Early 20th century modernists endeavoured to bridge architecture and housing through experimenting with materials, forms and industrial processes. Within these experiments, low cost housing prototypes came to characterize the architect’s potential role in an industrial society. This inventiveness was fostered from a generative relationship with parallel industries. The industrialization of construction was the basis of new formal and technical expression and a path for the democratization of architecture. Architecture and quality housing would no longer be for the elite but shared among a cross section of all society. This noble quest defined a type of practise which went beyond the clients’ mandate, the architect was an inventor and expressing this newness was his goal.
Richard Neutra, a very well-known modern architect well-versed in this new role, developed the Diatom housing system as a prototype for low cost housing. Neutra explored a strategy for minimal site disturbance, designing a house that would float over any setting. The system was a simple suspended prismatic form. The newness factor came from a cementitious panel made from Diatom; a type of lightweight polymer concrete. Diatom is a fossil-based silica based sedimentary rock that when ground up performs as an analogue to Portland Cement concrete but has a more porous and lightweight constitution; it is in a class of materials known as geopolymers. The Diatom in Neutra’s experimental housing concept was used for casting panels and beams which were then affixed to a steel skeleton.
The structural system supported roof and floor plates from four centrally positioned prefabricated anchors. Vertical steel masts were anchored to the cylindrical post moors where they were wedged into place. Roof diatom slabs and floor beams were fixed to horizontal purlin angles suspended from the central vertical masts. The Diatom beams and panels were cantilevered from the central masts composing roof and floor plates. The diatom house system was designed as an expandable modular kit-of-parts based on the easy to acquire and manufacture diatom components. This abundant raw material would revolutionize building culture. However, as with the project’s many contemporaneous experimentations, none of the advantages, architectural, economical, could be sufficiently tested or produced in adequate numbers restricting the prototype to a one-off experiment.
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| Diatom system components from CMHC catalogue of systems c. 1960 |
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