Prefabrication experiments - 190 - current practices - 01 - The self-deploying mobile home

Mobility in architecture can be accomplished and perceived in many different ways. The open plan and the separation of structure and skin allowed for free flowing organizations to develop and reform classical planning. The mobile home built on a wheeled chassis expressed another type of freedom and a willingness to bridge automobile and housing production.  Someone could live anywhere and move their dwelling according to social, economic or political reasons. More complex and even utopian versions of mobility include Pier-Luigi Nervi’s rotating house, the circular plan built in reinforced concrete was attached to rotating rollers producing a revolving machine for living, or Bucky Fuller’s standard of living package, which included all the essentials for setting up a dwelling in any context. 

Mobility as a theme in architecture benefits from a rich corpus of exploration, which now includes a self-building dwelling machine. Ten Fold engineering, a UK company, has developed a self-deployable structure that conceptually combines the mobile home, the high-tech machinery of Nervi’s rotating house with Fuller’s standard of living package to produce MY SPACE; a machine that unfolds as a type of crane to produce a fully furnished living.  Founded by architect David Martyn in 2010, the dwelling is based on shipping container dimensions and could easily be stacked and transported massively to any location. The internal structural and mobile organs are a series of articulated levers expand into a lattice structure. Each lever pivots and pushes the dwelling components outward from the core to define the living space. 

The company is marketing their technology for many uses and proposes the self-building dwelling for emergency situations. The U-Box, is a 645 square-foot mobile home structure that requires no foundations as it is set-up on plate anchors, similar to those used in heavy construction machinery. The anchors can adapt to any setting. The ideal of being able to move into a new home in minutes is certainly alluring and the capacity to mass-produce these dwellings could radically transform housing and construction in difficult conditions. Transported by truck, the machine can literally unload itself. A future where the house builds itself is certainly possible, its desirability is still open for discussion.

The expandable dwelling - From the company website

Prefabrication experiments - 189 - Exhibition houses - 10 - The modern pit dwelling : architecture, ecology and technology

A dwelling’s basic function is to mediate and protect interior conditions from external forces, climatic or predatory. Using the existing site elements to develop a site-specific architecture was lost to high modernism and industrialization. The mass-produced house rarely considered anchorage to its site as it was envisioned as a globalized product adaptable to any situation. Trying to bridge the gap between modernism and a type of ecological regionalism, Paolo Soleri developed a dome house which incorporates the basic elements of an archaic pit house with modern technology.  Soleri, an Italian-born architect who spent time at Taliesin with Frank Lloyd Wright is perhaps best known for his own architectural utopia, Arcosanti, an experiment in uniting architecture with ecology intended as a prototype city for 5000 people. 

Conceived with Mark Mills, another Frank Lloyd Wright alumni, Soleri’s dome house could be described as a modern earthship, using architecture and place to form a symbiotic relationship.  Soleri and Mill’s adaptation of a traditional pit house is composed of an excavated living space one floor below the ground, lined in masonry and covered with a glass dome. Benches, living spaces and bedrooms are carved from the desert. The Glass dome acts as a solar chimney in the winter is composed of two mobile sectors, which can slide and rotate over one another to open the house to its surroundings. The dome’s southern sector can act as a shading device.  When open, the space beneath the dome captures winter sun and warms the masonry’s thermal mass keeping the house warm at night. The masonry’s thermal inertia, maintains relatively stable temperatures. Water evaporation pools, tubes and sprays cool exposed elements during summer heat. The living room is circular in plan and is directly beneath the dome, while the sleeping spaces are tucked in the ground beneath a flat roof, which is also sprayed with water to cool it in the Arizona heat. The dome structure is a simple aluminum meridian and hoop skeletal structure that could be produced both simply and economically. As in a traditional pit structure, this roof can be disassembled, replaced, or even moved. 

photo by Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10) 

Prefabrication experiments - 188 - Exhibition houses - 09 - Bivouac mountain shelter

The prefabrication of components or complete buildings has been employed most successfully in difficult situations. An area of exploration for prefabrication, the emergency hut or cabin deployed easily, for temporary use and designed for mobility habitually employs lightweight components, requires little manpower and can be assembled and disassembled without the use of complex tools. The mountain shelter or «Bivouac» used as a temporary dwelling and basepoint while mountaineering has the added constraint of being built in intricate topography with little or no access for materials.

Interested in climbing, Le Corbusier’s most famous female associate, Charlotte Perriand, designed and built her aluminum version of the Bivouac with engineer André Tournon.  Perriand and Le Corbusier co-designed an ideal polygonal hut in 1938 based on the ideas she had put in place in her Bivouac shelter. Attentive to and inspired by the era’s fascination with minimal dwellings, she designed the small 1.9m x 3.95m (in plan) structure to accommodate a small group of hikers. Built on Mount Joly in France’s Savoye region at an altitude of 2000m, assembly took a group of three (Perriand, Tournon and one other) just three days.  The system’s pieces were carried by animal power and assembled by the small team. The small one room hut confirmed Perriand’s attention to integrating furniture with flexible and adaptable dwelling patterns. 

The exoskeleton is a scaffold-like structure made from simple aluminum tubing positioned and connected with right-angle bolt clamps, the same type used in scaffolding. The infill panels seem to be aluminum laminate, although their exact composition is unknown and varies in the consulted literature. The shed roof slopes the length of the shelter from a height of about 2m to 2.5 m. The small compact interior is packed with moveable furnishings, which could be organized according to changing conditions. Makeshift beds and tables are hinged. The Bivouac’s framework was anchored to four pile foundations and braced by cables. A small balcony, the depth of a bench runs the width of the bivouac on the lower side of the section and introduces a spatial element not usually found in an emergency dwelling: a comfortable pew to contemplate the surrounding landscapes.

Bivouac shelter photographs