Prefabrication experiments - 37 - Gerald Horn's space frame house

In a series of writings entitled «In Praise of Architecture», Gio Ponti characterized modern architecture's obsession with lightness and transparency as the disappearance of the wall. The relentless research for open and free space as a new architectural value was the foundation of architectural extremes intersecting Mies van der Rohe’s universal space as illustrated in Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Buckminster Fuller's optimized geodesic dome structures.

Quite different in their interpretation of how form, space and structure should relate, the two extremes shared the common concepts of maximum flexibility and industrialized material strategies. The absence of interior columns and the use of an overall structural strategy as a floor or a roof element to span large spaces without structural hindrance became the mark of adaptable architecture.

In the «turning point of building» Konrad Wachsmann argued for the space frame as a coming together of the values of open planning and the material potential of building industrialization. He designed a series of space frames for military airplane hangars. The use of the space frame for housing experiments was marginal and largely limited to high tech British architects. The relatively small scale spans implied by housing make it less cost effective than more conventional approaches.

An ambitious example of the space frame for housing was a non-built project by American architect Gerald Horn. Educated and influenced by the modernist heritage, most notably Craig Ellwood, Horn’s proposal used the space frame as a spatial device for adaptability.  The proposal combined a triangulated space frame, a modular grid based plan and the low-cost wooden two by four.

Horn’s objective was to portray the simple use of materials and assemblies as a low cost alternative to the balloon frame. The roof structure was a triangulated roof truss supported by 4 truss columns. Both the space frame and the columns used a double cord two by four bolted to a steel node that standardized the triangular module.

The free plan also used a modular and moveable ceiling panel to make the variability of space an evolving component of the proposition. The only fixed non-moveable walls were the core elements. The proposal was akin to the canonical glass houses of the modernist movement with the wood space frame being the proposal’s original element.

space frame house from Arts and Architecture november 1965