Prefabrication experiments - 61 - Herbert Yates' Plydom or plydome

The conceptualization of architectural form through a seamless link with architectural production was one of modern architecture’s principles. Manufacturing processes activated geometric based compositions, which leveraged components and repetition to challenge past models. New industrial methods supported a factory-produced architecture and specifically introduced the industrial design of building systems as a part of architectural practise. The relationship between the architect and the factory converged and supported this industrialized building culture.

Industrial development and inventive praxes instituted design, manufacturing and building unity. Assembly, folding, bending, machining, cast-moulding and bonding renewed design methods and architectural exploration.   Folding, in particular, related design to making or manufacturing and is still part of architectural pedagogy and exploration. Traced to traditional Japanese origami, paper folding elucidates the unified aesthetic of space, form and structure. The transformation of a two-dimensional plane into a shelter or a covering by an educated, geometric and rigorous production process correlates structure and architecture. From Eugène Feyssinet’s hangar at Orly, to Walter Netsh’s Airforce Academy Chapel at Colorado Springs, folded plate structures presented shape and dihedral angles as contributors to matter’s inert strength. 

The accordion linear fold was the basis for folded plate structures’ performance. In addition to the folded plates in reinforced and prestressed concrete, folding evoked paper as a structural material in architecture. Scaling the process from study models to prototype details and to an actual size was the basis for the 1966 migrant housing experiment by Herbert Yates for the International Structures corporation: the polydom (or polydome) houses. Neither polygon, nor dome, the folded plate barrel arch employed a three-hinged frame fold to create an easily foldable and transportable space. The interior ceiling plane revealed a geometric character that elevates structure to architecture.

Several hundred polydom structures were set up for temporary agricultural workers in California in the 1960s. Two folded vertical plane components sealed the vault on either end and a canvas canopy completed the shelter, which was anchored to a chipboard stressed-skin floor plane. Cardboard-based polyurethane core panels were polyethylene coated and articulated by impressing and creasing each fold line. The schematic proposal included and central furniture core for storage and sleeping. The shelter could be transported as a flat pack of thin pleated panels and easily deployed and anchored to its prefabricated base. 

Plydom(e) schematics and photos