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.
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| One of Wachsmann's space frame structures |
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