Prefabrication experiments - 30 - Domino and not DOM-INO

The common thread of early prefabrication experiments was the convergence of war, modernization and mass production. The manufactured house planned on a typical flat lot became the model for prefabricated housing systems. Site specificity and variability were lost to tract housing in service of massive housing crisis. The model of a site-specific house designed within local traditions and construction methods was replaced in many industrialized countries by the proliferation of the balloon frame. This combination of the 2 by 4 and the steel nail contributed to a housing culture of uniformity.

This detachment of architecture from industry and building distanced the architect from residential design and placed mass housing in the hands of builders. Architects, with a few speculative exceptions, developed a somewhat elitist view of the manufactured house, defining it as a soulless architecture of mass production.

It is important however to note that industry was not concerned with aesthetics. Its processes are equally conducive to beautiful and ugly architecture, site-specific or non site-specific buildings and local or global values. The marginal movement toward open building systems, based on fundamentally modernist ideas, came from a realisation that craft and industry were not incompatible. Modulli 225 designed by Kristian Gullichsen and Juhani Pallasmaa is perhaps the most notable system intended to merge craft and industry. Conceptually linked to Finland’s traditional connection to the forest, Modulli 225 promoted wood in a modular post and beam construction system.

Finland’s prefabricated house market had been driven by the housing crisis and the war reparations owed to Russia. An already craft-based wood building culture, Scandinavian countries and Finland in particular generated a number of open building systems conducive to variability, flexibility and adaptability. The modulli 225 evolved in this context and was theoretically related to the variable DOMINO component-based system. Conceivably also related to Le Corbusier’s DOM-INO, Finland’s DOMINO was based on a similar open modular planning grid organized by horizontal planes. The open spaces within the horizontal planes were filled with patterned panels of walls and windows.  The vertical stressed skin insulated panels allowed for multiple indoor/outdoor interactions.

The DOMINO system was based on a modular coordinated grid of panels, precise details and simple spatial organisations. This rational approach to variability allowed for numerous potential configurations presenting prefabrication as an integral part of an architectural process.

From the product catalogue of the DOMINO system