historical, creative and codeveloped - particularly within the AEC disciplines remains robust and a celebration of this fertile field of exploration will be the subject of the next 10 blog posts. 

 

Exhibits, literature, and prototypes have all been delivered to highlight how prefab would radically modify construction culture. The Dream of the Factory-Made House (Herbert, 1984), Kelly's The Prefabrication of Houses (1951), Wachsmann’s The Turning Point of Building (1961), The House as a Product (Vogler, 2016) and Refabricating Architecture (Kieran and Timberlake, 2003) all manifested and conveyed the prefab promises of their era. Curating prefab played a similar role. Architecture et industrie (Centre Pompidou, 1983)  Home Delivery (Moma, 2008), and Flying Panels (ArkDes, 2019), celebrated the diversity and influence on architectural praxis and education. 

 

Along with curating and publishing, government-endorsed exercises have disseminated knowledge aimed at enabling prefab to successfully infiltrate the market; Operation Breakthrough from the late 1960s remains the most famous. The experiments published on this blog incorporate this rich and diverse history of prefab construction specifically in their effort to reunite two fields represented by conflicting values; architectural values of singularity and the extreme production efficiency values which regard architecture's take as frivolous. These divergent views still embody the inherent complexity associated with construction’s industrialization. 

An excerpt of experiments from 1-489

Prefabrication experiments - 489 - 3D Printing - An Onsite Assembly Line

 

Considered for the designed-to-order fabrication of small complex objects in the recent history of additive manufacturing, the technology's translation to building has spawned a large amount of analogous exploration, though mostly linked to marginal prototypes. Precisely depositing a fluid concrete or clay composite layer-over-layer numerically controlled to produce an extruded form is the basic idea of these horizontally textured vertical bearing walls. 

 

Timber beams, steel purlins, or any other type of spanning element can be attached to the walls to cover interior space. Vaulting layers has also been explored and experimented with to produce compressive monomaterial structures. In all cases either a robotic arm, or a gantry type crane carrying a nozzle deposits material according to instructions contained in a 3D model, plotting in x-y directions with the z axis being developed at a relatively slow pace, which allows the material’s adequate consistency to settle and support the next layer. From bus stops to micro dwellings, and even two to three-story collective housing, 3D printing is being promoted as a low-cost alternative to conventional site cast concrete. 

 

The mass-construction archetypes are produced on regular, printed foundations or over a slab on grade. Using these techniques to produce housing implies delivering material and machines on a just-in-time basis using only what is needed, reducing costly and wasteful formwork associated with reinforced concrete construction. 

 

3D printing tehniques and methods are progressing rapidly. Demonstrated for continuous printing of linear objects over a conveyor, the Blackbelt 3d printer is showing what can become an alternative to bearing structures, where beams and other types of dimensional components could be made onsite and then simply bolted together or assembled with mortar in a 3d printed kit-of-parts. Producing complex components can further optimize the technology's use by providing any shape needed to adjust to site conditions. Bringing the required digitally controlled tooling to site points to new potentials in terms of size, scope, and shape as the normal transport criteria that limits sizes and capacities need not apply.

Blackbelt 3D, printing linear objects over a conveyor