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