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