Prefabrication experiments - 226 - AI and information technology - 07 - From Sears to Amazon, evolution of mail-order prefab

Ask anyone about prefabricated houses and almost without exception everyone will acknowledge the Sears Roebuck catalogues of houses published from 1908 to 1940 as their reference for mail-ordered dwellings. The pre-cut housing kits advertised by Sears were modest and made it possible for anyone to order, receive and assemble normalized and well-defined components for selected designs. The do-it-yourself delivered kit is not an invention specific to Sears. Sears simply leveraged their catalogue business model to include the single-family dwelling. Albeit fairly marginal, this type of prefabrication has come to portray early prefabrication and arguably contributed to the development of the tract house as the acquiesced form of housing in North America. 

From 1908 - 1940 Sears produced approximately 70 000 houses, a relatively small number considering the number of dwellings produced during that time. With little knowledge of construction but with help from an industrious group of friends and some tools, also purchased from the Sears catalogue, one could build and furnish, with furnishings also purchased from Sears, a standardized living unit. This kit ideal certainly inspired original proposals from architects and companies experimenting with the prefabricated dwelling sector. A compendium of trade journals, architectural catalogues, pattern books would illustrate this active sector progressing even further with the post-war baby-boom. 

The mail-order catalogue was virtually replaced by brick and mortar companies and builders. The prefabricated and mail-ordered kit house was surpassed by on-site builders mass-producing tract developments based on the same type of normalization proposed by Sears. 

Today, mail-ordering architecture on-line is a becoming a disrupting force, particularly in the manufactured housing sector. On-line kits are readily accessible to build anything from green-houses to tiny houses and industrial buildings. From Amazon to Ebay, the internet culture is driving a renaissance of catalogue purchasing with the added value of WYSIWYG and of real-time five-star feedback. As on-line purchasing is now mainstream and reforms how people purchase, amazon culture has the potential to democratize the catalogue house, this time with the ability to offer world-wide delivery and access, simply by changing assembly instructions in hundreds of different languages with a simple click.

Sears catalogue design (left) - Amazon advertisement (right)

Prefabrication experiments - 225 - AI and information technology - 06 - Woho by Ensamble Studio

Rational and accessible universal building systems have been a quest or obsession for architects at least since the advent of industrial processes and their potential application in building construction. A universal building system can be described as a coordinated set of components. These pieces or building subassemblies can be put together in multiple variations and applied to different settings and functions. Habitually related to kit-of-parts architecture, universal building systems are intended to be applied globally. As was the case during the twentieth century, architects are again revisiting the adaptable universal building system to solve housing shortages. 

Iconic examples and inspired by the potential to house the masses, both Walter Segal and Ken Isaacs circulated their ideas for universal systems through catalogues and recipe books. Today, open source methodologies are defining novel ways of distributing knowledge about building and construction. Information technology fertilizes an environment for the on-line crowd-sharing, crowd-outlining and exponential multiplying of iterations to address wide-ranging scopes and spans. 

Projects like WikiHouse by Alastair Parvin or Incremental Housing by Alejandro Aravena are charting and defining an ideal of open-source crowd-sourced architecture. Both proposals aim to universally share their design strategies. Equally ambitious is Ensamble studio’s, WOHO, a universal building system research project. The multidisciplinary studio based in Madrid first proposed in their concrete kit-of-parts in 2010. A type of building infrastructure, the system is based on spatial and structural components. Large-scale building blocks make up frames that are stacked to construct generic spaces ready for inhabitants to create their own individualized interior spaces. Likely inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and theoretically linked to Habraken’s natural relationship for mass housing “supports and infill” the universal building system is a vertical rack of tube like dwellings. L-shaped prefabricated concrete beams shape floors and half walls while the same inverted L-shaped beams are inverted and attached to previous ones to shape upper half-walls and complete the dwelling box-like unit.   The large girders could conceivably be manufactured in any de-localized factory setting. The resulting generic space is customizable with elements such as stairs, service cores and interior partitions added to the kit’s library or built locally with a more inhabitant-driven approach.

L-shaped beams and girders, image from the Ensamble Studio website

Prefabrication experiments - 224 - AI and information technology - 05 - Vector Praxis, bundle and stack

The intent of open prefabricated building systems as opposed to closed systems is and has always been the standardisation of parts to be combined in multiple manners and customizable configurations. Whether stacking modules or pieces, one of the persistent challenges to modularity is structural efficiency. Particularly in tall buildings, standardized components’ capacity to resist loads must be uniquely tuned to their specific placement within the building’s structure. As a typical example, lower modules in a tall building must support all modules stacked above them. Their geometry and organization are reinforced giving each unit a structural specificity within the overall structure. This fundamental uniqueness increases costs and impedes repetition. Similarly, in concrete construction whether modular or site cast, ground floor columns are often larger than upper floor columns in order to support the accumulating gravitational loads. 

A Canadian company founded by architect Julian Bowron, Vector praxis, is tackling this long-standing question with an adaptable building system which bundles standard elemental pieces together and provides for their connections. The modular skeletal system is composed of hollow structural sections aligned, juxtaposed and assembled to form composite columns of various sizes depending on the building’s span and scope.  Digitally calculated, profiled and manufactured the connectors are an accurate and interlocking alternative to the standard column to steel bolted connections.  Akin to timber glue-laminated beams, the system is scalable. Bundled together the 100x100mm steel sections define larger and more robust sections. The company has invented and developed a number of similar standard components to facilitate on-site assembly.   The company’s system proposed for tall buildings, employs these elemental units for columns, beams and for shear walls. The VectorBloc is the proprietary modelled connector which guides each joint in the required direction. Inspired by shipping container construction each connector is the vertex of a stackable prism unit. Further, by setting structural parameters, within a generative software environment, the resulting array of spans, sections and their required connectors could theoretically be instantly attuned as a type of responsive tessellation. Multiplying a kernal of a parametrically designed and regulated building system, the composite post and beams and their connectors are produced and delivered as an on-site customized kit-of-parts.

Bundling standard columns into composite columns - from the Vector Praxis Website