Prefabrication experiments - 160 - Building Kits - 01 - From Domes to Zomes

Reforming building culture through intelligently conceived and well-crafted kit-of-parts architecture delineates a notable segment of modern architecture’s contribution to off-site construction. Allying material coherence and dimensional coordination, building kits elucidate a building’s assembly while offering systemic variability and adaptability.  A type of obsession for modern architects, kits speak to a profession’s objective, activated by industrialization, to control every scale of material culture and offer a way to generalize architecture for the masses. If the timber balloon frame was the industry’s response to democratise building culture, architects employed and argued for geometric systems based on interrelated pieces to offer an alternative.

Geometry was the basic regulating principle of many building systems; variety from modularity. Geodesic domes proposed by Buckminster Fuller and his loyal followers epitomize using geometry as an architectural device. Fuller’s domes implement the linear principles of platonic solids, the 20 faced icosahedron in particular, to produce a large variety of geodesic dome kits for buildings of any scope and size.  The icosahedron’s composing triangular faces’ vertices are extended outwardly to approximate a sphere and their joining segments materialized to form a hemispherical dome.  The resulting latticework of constructed triangles relies on variable length segments and geometrically agile connectors.

Perhaps lesser known but equally instrumental in inspiring dome construction in the United States in the 1960s, Steve Baer was a mathematician / engineer who developed Fuller’s principles to foster domes and propose «zomes». Collaborating with the founding members of Drop City, an experiment in counter culture in the 1960s, Baer became synonymous with low-tech and low cost dome construction. While teaching at the university of New Mexico in 1968, Baer demonstrated his basic zome construction system.  Like domes, Zomes are compressive structures that replicate geometrically defined sphere caps. Zomes employ the principles of zonohedra. A zonohedron is a convex solid composed of identical rhomboids or parallelograms. Zomes employ the parallelogram face’s edges as a truss structure with braced diagonals. This rationalized geometric truss is the basic voussoir of variable curvatures. The rhomboid edges can be fabricated from steel, wood, aluminum or any other linear material. Rigid connections allow the rhomboid trellis to perform as a membrane in any arching shape that maintains a vertical load thrust.

Prototype at New Mexico University (1968) from Architectural Forum (April 1969) p54

Prefabrication experiments - 159 - Open Building - 10 - Sharing architecture

Open building theory outlines different approaches for empowering a building’s users. The theoretical framework relates particularized and collective needs while clearly delineating their limits to avoid systemic entanglement and restricting adaptability options.  Generated from a reaction to dogmatic modernism, user-defined organisations and user based planning sought to sanction inventive dialogue between designers and users. The potential to overtly share and communicate a system’s defining rules for both design input and output is central to the success of a participatory process.  Open and industrialized building systems relate on a basic level to the ability to socially construct a model: sharing the system’s guidelines and permitting a great number of permutations.

Walter Segal’s self-build method discussed in blog post, prefabrication experiments – 56- is a notable example.  This type of open knowledge distribution about buildings is less common in architecture than it is in the open source world of software development. In the digital world, an increasingly exploding knowledge database links users to data in a recursive discussion about an infinite number of topics placing the potential previously restricted information squarely on the laps of everyone (the crowd). Further the accessibility of laser cutters, 3d printers and even small cobots is driving a revolution in on-line sharing, turning everyday individuals into veritable small manufacturers.

The success of arduino.cc authenticates this sharing model. A long way from a building, but complex process builds none the less, arduino identifies potentials for an open building culture to enter the realm of materiality. DIYourselfers are a major part of this budding movement taking over all spheres of material culture. Although not prevalent, the open sharing of information is percolating in certain segments of architecture. The wikihouse project, Alejandro Aravena’s Villa Verde and the web platform paperhouses.co elucidates the way architecture is integrating an open source model. Theses three architect driven manifestos explore ways to share knowledge and architecture in order to democratize design quality. Particularly «paperhouses.co» invites architects to design and upload their projects and subsequently contribute to individual builds and comment on iterations made by potential self-builders. The uploaded designs are intended to start a discussion in a discipline that sometimes (more often than it should) is exclusive to those who can afford it.

From paperhouses.co

 

Prefabrication experiments - 158 - Open Building - 09 - Depondt's Steel Platform System

Dimensional coordination or the use of an incremental grid informed by construction material manufacturing is the root of modernist planning. Grids were established for optimal structural spans employing standard units to insure material coherence. This dimensional and manufacturing standardisation applied to building components and materials (macro and micro) potentially reduces resource waste and systematizes construction. Modularity and interrelating parts and pieces in variable and reversible organisations habitually define open Industrialized building systems. Advances in Steel production and the subsequent cataloguing and normalization of both components and connections helped define steel as the material of choice for rapidly erected adaptable structures. Paul Depondt’s standardized steel and aluminum modular kit-of-parts used in a 400-unit prototype in Chicago in 1971 represents this type of grid-based construction. 

An associate of Lods, Depondt and Beauclair, a French firm recognized for their post-war industrialized housing projects, Paul Depondt worked through the research group Groupement d’études pour une architecture industrialisé, for the advancement of industrialization in the construction industry. The firm designed over 20 000 housing units in France, mostly in concrete. Depondt first became interested in steel systems during his studies at IIT under Mies van der Rohe. He later returned to Chicago in the late 1960s propelled by his success in France, to join a group of firms and builders known as the consortium for the Component Building System. 

The Depondt system provided and stacked flatpacked floor modules (35x20 feet) onto steel posts to create a type of scaffold platform structure. Workers could then work safely on the platforms. Walls were erected by simply attaching aluminum wall panels into guides built-into the floor units. According to Depondt two men could install wall panels in five minutes. The exterior wall panels were a double construction enclosing an interior void that could be used to direct wires or service networks, which could be redirected though the open web floor plates. This type of simple steel structure is comparable to many steel skeleton structures that are erected today displaying the advantages of simplicity and quick assembly. Used mostly for school buildings the Depondt system showcased the rigorous use of a dimensionally coordinated modular grid. 

From Architectural Forum volume 35- 1971