Prefabrication experiments - 50 - «Transportable Units» by Angela Hareiter

Manufactured housing and prefabricated architecture as two distant theoretical relatives evolved from the conceptual distance modernity shaped between architecture and building. The modern architect’s preoccupation with mass housing rested on the meeting of immense housing demand, conflict and evolving manufacturing possibilities. The post-war massive building programs lead to great architectural exploration and massive entrepreneurial undertakings of tract housing. From this confluence, housing and architecture converged and then seemed to follow different paths.

Post war high modernism (Scott) noted as a technical condition that would improve social conditions, was well represented in architecture and developed a discipline articulated on values somewhat distant from problems of building. The disconnection between housing and architecture is still illustrated today as manufactured housing has only marginal links to architecture and architects have only a marginal aesthetic interest in the industrialization of housing. Late modern experiments show this detachment from building but also demonstrate a growing appeal for the industrial, technical and engineering prowess of the space age. 

Industrial production, mobility and flexibility became focal points of how architecture related to building systems. Plastics and specifically glass fibre reinforced plastic was the flagship material of this new architecture. From prefabricated bathroom capsules to aggregated modular matrix structures, architecture explored new housing types. Although innovative and optimistic, it can be argued that this further separated architects from housing.

Choosing an emblematic project that relates high modernism and architecture is a difficult task because of the great diversity and quantity of experimental projects. Patented systems range from suspended mobile units to stacked units and to mobile pods. The «transportable units» by Angela Hareiter addressed all the areas of study linked to high modernism as it relates to architecture in an ambitious dwelling tower: futuristic city systems, clip-on architecture, service cores, flexibility, adaptability, and unit mobility. The central vertical core infrastructure provided an outlet for services onto which each individual industrialized and moulded stressed skin unit could be plugged into and unplugged to suit society’s evolving needs. The collected units braced and completed the tower’s structural core system. Units were to be hoisted by crane or deposited by helicopter and linked to the structural core. The clip-on strategy failed to materialize but these building systems advanced assembly of parts as a 20^th century architectural aesthetic.

Mobile units - Clip-on structural system