Prefabrication experiments - 72 - Procédé Fillod metallic buildings

Pre-industrialised building culture assimilated processes, techniques and particular building characteristics from the exchange of knowledge between specialized guilds. The craftsman was the focal point of building production. In a wide-ranging shift, industrialised building culture placed the manufactured component and its fetish materials: plastic, concrete, steel and glass at the heart of new building praxes. Within this modernization and its material pallet, steel and its production became emblematic of a revolution in building.  Recognized for its versatility, precision and meticulous manufacturing, steel’s progress generated smaller astute profiles, stronger alloys, thinner laminates and exact engineering. From early cast iron houses to Barton Myers collaboration with Stelco, a plethora of kit-of-parts systems embodied the correlation between steel and the pursuit of an industrialized architecture: continuous production toward economic benefit.

Steel and its use in construction was endorsed in most industrialized countries.  In France, the GEAI (Groupement pour l'Etude d'une Architecture Industrialisée) loosely translated as the Industrialised Architecture Research Group, established in 1962, explored and examined building experiments in various materials and methods. Specifically in regards to their simple constituents, their agility and their dry construction methods, steel frame and component systems expressed a «mass-customizable» strategy for building encouraged by the GEAI. Frame (post and beam) systems supported countless grid patterns, arrangements and functions. The quickly erected steel skeleton was a framework for variable but coordinated envelopes. The skeletal components were profiled, cut and bored in the factory enabling an orderly and methodical type of «Meccano» construction.

The «Procédé Fillod» developed by Constructions Métalliques Fillod was typical of steel’s potential and development leveraged toward building construction. Furthermore the Fillod systems illustrate a conceptual model still in use today. The Fillod processes included both folded sheet material and laminated post and beam elements. The folded plate material was used for wall panels and notably as permanent concrete slab formwork for floors, foreshadowing present day steel floor construction.  Fillod metallic buildings evolved from early 1930’s patents to school building systems in the late 1960’s. Analogous to Lustron in the US and Dorlonco in Great Britain, the skeleton and skin approach to industrialized building systems proposed a flexible and adaptable language of coordinated parts.  Fillod’s simple steel framework was articulated to a predefined factory-optimized dimensional modularity.

Procédé Fillod - open steel framework