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