Prefabrication experiments - 12 - Green's ready-built solar house by George Fred Keck

Industrialisation developed prefabrication for the generic production of housing. The mass production strategies needed to successfully generate, produce and deliver the factory made house required the least amount of product differentiation. Architecture, framed in its much larger perspective including prefabrication, has a more site-specific objective.  The long lasting contradiction between prefabricated architecture and its difficulty in addressing context has always been a challenge for prefab and a driving force for the flexibility of on-site building.

Prefabricators seldom explored universal mass housing strategies that address different contexts as this contradicts productivity of scale. One of the marginal exceptions to this general rule was the Solar house designed by George Fred Keck for The Green Ready-Built House Company. George Fred Keck, was an American architect known for his work on exhibition houses; "the house of tomorrow" and «Chrystal glass house» both prototypes that were built in Chicago in the 1930’s to display new building methods and design strategies.

Both houses, although differing in plan, demonstrated Keck’s willingness to optimize the use of solar energy. Predating solar passive housing strategies by decades, Keck proposals made use of large glazed walls using double-glazed insulated glass and an intelligent composition of rooms relating to the sun’s path. The circular, decagon, plan of the «House of tomorrow» built in 1933 used large insulating glass panels as a skin to a standardised modular steel skeleton in composing what is referred to as America’s first glass house.

While the Green's ready-built solar house did not use Keck’s the circular plan or the completely standardized glass and steel components, the small prefab house was designed for an optimal south facing lot with rooms on the glazed side. The south-facing wall was composed of large windows, louvers and a large horizontal sunshade optimizing heat gain in winter and shading in summer.

The «solar» house was a simple rectangular plan using stressed skin panel construction. Keck also designed variants of the plan for four different site configurations understanding that the south facing lot strategy limited the proposal’s capacity to be adapted to a greater number of sites reducing its scalability. The variability Keck proposed tried to bridge the gap between industrialisation's need for the generic and the architect's responsibility to understand context. This effort to create a site-specific prefab had limited success and still remains a challenge of the industrialisation of building systems.

Add from Popular Science August 1946