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)