Prefabrication experiments - 17 - The iron houses of the Australian Gold Rush

Prefabrication as a strategy for quickly responding to high demand for housing has thrived during periods of economic difficulty. Migrating populations looking for work during the great depression or workforces supporting the defense efforts contributed to the early 20^th century industrious period for prefab. Prefabrication although linked to these times of crisis has also been used to support settlement of new areas and to establish new outposts for different empires throughout history.

As early as the 18th century English craftsman and early industrialists were producing and shipping pre-cut box frame houses with canvas or wood panelized infill. The tradition of the craftsman combined with the advances in industrial production methods most notably in Great Britain supported the transportation of these prefabricated shelters to British colonies. As building culture is more readily shared among friendly trade partners, the colonies were often established according to British tradition as native building techniques were regarded as too foreign.

The discovery of Gold in 1851 near Bathurst Australia is a noteworthy example of colonization stimulating prefab. Prospectors rushed to the area and changed the economic and social fabric of Australia. This gold rush attracted almost 400 000 immigrants in 1852. The confluence of the gold rush, industrialization, and the tradition of shipping homes already established in Great Britain instituted the «box frame iron house» as a dwelling unit packed and shipped to Australia to respond to the enormous need for housing.

The Iron Houses were simple box frame structures, at first in wood but sometimes turned to cast iron as their main structural component. Cast iron was industrialized, profiled, rolled to form corrugated iron cladding or window and door frames. The corrugated cladding, the main industrial component of the architecture of the dwellings is until this day a major element in Australian industrial building culture. The corrugated cladding brought a revolution in construction as it was easily fabricated, easily packed, easily shipped and easily fastened. The cladding in the iron houses was sometimes merely infill and sometimes combined with cast iron posts to share lateral loads. The Iron houses were not a sustainable form of settlement as there thermal qualities were less than optimal, conducting heat gain in summer and heat loss in winter. 

Image from the Iron Houses Ressource Kit prepared for the City of Port Phillip 

Prefabrication experiments - 16 - «The stainless steel igloo» – by Martin Wagner

The promise of factory produced housing shipped quickly, easily and cost effectively to consumers was a fascination for many architects studying, practising and maturing during the dawn of mass production. Architects seemed either to embrace or at least accept the Fordism and Taylorism of manufacturing as a basis for renewing architecture and transforming construction. Like some of his contemporaries Martin Wagner saw in the industrialisation of construction, architecture released from its traditional forms of expression.

Many modern architects proposed building systems that explored simple geometries and the abstraction of traditional ornament. Wagner, although a modernist, was critical of these «imitations of traditionally built wooden houses». Wagner’s outlook was similar in this respect to Buckminster Fuller’s view and less in tune with his European colleagues. The factory built house according to Wagner’s view was to be technically, aesthetically and functionally different from the pre-industrial house to reflect industrial society’s evolving social needs and lifestyles.

As a response to this idea, Wagner proposed a house conceived as a clustered grouping of circular rooms. In the cluster each circular room was linked by a shared space or hall. The overall plan seemed to revert to a primitive or a nomadic form of spatial organisation. The proposal was based on a variable and completely adaptable combination of conical dome-shaped igloos.  Rooms and spaces could be added and removed from the cluster as the family structure progressed. This flexibility and adaptability were part of a large Modernist theoretical stance on the new architecture’s essential responsiveness to change.

Each unit or room was a 13 sided-polygon based ogive dome. The base unit’s dome structure was proposed as a steel-sheathed plywood stressed-skin shell complete with windows, doors, mechanical core, complete kitchen and bath. The central apex of each «igloo» room could be equipped with a mechanical core. It is unclear however how each unit was to be linked mechanically.  Wagner proposed that a family could start with one basic circular unit and grow the cluster by adding rooms as needed. Similar to Buckminster Fullers’ proposal for the Dymaxion series, the circular plan minimised resource use also theoretically optimized mass production. 

Stainless-steel igloo from Popular Science May 1945 p.92

Prefabrication experiments - 15 - The Quonset or the Nissen Hut – the «portable» building

Historically, the need for Prefabrication and prefabricated buildings has repeatedly related to crises. Whether a period of war or of economic downturn, prefabrication was proposed as a solution for low-cost, ready made, industrialized buildings and as a way of kick-starting economies, solving social housing problems, or rapidly displacing populations. The prefabrication of buildings is linked to the idea of social unrest.

The beginning of the twentieth century was particularly fertile for prefabrication experiments as it brought a confluence of periods of emergency as well as periods of optimism about the modern machine age. Predominantly out of wartime there arose a need for quickly built ready-made buildings for barracks, clinics, hangars or any other military building type. The idea of ready-made components for military buildings can be linked to the Roman Empire and perhaps even further back in time as many tent based construction was pre-cut and re-used. However the idea of ready-made architecture is often associated with modernism and the twentieth century. Buckminster R Fuller was the most prominent proponent of the ready-made architectural theory, designing his Dymaxion series from the basic ready-made grain silo. 

As for Fuller’s DDU (Dymaxion deployment unit), the quick and responsive deployment of a building was the basic objective of the Quonset Hut. Proposed by Peter Norman Nissen in 1916 for the British Navy as a portable shelter, the development of the semi-circular rib-based structure was used for military deployments but later also used as temporary housing, green house building, industrial hangars and many other building types.

Nissen’s half-cylinder vault was a linear organization of a series of T-profiled two-point arch ribs. The ribs provided the overall shape and structure of the vault. Purlins and sheet iron cladding linked and laterally braced the ribs to complete the barrel vault structure. Walls were added on each end to enclose the structure but played no structural role. The barrel vault was completely self-supporting. All components were packed in a series of crates and could be assembled in one day by ten soldiers. The «portable» building was not actually mobile as it needed to be disassembled before being reconstructed on another site. The Quonset is linked to a very specific military need and is more akin to a tent than a building. It is one of the early 20^th century experiments of ready-made, low-cost, demountable, easily deployable strategies to face any number of crises.

Quonset Hut as housing - see http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/wp-content/uploads/quonset-house-small.jpg

Prefabrication experiments - 14 - Pleated plastic roof dome for low-cost housing – designed by B. S. Benjamin

Twentieth century advances in industrialized building induced a new material palette for architectural forms. Concrete, steel and glass were the flagship materials of the industrial era. Plastics were also pioneered but often relegated to a secondary role in building construction: finishes or furniture. Plastics or more precisely polymers introduced new possibilities of lightness, colour, durability and thin skin fabrication techniques based on mouldings, injections, extrusions, or rotational moulding. Plastics were intimately related to mass-repetition in order to spread the cost of moulds and injectors over the quantity of produced objects.

The use of plastics for modules, units, components, elements, pieces, and sections all contributed to the transformation of building from a massive artefact to an assembled system of mass-produced parts. The vocabulary of industrialized architecture is articulated upon this unit to whole relationship. The parts produced on a massive scale also ascertained the use of grid-based geometric compositions and organizations of space. Each part was part of a greater whole but celebrated as a recognizable sub-piece.

The use of this component based architecture along with advances in plastics produced systems for housing and building that proposed lightness, durability, simplicity and ease of assembly and disassembly as their contribution to prefabricated building systems for housing. B.S. Benjamin’s pleated plastic roof structure is one of such systems based on the repetition of a geometric shape to construct a larger framework for housing. The system is based on a double skin glass fibre oven-cured reinforced resin poured over a mould. The twin skin construction developed a hexagonal shaped roof part that is assembled on a modular grid of hexagons to compose larger interior space. Each unit had a three-meter diameter and its connection to the next unit included an elegant polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gutter that addressed to the joint as industrialization’s contribution to architectural detailing.

Difficulties in plastic construction such as fire resistance, resistance to harsh climates, and production costs of moulds made it difficult for such systems to be successful on a massive scale. However the legacy of such systems is once more becoming part of architectural language, as parametric based modeling tools and one-off fabrication capacity are mainstream. This part-based building system also has the potential to create an open-source ecology for architecture as each individual component is embedded with an assembly intelligence that permits greater variability of the whole system.  

Plastic Pleated Roof from Interbuild October 1966