Prefabrication experiments - 207 - master industrialists - 08 - Vitaly Lagutenko's K-7 panel building

Government assistance through financing or policies intended to industrialize construction for increased productivity, solve war induced housing shortages or produce low-cost options propelled research and development of off-site construction strategies and prototypes throughout the twentieth century. The standardization of the single-family dwelling by the FHA (Federal Housing Authority) in the USA or the expansion of manufacturing and automation in Japan are two analogous examples of post-war construction sponsored by government intervention and programs. Post-war USSR is the superlative example of political support. Regime-run factories tested, evaluated and conceived of new technologies for building. Previously explored in the early twentieth century by Ernst May and his construction group, concrete panels were identified as the system of choice; they were flexible, easy to produce and required little factory logistics. Further the panels’ connection details required little specialized labour onsite. This type of concrete panel construction became synonymous with low-cost socialist housing experiments. 

According to Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s (leader of Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964) vision, architect and industrialist in chief, Vitaly Lagutenko managed two factories where he defined, normalized and standardized everything from flat planning, room sizes and assembly details. Leveraging and developing his previous experiments with pre-cast concrete components for frame structures, Lagutenko streamlined design, construction and mass-production. The result was the K-7 building system. Designed to avoid costly components like elevators, the five-storey building employed other various questionable rationalizations to reduce costs including low ceilings. Typical flats included 30 m² for 1-room, 44 m² for 2-room and 60 m² for 3-room options. Along with normalized plans and panels, complete bathroom pods were built, coordinated in factories and delivered to sites to be plugged into the building’s infrastructure.

Lagutenko epitomized the early dream of mass production applied to housing. Thousands of the standardized flats were constructed and attest to the strength of the centralized building program. Originally planned as temporary with a 20 to 25 year life-span the concrete panel building kits were designed for speed but not quality. Insulation, both thermal and sound was inadequate and poorly detailed. The system connoted substandard construction and many of the buildings have been demolished and replaced.

K-7 building system representation

Prefabrication experiments - 206 - master industrialists - 07 - Albert Farwell Bemis and modular coordination

Building and design methods shared by master masons, carpenters and architects have always included some type of numeric order for organizing structures, their anchoring to site and their composing parts. Modernity’s industrialists were no different applying geometry, sequences and patterns informed by production to facilitate manufacturing and building assembly. Modularity, rationalization, standardization consonant to modernism in architecture developed various approaches of dimensional coordination seeking efficiencies for managing design and construction.

Well versed in manufacturing, Albert Farwell Bemis wrote extensively on the economics of building, construction and housing and attempted to rationalize construction through an idea for harmonizing production and design measurements. A Graduate of civil engineering at MIT (1893), Bemis embodied the model of the industrious master industrialist from running a jute mill to managing banks and companies (housing company, Atlantic Gypsum, Penn Metal Co) his global brand of Bemis Industries also became synonymous with construction research.  His posthumous Albert Farwell Bemis Charity Trust (1936) for housing research continued his initiatives to improve construction. Marginally referenced in literature, Bemis’ three volume analysis of housing construction (The Evolving House 1936) published just after Bemis had passed demonstrates his comprehensive understanding of housing and the industry’s potential to address a lagging productivity.  

The second volume (Rationalization) lays out a modern numeric logistic for composing buildings of any scale. Based on a four-inch cube (100mmx100mmx100mm) and its multiples, Bemis argues for modular coordination to inform different production sectors and to normalize design, production and construction.  From this four-inch unit a hierarchy of primary, secondary and tertiary axis imparts each building system with a arithmetical relationship to the whole. His modular coordination was concurrent to what Ernst Neufert was studying in Germany and predated the International Modular Group’s standardized design guidelines in 1960. Bemis imagined an integrated industry producing parts for a building as parts of vehicle production had been outsourced but harmoniously and coherently assembled by a central manufacturer. His vision helped establish architectural standards for details, drawings and coordination methods that by and large still represent today’s industry. Dimensional coordination offered architects and builders a type of common language for assembly details to overall structural and building dimensions: a modern-day classical architectural order. 

Bemis' comparison between car and building production in The Evolving House (1936) volume II

Prefabrication experiments - 205 - master industrialists - 06 - Henry Robinson Palmer’s patent for corrugated iron

Prefabrication and industrialization are at times used interchangeably when discussing the prospects of manufacturing applied to architecture and construction. While prefabrication, as old as civilization, only implies preparing materials in advance of their use, continuous industrialized production transformed, standardized and globalized building culture in relating contexts during the 18th and 19th centuries. Making, preparing, shipping and distributing industrialized materials arguably contributed to shaping a type of colonized vernacular. No material symbolized this type of cultural adaptation to a greater degree than corrugated iron (from the latin corrugo which means to bend or fold) patented in 1829 by architect and civil engineer Henry Robinson Palmer. 

Employed as an architect by the London Dock Company, Palmer had the wrinkled iron sheets milled as a roofing material for large warehouse spaces. His intention was simple: the sinuous curves created by pushing flat material though shaped rolling mills stiffened the metal sheet. The corrugated pattern could be easily stacked or staggered and the material overlapped, nailed or screwed to framing to produce a water-repellent joint. Combining ease of production and flat pack stacking with straightforward construction detailing for onsite assembly and disassembly the product quickly became the go to material for roofing and walls. Corrugated sheets were shipped to British colonies, specifically where gold and diamond rushers needed vast amounts of temporary dwellings in a short period of time. Britain had become its colonies manufacturing plant, usurping local building culture. 

Palmer’s patent purchased by the London Dock Company and contractor Richard Walker expired in 1843.  A large number of iron mills consequently entered the corrugated sheet market and the material benefitted from the addition of galvanic coatings, varied curvatures and assorted steel grades. This increasing variety was presented at the London exhibit of 1851 (known for Crystal Palace) and supported by the Monarchy who suggested a royal ballroom (Balmoral castle) be built with corrugated iron by the Eagle Foundry of Manchester. The building’s cast iron frame was infilled with painted corrugated iron sheets. The material became so popular in Australia that it was manufactured locally in the early 1900s and substantiated a form of Australian modernism including recognized work by Glenn Murcutt. 

Rolling flat sheet material to a stiffened corrugated sheet

Prefabrication experiments - 204 - master industrialists - 05 - Alexander Graham Bell's flying machines

At the end of the 19th century, the progressive industrial engineer/designer explored, reformed and redefined the built environment’s various scales and networks through building techniques, communication technologies, utilitarian objects and machines. Industrialists promoted an optimism based on the perfect harmonization of design with production. Even as this federation of science with manufacturing and technology reformed building culture and was being challenged by proponents of traditional crafts, industrialists argued for technology driven cross-disciplinary exploration to improve living conditions for all.  Best known for his invention of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, embodied industrial optimism exploring kites and flying machines as devices for advancing flight and its potential for communication, transportation as well as military or civilian uses.  

The box kite was commonly used in the military. Bell’s schemes envisioned a resilient kite structure for carrying large and heavy loads (people and things) built with a minimal amount of material reducing the airborne dead load of the kite itself. Bell’s maximum structural effect with minimal mass was developed though the critical analysis of box kites in flight. Box kites are formed as their name implies from the materialization of a rectangular prism’s edges and faces. Bell noted increased bending and decreased agility as the size of the boxes increased. He applied a network of diagonals to brace the structures while trying not to proportionately increase weight. The lightweight structure’s network of straight members could be easily applied to different kit sizes as they were based on the repetitive juxtaposition of regular polyhedrons.

A tetrahedron, also known as a regular triangular pyramid, is shaped by starting with a basic stable symmetrical polygon, the equilateral triangle and aligning it with three others along its edges. All edges are inherently braced and stiffened providing a formidable building block for structures. The triangular solid could be bonded with other tetrahedra to fill or bound space infinitely for large spanning wings for kites or any structures. Bell’s large kites were towed and flown behind ships and could carry large loads. Landing however, was another issue as many broke up on impact. The tetrahedron’s use for flight may have been short-lived but its application in architecture and building inspired space frame design and foreshadowed exploration and well-known work by both Konrad Wachsmann and R. Buckminster Fuller.

One of Bell's experiments in kite flying from Popular Science, December 1903

Prefabrication experiments - 203 - master industrialists - 04 - Glulam timber comes to America

About one quarter the mass of reinforced concrete, a computable combustion rate and a vital carbon sink, timber’s properties argue for its use as a sustainable alternative to steel or reinforced concrete for tall buildings. As the advantages of engineered timber products are being promoted, they were first experimented with by early industrialists searching for ways to combine modern engineering principles, manufacturing potentials and material development, specifically polymers and resins. Plywood and glue laminated (glulam) structural components for building embody these advances as small pieces or sheets of continuously milled timber are glued and laminated to generate dimensionally stable units and large spanning components without the use of old growth timber. 

German master carpenter Otto Karl Freidrich Hetzer originally patented Glulam in 1901. The process of laminating timber slats into large beams efficiently uses natural resources and arranges wood fibers for structural efficiency. The small slats combined to propose large beams could be further developed as curved arches, butler frames or even to reproduce archaic systems such as the cruck frame. Shapes are a pressurized composite of standardized glue and timber lengths assembled with staggered finger-joints according to structural and aesthetic requirements.

German architect Max Hanish arrived in America in the early 1920s and designed traditional projects while promoting Hetzer’s glue laminated timber as a stronger alternative to traditional cut lumber as adhesives were quickly evolving to provide a waterproof and durable bond. Hanish received a first mandate in 1934 for a school and gymnasium project in Peshtigo, Wisconsin using glulam arches.  The Peshtigo gym’s hinged arches spanned 64 feet in plan and 24 feet in vertical section. These first experiments were relatively unfamiliar to engineers who insisted upon bolts and straps to keep the laminates together in order to get the project built. 

Hanish's production developed under the banner of Unit-Structures Inc. “Unit” is a particularly pertinent appellation as it refers to laminated timber at both the micro (small pieces) and macro (large components) scales. Unit-structures’ innovation benefited from research at the Forests Products Laboratory and a federated partnership with local boat builders Peter and Christ Thompson, owners of the Thompson Brothers Boat Company in Peshtigo to successfully develop and sanction Glulam frames in America.

Max Hanish's Glulam gymnasium in Peshtigo, Wisconsin