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