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