Prefabrication experiments - 25 - Marcel Breuer's bi (by) nuclear house

The assembly line, the separation of tasks and the hierarchal organization of the factory evolved from the models of Henry Ford and Frederic Winslow Taylor transformed both architecture and building culture from pre-industrial craft based output into a post-industrial task based output.

The standardization of production along with the housing crises of the twentieth century gave modern architects a «predicament» that still haunts the discipline today. The larger building industry industrialized and stereotyped traditional housing forms while architects compared housing to automobile or aircraft production in the search of novel aesthetics.

The Citrohan (Le Corbusier), the Dymaxion (Buckminter Fuller), the Plas-2-point (Marcel Breuer), and the Meudon houses (Jean Prouvé) are notable examples. A consistent scenario for living patterns also accompanied their search for «the factory made house»(see Herbert 1984): The modern man (or woman) would have more time for leisure. This pattern helped establish the open plan as a standardized form of space organization for the modern architect.

One notable example of this leisure intensive scenario for post-war living was Marcel Breuer’s take on the open plan. Published in a December 1943 Arts and Architecture article (on the design of a bi-nuclear house : design for post-war living), the «by or bi nuclear» house was proposed as a generic planning tool for the new «nuclear» family and the variable modern activities associated with it.

Breuer’s take on the open plan was the clear separation between day and night spaces organized around the central nucleus of the house : an entry patio for gardening and leisure activities. The receiving spaces were an open composition for hosting lavish parties : modern man would only work three or four days leaving the rest of the week to host friends or partake in other hobbies. The night spaces were separate so the children could have their own spaces for studying and sleeping.

The spatial organization seems to have somewhat percolated mid-century-modern bungalow design and further into todays appreciated open kitchen-living-dining-outdoor relationship. Although Marcel Breuer’s take on post-war living patterns was not an industrialized output, he did organize his custom designed houses around this approach.

The clearly defined bi-polar plan perhaps even foreshadowed the case study house program’s experiments designed by Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinnen and particularly Ralph Rapson’s case study house #4 (the green belt house) which certainly exposed the separation of day and night spaces separated by a central natural axis.

Marcel Breuer's prototype plan - the bi(by)nuclear house

Prefabrication experiments - 24 - Heinrich La Roche's building construction system of bolted panels

The production of architecture from prehistory to today encompasses two archetypes: Massive (masonry, wet) construction and filigree (skeletal, dry) construction, both evolved after industrialization into a systematized form of off-site production for on-site assembly. Within the framework of this evolution, modular building coordination based on uniform multiples of building units percolated into building culture and helped standardize, customize and optimize on-site construction.

This on-site optimization reduces demand for factory produced complete building systems. On-site builders do recognize the value added nature of certain increasingly industrialized components that further improve on-site construction. The wall panel, somewhere between massive and filigree construction, is a surface component with the structural capacity of being used vertically or horizontally to create a variable on-site construction system. The wall panel is increasingly prevalent even in traditional on-site stick frame construction.

Heinrich Le Roche is an inventor who patented a system for housing based on panel construction in 1932. Proposed as a factory produced panel system structured around a corridor core, the panels were to be bolted together in their corners relying on the monocoque or stressed skin nature of the panel construction. The surface panels used standardized unit dimensions and required only dry construction techniques for on-site assembly. The dry construction also allowed for easy disassembly improving the system’s adaptability over time.

Multiple panels bolted together produced a boxlike module linked to a linear corridor. Although invented for variability, the system’s flexibility was limited to a linear composition. La Roche's system was a bearing wall composition in which the corridor and the exterior wall supported the interior floor and ceiling panels. This organization offered multiple free spans for adjacent corridor rooms. The objective was to offer maximum flexibility and ease of assembly. The corridor as a linear core element has many advantages in terms of structural simplicity, clear circulation and egress efficiency. However, it creates a very rigid composition that in La Roche's view could be avoided by arranging the adjacent rooms in a variable manner. 

Today’s structural insulated panels or stressed skin factory framed stick built panels are recognized for ease of use, ease of integration, and variability. Their open form of construction allows for any configuration and their flat-pack nature offers transport flexibility.

Patent Drawing by Heinrich La Roche see  http://www.google.com/patents/US1886962

Prefabrication experiments - 23 - Timber Structures inc. - the MOBILCORE

Appointed in 1946 to «make no small plans» by American president Harry Truman, Wilson Wyatt (United States Housing Expediter in the Office of War Mobilization) was still dealing with a considerable housing problem in 1950 when he planned to inject a lagging building industry with a demand for 2 700 000 units.

Wyatt’s aggressive and renewed building plan paired on-site and off-site building strategies and encouraged innovation in reducing costs and material use. In the context of low-cost government supported building, developers had adopted wood stick framing as a light, quick, flexible and adaptable form of construction. The stick built balloon frame and today’s familiar platform frame evolved and had been refined in America since the early 19^th century.

The work of San Franscisco builder/developer Dave Bohannon was a testament to the reason why stick-framed building culture was prevalent in the United States. Bohannon combined factory and site construction techniques; A portable sawmill was installed on the tract of land for cutting and profiling all the necessary building components. His methods generated seven hundred units in six hundred ninety-three man-hours in Oakland in 1944 (Life April 12^th, 1950). The materially innovative steel or concrete prefab experiments of the era could hardly contend with the industrialized 2 by 4 and the steel nail.

A number of builders did however see potential in the factory produced complex parts of a house. These builders looked to enhance labour intensive stick framing by industrializing mechanical cores around which houses could be completed. One example of a factory-produced core was Timber Structures inc.’s MOBILCORE. The unit of approximately 8'x24' (2,4mx7,2m) included all fixtures and appliances. The module was divided into bath, mechanical room and kitchen. For two thousand seven hundred dollars (approximately 40% of a total house price of the era) one could purchase a unit, have it delivered on-site and build the house around it.

Comparable to Walter Gropius’s theories of standardization of components to allow for the greatest possible architectural variability, the MOBILCORE brought the value of factory quality to the complex components leaving the rest of the house to the flexibility of the wood frame. Combining the malleability of the stick frame to the factory-produced core created a formidable open industrialized building system for housing.

The Mobilcore as illustrated in Life April 12th 1950

Prefabrication experiments - 22 - Precast concrete (pieces, panels and boxes) in postwar U.S.S.R.

Industrialization of building and construction evolved from the transmission of new technologies and the ensuing urbanization of cities. In the United States the government put the burden directly on private industry to solve the housing crises that accompanied industrialization and urbanization. The single family home was the nucleus of American examination of industrialized building systems. The privatization of housing was a major component of the rapid suburbanization of America.

A parallel challenge arose out of the ashes of World War 2 in the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. had lost over a third of its housing. The housing emergency accompanied an economic crisis fuelled by a deteriorating labour force and material shortages. The soviet government planned a colossal program to provide a quality home for each resident. The social program positioned the state as promoter, builder, designer, provider and purchaser. The standardization of industrialized building systems and the collective housing block evolved from a unique government promoted strategy for mass housing in the USSR.

Labour intensive traditional brick building, steel and wood shortages and difficult winter conditions all combined to create an environment conducive to a factory produced precast concrete component based building culture in postwar U.S.S.R. The government set up factories to build pieces (post and beams), panels (wall sub-assemblies) and boxes (completely integrated modules) all in precast concrete based on standardized building plans which optimized housing as an industrial process.

The precast systems offered a limited number of designs. 12 building types (see Industrialized building in the Soviet Union, 1971) and housing units were proposed to optimize production. This Precast culture used concrete's moulding potential to integrate mechanical walls and pre-plumbed partitions. The basic unit of U.S.S.R.’s precast building culture was the modular coordination of components based on a grid used for all housing production. The preferred structural grid for housing projects was 6m x 6m which was modularly coordinated from a 60cm planning grid and a basic 10cm component unit.

The massive scale of standardization produced architecture that reduced demand on qualified labour, reduced construction timelines, optimized costs and offered a greater quality of construction. This standardized building culture although successful at creating large amounts of housing also illustrated one of the challenges of industrialization for building, an often rigid relationship between design, variability and production.

Precast pre-plumbed wall image for Industrialized building in the Soviet Union, 1971