Prefabrication experiments - 79 - Renzo Piano's Diogene retreat

Throughout the history of architecture, small buildings, furniture, cabinet making, garden follies and even jewelry have been objects and subjects of experimentation and a source of inspiration for larger buildings. The small edifice remains architecture’s enduring research project. The notion of encapsulating all of the practical elements of a grand building into an integrated micro-architecture was the modern architect’s fixation. The exitenzminimum movement exemplified the search for a complete mass-produced «machine for living». Le Corbusier, Jean Prouvé, Konrad Wachsmann and the list could include more recent architects, Shigeru Ban, Patkau architects, and Bernard Tschumi, all used the micro-building to innovate technically and spatially.

In the context of today’s growing tiny house movement, the architect’s fascination with tiny spaces has become mainstream. The tiny house is the emblem of an intensifying simplified living effort. Whether prefabricated or not, the tiny house reforms domesticity. Rationalising space, resource consumption and varying from 100 to 400 square feet these small structures require imagination to offer a vital minimum to their inhabitants in a diminutive form.

In the tradition of architects' interest in small fully integrated spaces, Renzo Piano, the 1998 pritzker prizewinner recently teamed up with Vitra, a Swiss family-owned furniture company, to commercialize his design for a micro-dwelling. Piano had begun this design as a side research project to design a minimal dwelling. The small all-inclusive capsule unit designed as «a place of retreat» offers a 7,5 square meter living space in an approximately 2,5x3 meter archetypically shaped unit who's systematic nature seems informed by mid-century capsule architecture.

The tiny house functions as an autonomous system. The concept is specifically technological as all energy is produced by the dwelling’s solar panels or wind turbine. Rain water is collected by small water tanks underneath the structure’s floor. The included composting toilet and recirculated water shower ensure the structure responds to basic human needs. The envelope is composed of cross-laminated timber panels clad in brushed aluminum. The structure could be positioned on a site with four screw piles to which the volume would be anchored.   Relations to the outdoors are kept to a minimum. The interior is more akin to multifunctional piece of built-in furniture offering little luxury but maximum functionality.

The Diogene portable dwelling

Prefabrication experiments - 78 - Moladi injected plastic moulds

Roman builders were the first to use concrete. They filled walls shaped with lateral brickwork with a mixture of incinerated limestone, hydrated volcanic sands and gravel. Concrete's relationship with the history of construction and particularly with the industrialisation of architecture has a rich heritage both technically and aesthetically. From breakthroughs in reinforced concrete in the late 19th century, its malleable properties have been used on and offsite in the production of panels and surfaces for walls, floors and for a plethora of either component or monolithic building strategies.

While adaptable, concrete’s weight, curing time and space requirements have forced builders to regard the building site as an industrial unit. This relationship between production and place have produced a well documented tradition of industrialised formwork conceived to at once simplify assembly and streamline the onsite manufacturing process.  Tunnel forms, slip forms, reusable forms and the iconic Tournalayer sought to industrialize onsite concrete production. Permanent or temporary formwork was and still is fabricated in wood, plastics, steel, or foam insulation. Within the spectrum of reusable formwork, plastics are specifically valued for their agility, lightness and strength. Furthermore, plastic’s precise production processes enables simple and stable connections.

Moladi is a producer of injection moulded lightweight reusable formwork, which carries a simple assembly line process to the building site. The plastic moulds are designed to standard modular sizes, which are delivered and assembled on site. Reinforcing bars are then positioned within the cavity, which is filled with a cement-based mortar. The mortar is allowed to cure twenty-four hours before the forms are removed and reused on an adjacent structure. The plastic forms are moisture and mildew resistant. The forms can be reused multiple times because of the injected plastic’s durability and constancy. The mortar is a mixture of cement, sand and fresh water. The Moladi system eliminates the necessary skilled labour required in building accurate and resistant formwork and replaces it with prefabricated easy to assemble panels. The assembly, mixing and filling does not require any skilled labour and can be taught on site establishing a localized and economical building process. The Moladi plastic forms are promoted for developing countries or crises requiring quick, solid and straightforward building systems.

Extracted from the moladi website http://www.moladi.net 

Prefabrication experiments - 77 - Baühu Cubes

Whether stacked, juxtaposed or grouped, combining continuously produced room sized building elements epitomizes the concept of factory produced buildings and architecture. Using factory produced box framed units rationalizes the connections between design, production, assembly and construction. The origins of box-type industrialized building systems seem to stem from early pioneer caravaners or the train car container frame. Further inspired by a mass-production legacy, many volumetric systems have been described as solutions to housing crises in many different contexts both by industry and architects.

The sectional unit or container bridges the fields of production and design using a simple conceptual framework articulated to a rigorous set of dimensional, structural and compositional standards. Akin to toy blocks or simple brick construction, the clearly defined modular units and their arrangement can achieve countless combinations. These types of containers or volumetric structures include transformable industrial shipping containers, manufactured rooms or service sub-assemblies and the iconic singlewide houses.

Bertrand Goldberg's Unishelter Town and more recently Sean Godsell's Emergency Sea Container reuse for emergency shelters both exemplify designers’ fascination with the standard rectangular prism and its compositional agility, however the transport and shipping challenges appear to out way the advantages as the modular building block is still a fairly peripheral strategy. Many companies or industrialists have tried to optimize transport by proposing flatpacked boxes.

Baühu modular buildings form the U.K. is one such company that produces standard shipping sized volumes of 2.4 x 6 x 2.5 meters, that are shipped as a flat surface package and unfolded on site. Each container can be stacked to a maximum of three stories. The telescopic flatpack is expanded to a simple box frame configuration with steel framed edges revealing the flat packed facing panels, which are then simply tilted into place. The company offers standard plans and modular configurations for schools, housing, worker camps, and commercial applications. The prism’s envelope materials can also vary from the standard metal container to fully customizable imagery for each face. The steel structure frame is infilled with insulated sandwich panels. The flat pack strategy allows for easy assembly as well as its total disassembly for relocation and its long-term adaptability.

Images from the company brochure