Prefabrication experiments - 108 - Ready mades, found objects, and the architecture of cast-offs

Artist Marcel Duchamp infamously assembled or showcased ordinary objects by transforming their nature and our perceptions of them. Creating something unexpected, critical or fun from an everyday commodity became regarded as a ready-made. In architecture the idea of a ready-made conveys prefabrication. Since modernism, the concept of a recycled object or an inspirational object has motivated many building and mass housing systems. Buckminster fuller deployed thousands of his Dymaxion deployment units derived from typical cylindrical Butler grain bins, while refrigerated railway cars informed Bertrand Goldberg’s Unishelter projects. Both projects represent classic prefab theory and prototypical ready-made architectures.

Articulated to an object’s potential to serve diverse functions at different scales, architecture created from «found objects» that no longer serve their original purpose can also conserve resources and raw materials. Amassing shipping containers, concrete infrastructure tubing or pipes, used tires, shipping pallets, cardboard tubes, ready-to-use castoffs infuse prefab theory with an artistic reference to the «objet trouvé» or «ready made» while reducing a building's ecological footprint. Reused Dimensionally regulated objects also address modularity: combining similar units in multiple, varying and differing patterns to achieve efficient, economical and an explicitly forceful architecture. 

The standard ISO shipping container is made of steel. It is a strong and durable volumetric building block designed to withstand the rigours of global transport and is employed readily as ready-made architecture. Analogous to manufactured single-wide housing volumes, the freight containers offer similar aggregation and massing possibilities which have been exploited by many designers. The Holyoke, Minnesota weekend house designed by Paul Stankey and Sarah Nordby employs two standard twenty-foot cargo containers as service spaces while defining the home’s served spaces. The two containers are positioned over pier foundations and compose the bearing walls supporting both the timber floor structure and a clearstory roof structure. The containers are used authentically and creatively structuring both their inner space and the outer void created by their juxtaposition.

The containers offer an interior space of about eight feet (2.4m) by twenty (6m) feet, which limit both planning flexibility and structural definition. Does this «objet trouvé» / ready made architecture help prefab's appeal by graphically exposing recycling or does it's marginal application continue to hinder a more comprehensive strategy for prefab as it proposes little architectural variation, adaptability or planning flexibility ?

Exterior photo of the juxtaposed containers

Prefabrication experiments - 107 - Open-source architecture for mass housing

The benefits of industrialized building techniques combined with skeletal frame structures and an intelligible design strategy complementing its users’ changing needs or evolving lifestyles helped found the enduring values of flexible planning. Le Corbusier’s generic flat slab DOM-INO housing system and Walter Gropius’ expandable house system showcased early 20^th century architectural variability. Later, experiments like Herman Hertzberger's "in between spaces, or spaces interpreted by their users" offered a type of systemic adaptability through common infrastructure.

N.J. Habraken referred to personal alteration of a generic infrastructure as the natural relationship for MH (mass housing). Borrowed by open building theorists as their common framework, the ideal of nonspecific adjustable/flexible/modular systems is developing into more than just adaptable housing but into a model of open-source sharing of housing concepts for design and construction. Wikihouse and Paperhouses both offer public permissions and argue in favour of sharing designs or systems and maintain the principles of individualized adaptability.

Contrasting with the traditional idea of the «architect» designed original one-off building, Chilean Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena of Elemental architecture has begun distributing cad and pdf files of four adaptable housing projects on a creative commons license. Individuals can download, use, modify and pursue each project according to their personal needs. Revising the traditional criteria for authorship, Elemental Achitecture publicly shares its vision for mass housing. Their «abc of incremental housing» makes a case for open-source distribution and for adaptable, simple and densely organised housing concepts. Of the four open-source projects, the Villa Verde project designed in 2013 for 484 Chilean families most emblematically represents the ideal of a generic infrastructure. The open frame composed of a folded surface plane defines a cross section that can be inhabited from 57 to 85m2 paralleling a family’s evolution.

Based on precepts developed in projects such as Avi Friedman's grow home in the 1970’s and 1980’s the incremental housing strategy is on-line and ready for download. The creative commons license allows users to engage with professionally designed work. This open source ecosystem is set to change the way we think about sharing information. Knowledge is valued above authorship; a major change in Architecture’s singular building tradition.

Villa Verde open-source housing project