Prefabrication experiments - 216 - oddities - 07 - The helicopter house

New promises of mobility and more time for leisure increased excitement for travel, tourism and secondary dwellings perched above or anchored to extraordinary settings. Along with this technology-based optimism and three decades of prosperity that followed the second world war, new materials and methods provided a framework for developing a specifically unrooted architecture linked to discovery and progress. An architecture developed from these themes that has been analysed as a type of cockpit inspired architecture: designed as a control center for all dwelling needs, intended for manufacturing and adapted as an ergonomic living device. Spaces, their heights and dimensions were used to plan a virtual second skin moulded to human measurements. 

Moving architecture in the 1960s included manifestoes by Archigram but were not limited to utopian city machines or walking megastructures. The mobile home carried on a trailer or self-propelled represented a type of prefabricated dwelling that eventually inspired grander forms of moveable houses. Guy Rottier’s helicopter “maison de vacance” or flying holiday home characterises this uniting of industrial potentials with architectural reverie. Rottier an architect and engineer trained in Europe during the years following the second world war worked briefly for Le Corbusier in the late 1950s and was introduced to Michel Ragon, a famous French modernist historian. 

Well versed in modernism, his holiday house is a true representation of the era’s machine aesthetic. This version of the capsule house bridged helicopter technology and fiberglass monocoque construction. The dwelling was literally moulded into a helicopter cockpit providing spaces for controlling flight, sleeping and eating. A flight range of 50-100 km based on the dwelling’s fuel tank, it was envisioned as a means of leaving the city and gaining access to isolate sites that were inaccessible for normal housing types. A 15 m² moulded GRP hull with overall dimensions of 3 m. x 5m., the dwelling’s furnishings and equipment were completely self-contained and planned to serve a small family. Rottier’s vision exhibited at the Salon des Metiers d’Art in Paris in 1964 was designed in collaboration with Rottier’s contemporary Charles Barberis. The helicopter house suggested a futuristic vision of democratized flight and setting up house wherever one could fly to.