Prefabrication experiments - 11 - The Mobile Housing Unit - US patent 2499498 A

The diversity of building construction solutions proposed at the beginning of the 20^th century displays that era’s preoccupation with housing. Prefabrication of building components and assemblies as outlets for industrialisation contributed to the invention of novel architectural systems. Along with the new machines, Industrialisation’s division of labour and hierarchal systematic production methods influenced the evolution of architecture from a site-anchored artefact to a factory-produced item. 

The commodification of architecture determined ideals of integration, standardization, and modular coordination as strategies for cost reduction, mass production and the long-term suppleness of systems architecture.

Monolithic units or boxes (see Industrialized building systems for housing, MIT press, 1967), often referred to as modules, are preassembled volumes completed to various degrees in factories. The modules can be used as an autonomous housing system or assembled, stacked, and integrated to form multi-unit buildings.

The «Mobile housing unit» patented by John Hays Hammond Jr in 1947 explored the monolithic unit or module both as a housing unit and as a condition for the adaptability of housing over time. The proposal included a support structure that served as a crane during construction and also served to receive and join each unit in the whole building system. The support structure as the essential component of the building erection allowed each unit to be stacked and disassembled in reaction to the varying and evolving needs of the occupants.

The building as a support structure and crane essential in the building’s erection is perhaps one of the most experimental visions of building to come out of the machine age, even though machines for building have been an integral part of architecture and its literature throughout history.

The scheme’s objective was mobility. Housing was not viewed as a static building form but a moveable and adaptable commodity reacting to lifestyle changes or the diversity of user demands. The industrial and architectural ideal of building with modules took many forms through the 20^th century: Kisho Kurokawa’s capsule tower, Moshe Safdie’s habitat 67, or the Zachry System of modules being the flagships of modularity.

Mobile Housing Unit : Patent drawing