Prefabrication experiments - 27 - Liberty Inc's telescopic trailer home

The association of dwelling and mobility is rooted in nomadic cultures. Tipis and yurts epitomize the union of shelter and displacement.  These archetypes exposed the combination of quick construction, light materials, simple disassembly and uncomplicated transport. The American tradition of the covered wagon and the need for relocation during the modern era drove the modest transformation of early motorcars and eventually developed the mobile home industry. Carrying your dwelling offers the perfect paradox of linking anchorage and freedom.

The «anchored freedom» proposed by the mobile home along with the Highway system combined to encourage the leisurely discovery of post-war America. The mobile home was the flagship component of postwar leisure and helped grow the manufactured home industry. Articulated to the steel chassis and its accompanying criteria for transport, these factory made trailer-homes were the embodiment of the modern architect’s dream of factory-produced house.

Motivated by government aid and the baby boom, the industry eventually developed the double wide (two adjacent and complementary mobile sections) to compete with permanent dwellings. The advantages of a mobile chassis and a different set of building standards allowed for a different cost structure, which helped the mobile home become one of America’s most affordable housing types. Traditional aesthetics and permanent decorative appliqués such as entry canopies were all included to achieve a greater permanent feel.

Liberty Inc’s telescopic two-story trailer is a remarkable example of using technology to diversify the mobile home. In the case of the Liberty telescopic trailer, the objective was a second floor to increase floor space and its potential flexibility for a changing family structure. A patented system combining a worm shaft and worm wheel in a translating jack allowed for the relatively simple lifting and sliding of the upper envelope over the lower one. The extrusion of the upper floor once the home was set in place gave the mobile home a scale analogous to a typical two-story American shotgun house. The stair component included in the bottom section provided circulation and certainly established a spatial quality not commonly found in trailer homes.

Regularly cited, but rarely successfully applied by architects as a model that could be applied to mass housing, the mobile home industry has employed Fordisms effectively for a century.

Patent drawing from  http://www.google.ca/patents/US2862253    

Prefabrication experiments - 26 - «casette prestampate» Cesare Pea's moulded plastic houses

The development of architecture as an autonomous field relating to academia and to design practise is associated with the social progress of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In particular, the two world wars and the transformation of production from craft to manufacturing set up a new paradigm for the architect. The architect was divorced from his roots as a master builder which split architecture and building into two distinct fields.

The combining of innovative techniques and the city as industrialization’s social framework offered the modern architect a new and long lasting challenge: mass housing. This challenge fostered modern architecture’s obsession with technology, mobility, efficiency of manufacturing and the potential for a factory produced architecture.

The objective of merging architecture with factory production was imagined in the experiments of Le Corbusier (Citrohan), Buckminster Fuller (Dymaxion) and even Jean Prouvé (mobile barracks). These experiments influenced post WWII larger theories involving the capsules and superstructures that characterize the Japanese Metabolist movement or Archigram’s graphic representations of experimental cities during the 1960’s. The mass-produced living unit, capsule or pod inserted into a dense adaptable infrastructure became an icon for late modern architecture’s theories on mass housing.

Advances in concrete, steel and particularly innovative uses for polymers in building accompanied the architect’s view of this highly technological industrialized and decontextualized architecture. The intake infrastructure and the plug-in capsule assembled from «ready made» components exemplified architecture as a commodity detached from the tradition of place.

The «casette prestampate (Italian for pre-printed or pre-molded houses)» proposed by Cesare Pea an Italian architect is a testament to the far reaching influence of the capsule or the adaptable pod as an architectural idea in post-war Europe. Cesare Pea designed an experimental glass fibre reinforced plastic modular pod for varied organisations.

The pleated stressed skin panel construction system structured a modular shell, which included a floor, roof, walls and openings. The modules were organized as cells in a biomimicking housing system that could expand and contract as needed. The project title (prestampate) connotes the moulded and pleated panel manufacturing process but also interestingly references the printing press (stampatore) and relates the project to the idea of printing a house. The idea of a printed house conceivable in today’s world lyrically referenced the serial topology used in Pea’s proposal.

Image form DOMUS no. 334 (1957)