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