Prefabrication experiments - 149 - Future visions - 10 - Building Foundations

Earthworks and building foundations symbolically and physically anchor buildings to their location. Whether buildings seem to grow from their context or float over their sites, local ground conditions and bearing capacity dictate the manner in which a building’s vertical loads are transmitted to some type of footing. Akin to the manner in which a snowshoe spreads a person’s weight onto a larger surface area, building foundations and footings distribute loads onto a larger footprint. Foundations require soil that is stable enough to support loads and that it remains so, in order to keep the building standing throughout its life. 

Traditionally concrete, stone or in some cases carbonized or treated timber, were used to affix a building into position. Rot resistant materials such as concrete and stone are more commonly employed as foundations are susceptible to water infiltration, frost heaving, or soil instability. Recently, insulated concrete formwork is integrating conventional construction as the formwork reduces waste while increasing the wall’s thermal performance.

As ecosystems become increasingly fragile, researchers are developing innovative ways to improve foundation strategies. Rising flood plains, melting permafrost, sinking water tables are just some of the issues pressuring traditional monolithic foundations. A research group lead by architect Dr. Martyn Dade-Robertson from Newcastle University is proposing a type of bacteria to reinforce soil weaknesses by creating a type of bio-concrete, which could respond to changing conditions over time adjusting support structures as needed. 

Before integrating this type of self-adapting soil becomes common, lightweight, multipoint, space frame and modular structures are also being used in fragile conditions to reform standard concrete foundations and footings.  Platforms are built from triangulated structures onto which buildings are attached as a structure to a large raft. Triodetic structures, a Canadian firm well known for their space frame assemblies, has begun marketing and employing this type of raft foundation for a diversity of applications. Space frame foundations can be tailored to different sites. Buildings can sit lightly on fragile soils reducing local soil disturbance. Assembled from steel tubes and connectors, this type of foundation could conceivably be adjusted to changing conditions over time. Further this type of dry assembly of prefabricated components allows the structure to be dismounted and redeployed in other conditions.

Multi-Point foundation system by Triodetic 

Prefabrication experiments - 148 - Future Visions - 09 - Flat Pack Disaster Dwelling from a Waste Based Bio-composite

Rapidly increasing world populations, conflicts, changing urban and regional demographic patterns and natural disasters amplify the need for adequate housing. Increasing pressure on finite resources argue for inventive building products, materials and methods durable and sustainable enough not to increasingly pressure already fragile ecosystems. Consumerism associated with new construction is still a major factor in the generation of waste. Industrialized building systems have the potential to cut waste and generate a more responsible building culture. Complementing intelligent building systems with materials that use waste or by-products in their fabrication process further reduces raw material harvesting. 

Exploration in low-embodied energy materials is not new. First patented in the late 1920s, Papercrete suggested a recycled paper fibre mixed with cement, clay and water to produce a mouldable mixture for casting walls or blocks. This type of engineered building product is the basis for a flat pack emergency dwelling proposed by the American USDA’s (United States Department of Agriculture) Forests Product Laboratory. The fibreboard is a type of stressed-skin wall panel that can be composed of wood fibres, recycled paper or agricultural waste. The bio-composite is the central component of a simple, deployable and compact building system assembled with extruded aluminum clips; the easily assembled kit is not only easy to assemble or disassemble but also fully biodegradable. The aluminum fasteners are simple friction clip connectors, which would undoubtedly require some type of pin connection to increase solidity and durability especially in extreme conditions.

The sheet material is made to compete with any other sheathing product and with a high strength to weight ratio.   Insulated or non insulated the stressed skin structure could be strong enough to eliminate wall framing reducing the building system to two intelligible parts (panels and clips). Akin to flat packed furniture, the lightweight system could be waterproofed and sealed, delivered to any building site and adapted to any foundation. The aluminum clips also add little weight to the overall building system. The flat pack is not a new concept in building culture. The stacks of panels reduce the transport energy associated with shipping volumetric construction building systems.

Image of flat pack dwelling from USDA report -
see https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/products/publications/specific_pub.php?posting_id=17089&header_id=p

Prefabrication experiments - 147 - Future visions - 08 - Megastructures

As contemporary information technology percolates building culture, the potential to industrialize entirely personalized and personalizable building systems expands. Software and hardware platforms allow users to interact more directly and define their environments.  Building information modeling, large scale 3d printing and all manner of numerically controlled cutting devices are reforming the way buildings are designed and built. This greater personalisation potential consequently repositions an argument in favour of generic collective infrastructures capable of sustaining individualization particularly in terms of the collective housing block.

Framed as “supports and infill” John Habraken’s theories are increasingly relevant as customizable kits could be designed and manufactured to be simply fitted into a common substructure. The mega-structure plug and play capsule architectural discourse and aesthetic synonymous with the second half of the twentieth century proposed a utopia of fully modular, transformable and adaptable dwellings. As migration patterns and expanding populations increase the need for adequate, affordable, flexible and dense housing solutions, the mega-structure has reintegrated architectural exploration.

A speculative proposal by Edge Design -  Gifu Kitagata housing interprets the generic structure’s potential. It proposes networks and infill patterns based on vertical communities, each with their own light building system. This type of vertical spatial organization and development explores the mega-structure as an active component supporting individualized dwellings and community development. Envisioning a future where mega-structures offer more than a support structure, “the pod vending machine” designed as a competition pitch by Haseef Rafiei proposes a veritable construction machine: A vertical skeletal frame integrating a capacity for generating individual dwellings. The conceptual project proposes a unique user experience in terms of dwelling procurement. Combining the contemporary microdwelling with a superstructure modular frame that acts as a giant 3d printer and crane, the machine deposits and positions dwellings as required. Further, dwellings can be repositioned over time and offer potential to be adapted for different needs. Historical precedents such as the Nagakin Capsule Tower (1972) by Kisho Kurukawa imagined similar futurist systems where dwellings are interchangeable consumables. Here in a similar proposal users not only can choose their pod but also have it the way they want it as the just in time production crane delivers a user-defined dwelling. 

Capsule Tower - Gifu Kitagata Housing - Pod Vending Machine

Prefabrication experiments - 146 - future visions - 07 - The mobile home as mass housing - The Alpod

Even as other industries embraced industrialisation and the resulting heightening of productivity and quality, factory production of housing has largely festered in a debate between onsite or offsite construction. Even in the most industrialized nations manufactured housing remains a marginal portion of production. Throughout the 20th century factory built dwellings were regarded at best as reforming building culture or at worst as a poor replication of traditional building. At the core of the debate, a popular commercial story was evolving. By 1978 when HUD (Housing and Urban Development) established the Manufactured Housing Program, the mobile home sector of the housing industry was fulfilling what others had only dreamed of; producing an accessible and integrated product dwelling in a factory setting.

Contrary to other more progressive political systems in post World War II, and ignoring marginal collective housing experiments, the private sector was generally responsible for mass housing in the United States. The mobile home made the American dream of home ownership accessible. Today more than 20 million people live in the 8 million mobile homes produced and while the sector’s setbacks are well documented (fire, condensation, formaldehyde, and suspect building methods) the Manufactured Housing program has yielded a successful model. The negative connotations associated with the mobile home, although still prevalent, are gradually being replaced by architects, designers, developers taking notice of this small, efficient, mobile, flexible and adaptable building type. As housing is adapting to a substantially more informed market place, design is becoming a central force in realigning the sector’s potential.

Conceivably a result of the integrated smart phone culture, The «Alpod» aluminum pod prototype designed by Cybertecture, Aluhouse and Arup offers a look into the conceivable future of the mobile home. The stressed skin aluminum singlewide structure is a simple container-like multifunctional completely integrated unit; a made for order manufactured good. The Alpod’s roof and short walls include operable skylights and vents for natural ventilation while the long walls are either opaque or completely glazed. Highlighting the manufactured house's benefits and renewing its design culture, the efficient aluminum container, is proposed as a mobile hotel suite, minimal dwelling, cabin or exhibit space.  A definite dissociation from the customary mobile home designs, this forward-looking proposal endeavours to bridge the gap between design and housing production.  

From the mobile home to the Alpod

Prefabrication experiments - 145 - Future visions - 06 - Kite Bricks: an open and industrialized building block

A curious thing about the evolution of architecture and construction and wall systems in particular, even as industrialization allowed for greater component delineation, is the closed up character of architecture’s internal organs. Wiring, plumbing, insulation and systems in general are not only hidden but restricted leaving costly retrofit options requiring major demolition and reconstruction. This sealed nature can be read as the remains of archaic wet construction methods.  Modern building culture has for the most part accepted assembly of dry components as quicker, more efficient and reversible with the exception of interior finishes, which are still highly bonded by wet construction, plaster joints, and painting, all difficult to reverse or disassemble. This sealing of systems makes adapting existing building stock through renovation and retrofit a little more difficult and argues for some type of open and accessible partition system to facilitate retrofit and gain easy access to hidden components.

Kite Bricks is the invention of an Israeli start-up company with a patent-pending technology that is trying to reform building culture one «open» brick at a time with their «smart brick». The smart brick is part of an interlocking system of high strength lightweight concrete blocks bonded together not with mortar but with a polymer based cement. Each dimensionally coordinated block is cast with a void for insulation, wiring and other technical ducting. The structural system systematizes an infrastructural void, which can be easily accessed after construction. The modular blocks will be available within a series of different finishes and require little additional labour on site besides assembly. Akin to cellular block construction, Kitebrick contains one special difference: a removable face.  This forward looking system leverages the advantages of mass construction, inertia, strength, durability, thermal mass with the advantages of dry construction, rapidity, easy asembly and low onsite waste. The network of voids could potentially simplify acoustic and fire separation issues as well as all the dangerous elements are not only accessible but encased in fireproof concrete.

The system’s theoretical framework provides a vision for the future of construction where the internal mysteries of the wall are as simple as the intelligible interlocking system of a Lego block.  

Kitebrick - a patent-pending technology