Prefabrication experiments - 20 - California modern prefab

The immigration of influential members of the European avant-garde to the United States transported and secured modernist values to American architectural academia in the 20^th century. The combination of European modernism, its attraction to the American building culture of light industrialized components (balloon frame and skeletal steel) and the American pioneer spirit contributed to prefabrication as a recurrent theme in American modern architecture with the single family home as its nucleus. While present throughout the United States, California was a particularly fertile context for the examination of modernism.

Regularly linked to Charles and Ray Eames’ Case study house 8, prefab culture has a deeper-rooted tradition in California. The mid nineteenth century brought over 300 000 forty-niners and varied transportable housing from United States, Latin America, Britain, and Asia, diversifying California’s social make-up and contributing the progressive nature of its building culture.   

This tradition of shared building culture exemplified by the designs of Bernard Maybeck, and the influence of pure modernists like Walter Gropius and Richard Neutra combined to create an American / California modernism. The Case Study House Program published by Arts and Architecture is a prime example of the era’s progressive ideas for housing. The CSHP designs revealed the common themes of horizontal layering of spaces, centrally clustered flexible spatial composition and modular coordination of components.

Gordon Drake who died tragically in his early thirties had a brief but prolific career inspired by California modernism. Drake designed a series of houses based on a four-foot grid module and a panel system not unlike Gropius and Wachsmann's packaged houses system. The 1946 designed experimental house system proposed interchangeable components based on a three dimensional grid. The strategy was concurrent to the Modular Standards Association and the American Standards Association proposals for a 4-inch cube module that was to facilitate building from a point of view of systems and component integration. This grid was an evolution of Alfred Farwell Bemis’ studies during the 1930’s.

Gordan Drake's proposal for his experimental houses was based on modular coordination composed of floor, wall and roof panels, mostly skins attached to a simple open frame structure. The drawings for the house kit foreshadow Charles Eames’ 1949 CSH #8 kit and portray a typical view of the California modern prefab of the era. 

Experimental House in Architecture d'Aujourd'hui july 1948