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 |
No comments:
Post a Comment