Prefabrication experiments - 68 - Eliot Noyes : The General Electric Wonder Home

Fertile Cross-pollination between artists, designers, architects and industrialists in the early twentieth century underwrote the establishment of industrial design as a new discipline. The convergence of production techniques with the search for efficiency, good design for the masses and new pedagogy broke down barriers and initiated design for production. Designers developed prototypes for furniture, buildings and commercial products and overlooked disciplinary boundaries. This new commodity culture showcased a potential all-encompassing and comprehensive assertiveness for the designer.

Furthermore, strenuous political turmoil in Europe brought an influx of avant-garde architects such as Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra and Marcel Breuer to America. These architects, fortified by the theories of the German Bauhaus and industrial production, practised and helped educate a generation of young modern architects and their disciples to forge an American modernity. Endorsed by American masters, most notably Charles Eames and Buckminster Fuller, the modern designer blurred the limits between industry and design. Eliot Noyes was the prototype designer of this American modern culture. Influenced by his time with the firm of Gropius and Breuer and his education at Harvard, Noyes crossed disciplinary boundaries by designing for companies and their flagship products, while looking to streamline his media (design) and his message (commodity) into post-war success.

Perhaps best known for his contribution to IBM with the Selectric typewriter, Noyes also designed The General Electric Wonder Home as a prototypical all electric plastic home, which illustrated the model of cross-pollination between design and industry driving the prosperous post war years. Combining modern architectural ideals (open plan and transparency) with a search for military grade structural efficiency (umbrella stressed-skin roof) and industrial innovation (general electric components), the wonder house typifies the use of exhibit houses as a showpiece for modern living. The umbrella roof, the design’s main architectural idea, expressed structural efficiency as the thin shell’s four corners stretched down to solid ground. The monocoque construction organised an interior space free of structural constraints. The house featured a circular electric dolly living room which electrically rotated to position users in relation to design features: a view, a fireplace, or a television, the house would in the future, work for its occupant. General Electric viewed this prototype as an expression of modern power-driven conveniences.

Wonder Home - model photo

Prefabrication experiments - 67 - Dan Kistler's Omega Structures - kit-of-parts

Prefabricated building systems can streamline construction but have repeatedly provided for a limited scope of work in an overall building strategy. Most commercial kits target structural components or wall systems but are incomplete in terms of integrating other systems and their functions. Insulation, weatherstripping, wiring, plumbing, finishes, ventilation and infrastructure connections are the most complex parts of building and excluding them from most building systems’ manufacturing has impeded the growth for industrialized building systems. On-site building maintains the bulk of the process and of the deployed products in our building culture.

A total system approach implies one company purchasing and controlling all of the buildings elements and their coordination unquestionably increasing the complexity of manufacturing. The factory must be set up to include all trades, materials, pieces and processes, which is the model that is used by most modular volumetric builders and associated with mass production and little flexibility. A factory-made complete kit optimized for variability and all building systems is difficult to line up. Procurement and process costs rarely converge with the necessary demand for implementing such systems. The manufacturer must support inventory and marketing costs, further loading the cost structure as compared to on-site builders. This total systems approach increases factory intricacies but offers increased craftsmanship and quality control that comes with factory production.

Dan Kistler’s Omega Structures incorporated was set up to combine custom home design with a prefabricated kit of parts for a global approach to building systems. Along with the regular components such as posts and beams for structure and materials for cladding panels, Kistlers’ proposal included wet and mechanical cores for baths and kitchens. The frame, panels and cores provided an open modular design system which offered clients unlimited potential in terms of design variants. This component-based system completed, pre-wired, pre-plumbed and pre-finished, walls in the factory. Floor panels were ducted in the factory and their overall factory coordination facilitated site work. The methods for achieving infrastructure connections left on-site, are unclear, as is the case with most kit of parts systems. Still Omega structures exemplified standardizing design and production leveraging this consistency toward unrestrained customization based on a modular grid and simple building block type components.

Omega Structures by Dan Kistler

Prefabrication experiments - 66 - Habitat MV

The structure versus skin paradigm brought about by the modernization of construction techniques induced building strategies based on component systems disconnecting structural support, thermal insulation, climate control and physical protection. Each system interacted, was co-ordinated and integrated to perform within a coherent whole while its properties and assembly could be optimized for particularized performance and replacement.  Grids, open frames and interchangeable envelope panels were the flagship constituents of these modern methods of designing and building. Customizable kits included exclusive components fabricated to achieve systemic harmonization and to associate the advantages of continuous production with the uniqueness and site specificity required by architecture.

The theories of flexibility, adaptability, variability and the principles of «open building» developed concurrently alongside these kit-of-parts systems targeting spatial and temporal versatility. Particularly common to school building systems developed in the 1950's and 1960’s in most industrialized countries, the continuous production of standardised components was fused with a construction management process that increased productivity, simplified building details, and enhanced systemic relationships between building elements. Each individual building system was defined as a plug-in to an overall building strategy. This systems based theory still typifies the trade-based organization of the present day building industry.

Habitat MV designed by architects Mazery and Valode in 1971 was designed as an industrialized kit-of-parts that employed modular coordination to standardize details and component assembly. The system included options for steel or concrete open frame post and beam structures organized within spans of 4,5 to 5,4 m. The design was instituted on a unit module of 90cm, which regulated dimensional coordination. Planning grids could be square or rectangular. Steel corrugated deck panels were employed for floor structures while Glass fibre reinforced plastic panels of sandwich construction with a urethane core were proposed for the envelope. The profiled and individually shaped panels available in two widths of  90 or 180 cm expressed their modularity and their unit to whole relationship. The profiled sandwich panels also delineated an active wall space that could be employed as shelving or additional interior space. The entire system and its components were bolted together maximizing their potential for change, disassembly and flexibility.

Habitat MV - system axonomteric