Prefabrication experiments - 210 - oddities - 01 - Pipe and wire houses

Long before industrialization, construction relied on compression as a simple structural factor to define building structures. Tension was limited to tents and mobile structures. Stone and to a lesser extent timber was employed to express compression in vaults, domes and triangular-shaped frames. Tensile stresses redefined structural efficiency as steel production progressed. Today, any structural system is defined by compression and tension as two coordinated stresses where compression can be associated to stiff members such as pipes and tension to malleable lengths such as wires. 

For prefabricated building systems and their components, pipes and wires convey two main categories: Pipes were often used as simple building components for temporary and industrialized dwellings; Daiwa’s Pipe House manufactured in the 1950s being a notable example of a modular micro dwelling assembled using a simple tube structure. On the more innovative side of the spectrum, tensegrity employed pipes for compression and wire cables for tension to devise an optimal structural system. Both experiments seem relatively conservative when compared to a reinforced concrete housing system patented by the Suspension Steel Concrete company in 1909. 

The Pipe and wire house is quite literally a structure made of pipe and wire encased in concrete. Purportedly built a few times, the overall structure employed tubes filled with concrete as posts and beams buttressed at their spanning edges by a type of king post suspension truss increasing the edge’s stiffness. The entire frame structure was then wrapped and stiffened by a cable weave on each face. The woven wires were extended in a state of tension by the pipes’ compressive resistance holding the entire structure in a type of stressed state before being encased. Conceived as a reinforced concrete floor structure, the interlacing would, according to the authors, reduce cracking as strain was distributed equally throughout the entire slab and wall thicknesses. The pulled wire reinforcement compares to a type of pre-stressed concrete as the combined harmony of the pipe and wires reduce sag in the entire system. Marginally employed, the pipe and wire structure was explored concurrently to Hennebique and Kahn’s better known reinforcing systems which both employed bars as reinforcement and became the archetype of reinforced concrete structures.

Pipe and wire patent drawing

Prefabrication experiments - 209 - master industrialists - 10 - Konrad Wachsmann

The industrialization of construction produced many of modernity’s famous architect - protagonists. Charles and Ray Eames, Jean Prouvé, Robert Maillart, Eugène Freyssinet, François Hennebique, William Le Baron Jenny, Richard Buckminster Fuller or Pier Luigi Nervi are just a few characters that have come to portray different areas of prefabrication from off-the-shelf building kits to vertical skyscrapers, large spanning structures and specific material innovation. The modern engineer/architect/industrial designer worked and learned amid social and political turmoil incorporating innovative technologies for building. During this fertile period of urbanisation and industrialisation, materials and methods moved from crafted components to mass-produced pieces defining the industrial designer’s role toward unifying production and craft. 

From the abundance of master modern industrialists, Konrad Wachsmann perhaps best represents the ideal of «mass-crafting assembly».  Trained as a cabinet and furniture maker Wachsmann honed his understanding of building production with Christof and Unmack (well known manufacturer of timber houses in Germany) in the early 1920s. After immigrating to the United States (1941), Wachsmann began working with Walter Gropius on a prefabricated house system and later developed large spanning airplane hangar structures for the US air force. Both the Packaged House system and his cellular construction system illustrate how Wachsmann’s early training as a furniture maker influenced his ideas on construction. Both designs hinged on a universal connector capable of interconnecting differing pieces and trajectories. The panel house and the airplane hangar connectors were sophisticated in their design and allowed for multiple geometric configurations. A type of lightweight triangulated and braced scaffolding structure inspired by the tetrahedron cell, the US Air Force hangars represented the potential for industrialized building: manufactured components assembled according to numerous and variable geometric patterns. 

Highly sophisticated in matters of design, fabrication and structural principles the multi-use connector was arguably the downfall of the Packaged house system as its mass production was never commercially feasible. His experiments in large spanning structures portrayed the idea of a universal space flexible and adaptable to any use. Wachsmann published the Turing Point of Building in 1961 where he continued to argue for space frames for productive building at every scale as he upheld the structures’ span to weight relationship as a noble quest. 

One of Wachsmann's space frame structures

Prefabrication experiments - 208 - master industrialists - 09 - «Up from the potato fields» Time Magazine – July 3,1950 – William J Levitt

The American congress declared a national housing emergency in 1946. Five million housing units were needed to serve accumulating domestic demand, migrations and returning GIs. Through the Gi Bill and the Federal Housing Authority, policymakers encouraged home ownership and private builders by providing guaranteed loans for up to 95% of a home’s value, 100% for returning war veterans. As a result, a greater number of housing units were produced in the two years that immediately followed the war than in the two decades that preceded it. The support and collaboration with private industry fuelled experimentation and many prefab icons were established in this context. Gropius and Wachsmann’s General Panel Packaged House, inventor Carlo Strandlund’s Lustron houses and even Fuller’s Wichita house promoted the idea of industrialization to increase housing production. While many argued for architectural or material innovation, some building promoters turned to more traditional models and employed mass production as an aggressive tract housing development tool.  

William J. Levitt, a name often tied to suburbia in the USA, adopted onsite assembly lines to sprout small, affordable and standardized dwellings. The strategy famously applied at Levittown near Hicksville Long Island produced a 1200 bedroom community. The process was simple: bundles of normalized materials were delivered to the site of each house where tradesmen and machines reproduced the 25 by 32 ft houses in an operatic process. Task division and repetition supplied houses at a rate of one house every 45 minutes. 10 600 were built over a period of three years. In an article published in Time, July 3, 1950 the author flaunted the partnership between industry and government. The government, through guaranteed loans, had spent little or no money to get the houses built. Contrary to the government owned factories in the USSR, private promoters in the USA harbored all the risk. Levitt and Sons inc branded the small homes as containing all the modern conveniences marketing a dwelling as well as a lifestyle and the democratized goal of home ownership. Applying the principles of mass production, Levitt was able to offer a consistent unit for 7900$. A returning GI could become a homeowner without the burden of debt while paying reasonable installments and forgetting the horrors of war. 

Onsite assembly line and normalized production