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 20th 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 |
No comments:
Post a Comment