Prefabrication experiments - 36 - Componoform inc

A French gardener, Jean Monier, is usually credited with inventing reinforced concrete. However, some of his late 19^th century contemporaries including W.B. Wilkinson in England, François Coignet in France and RB Stevenson in the United States received patents for embedding bendable materials in concrete (either wood or steel). Concrete like stone is inherently strong in compression and fragile in bending. The embedded tension material, typically steel rods reinforce the concrete’s spanning ability. Moreover, if the concrete covering is of an adequate thickness and quality it protects the steel rods against their inherent limitation, which is corrosion. The reinforcing rods are characteristically placed in a grid pattern where tension reaction is necessary and then encased in the concrete. 

Early 20th century experiments characterized by the work of Eugène Freyssinet further optimized reinforced concrete by stressing the steel before encasing it. This process placed the concrete in a compressed state as the concrete hardened and the rods were released much like an elastic band that is placed in perpetual tension. This process, allowed for longer spans as the concrete is permanently stressed in compression and less material is needed, therefore producing lighter members.

Concrete and modern architecture’s social housing experiments went hand in hand. Concrete’s strength, résistance to fire, and its durability stimulated the industrialization of precast panelized and component systems and helped produce modern social housing block. Concrete systems also initiated the theorization of flexible plans and adaptable system organisation as they clearly separated structure and non load-bearing systems.

Componoform was a building block system that proposed pre-stressed building components for beams, columns and slabs. Each element could be bolted for ease of assembly and disassembly. The longer spans of up to 10 m generated a free plan and allowed for spatial variability. The main element of the original Componoform patented building system was a cruciform column head that radiated in four directions developing a simple post and beam dry assembly. The modular precast slabs integrated a linear void space for lightness and transferred their loads to beams, which in turn transferred the load to the columns. The frame (or skeleton according to the patent text) could then be covered in modular precast panels or any other potential skins.  The cross-head column standardized the orthogonal nature of the system but permitted multiple grids and spans.

Patent drawing of the Componoform system

Prefabrication experiments - 35 - Ingersoll Utility Unit

The Post World-War II housing boom experienced by a majority of industrialized countries employed military advances and offered luxuries like indoor plumbing, central heating and electrical distribution to the masses. The house was no longer simply for occupant protection; The industrialized house’s technologically advanced user-friendly devices allowed for cooking, heating, lighting and even telecommunication (intercoms). The freedom and ease of use associated with these modern amenities were unfamiliar to traditional building techniques.

These added components presented challenges for conventional construction. The necessary distribution of wiring and plumbing brought with it the fairly recent idea of building coordination. The integration of systems often left to on-site building or to the architect in more complex building types created confusion between structure, envelope and mechanical elements, which still persists. The mechanical systems and their coordination often represent 40% of the total cost of construction and are handled as secondary elements passing and tangling through wall cavities, reducing sound and thermal insulation.

The building industry needs to tackle this coordination entanglement using mechanical cores and factory installation as quality control tactics and as strategies for making the technical components fundamental articulating elements of spatial organization and planning. Analogous to the computer’s microchip, these cores can contain the intelligence needed for modern living but can also simplify distribution of plumbing, electrical, heating, air-conditioning and overall construction.

The Ingersoll Utility Unit proposed by the Borg-Warner Corporation of Chicago in 1947 proposed a central core unit as a spatial device that contained the house’s complex chunks (see refabricating architecture). The factory-produced unit was approved and tested by Underwriters Laboratories. This core unit could be included in an overall scheme with adjacent kitchen and bath spaces. The Ingersoll Unit was a steel channel framed box that contained plumbing stacks and distribution, heating furnace, and central electrical components. The bathroom could be connected to one side of the core while the kitchen components were connected to the other. The compact nucleus of services optimized living space, variability and adaptability. This adaptability was illustrated in the company’s catalogue as a major architectural feature. The core unit as a strategic spatial device and a value added building component continues to influence architectural and prefabrication theory to this day: «blocks or facilities» are modular cores used by Kieran and Timberlake for the Loblolly house.

Ingersoll Utility Unit from the product catalogue

Prefabrication experiments - 34 - Carl Koch's Techbuilt house

Walter Gropius’ influence on the development of modernism in the United States was extensive. Gropius’ work at the German Bauhaus, his early 20^th century manifestos on industrialized building and his contribution to education of young architects at Harvard helped establish a specifically American mid-century modern architecture. His assessment of the need for variability and adaptability suggested prefabrication as a strategy to provide for architecturally variable systems. The concept of a kit-of-standardized parts informed Gropius’ attitude toward prefabrication. The architect should not only reflect on the architectural composition but also on the process of facilitating construction and individualized building. His theories tried to link values of industry and humanism.

The approach of a coordinated system of parts relating to the whole building scheme was already prevalent in research and Gropius’s experiments participated in furthering Albert Farwell Bemis’ theories of modular coordination. This confluence of concepts, principles and explorations was clearly evident in many experiments of the era and in traditional kit houses going back to the Christof and Unmack German wood systems. The kit of parts could also be traced to the British Dorlonco or Weir houses. These steel component-based housing systems leveraged traditional post and beam construction along with lighter steel and new assembly techniques toward a coordinated building organization.

The influence of Gropius’ theories, and by extension his knowledge of the post and beam German systems, was evident in the work of Carl Koch. Koch studied under Gropius at Harvard and proposed housing systems articulated to similar values. Koch’s ideal of affordable, flexible and adaptable housing was directly motivated by Gropius’ early manifestoes. Koch’s preliminary work on the Acorn house evolved into his most ambitious experiment in prefabrication. He developed a system that combined the open plan made possible by post and beam with the ease of assembly of stressed skin panel envelope. The Techbuilt house was based on the modular coordination of structure and skin. The spatial openness, the optimization of ground to roof plane liveable space and the extending roof cantilevers were elements of the modernist spirit included in the Techbuilt kit. The most innovative design element of the house was Koch’s conceptualization of a system that could be easily modified, adapted or dismantled and reassembled on a different site. Housing, in his view, would need to be a flexible and variable reflection of the evolving modern world. 

 

TECHBUILT catalogue rendering

Prefabrication experiments - 33 - GFRP air terminal in the arctic

The launching of satellites into space, the resulting space race and the progress of material chemistry post World War II drove a new spatial and material language for architectural experiments. Glass fibre reinforced plastics were relatively unfamiliar matrices. Glass fibre matrices were studied for military use allowing for much lighter and stronger aeronautic structures. The correlation between lighter airplanes, space shuttle development and capsule architecture is articulated to the chemistry of this new material research. The Glass fibre reinforced stressed skin panel construction on Polykem’s Ventura House, the Monsanto house of the future or the even more UFO like finish future houses designed by Matti Suuronen are the flagship projects of this new material language.

Imagining the colonisation of difficult and barren moonscapes also contributed to this space age architecture of autonomous settlement. This combining of integrated systems, lightness and capsule representation was used in various contexts but none more barren than the Canadian Arctic. Nunavut, Canada's most climatically difficult landscape was the focal point of Papineau, Gérin-Lajoie, Leblanc, architect’s (a post-war emerging French Canadian firm) most technically innovative experiments.

The Fort Chimo air terminal was among several of the firm’s experiments in attaching GFRP panels to a lightweight structural steel frame. The GFRP contributed to a lightweight and highly insulating envelope conducive to weathertightness and an aerodynamic overall building form. The stressed skin envelope was easy to transport, easy to assemble, and flexible enough to support quick on-site project management; It allowed for the envelope to be air-tight and for work to continue in a climate controlled environment.

Along with the Fort Chimo air terminal, the inuksuk secondary school used the same principle. The panels included exterior and interior GFRP with a rigid insulation core. The assembly points were overlapped to avoid thermal bridging and windows were reduced to a porthole minimum. The lightweight panels and steel structure optimised transport by ship or air and were included in an overall kit of parts strategy for construction. This strategy also allowed for local labour to be used in the assembly of a simple «meccano» type erector set construction system. The combination of innovative construction with intelligent passive massing strategies contributed to an innovative construction system for the difficult Arctic winters.

Air terminal published in Progressive Architecture, September 1972