Prefabrication experiments - 230 - drawings and representations - 01 - Eliot Noyes' aluminum modular structure

In his 2005 book, The Prefabricated Home, Colin Davies identified the sometimes confluent but often divergent relationship between architecture and industry. Davies argued that a post World War II deviation lead architecture toward an idealized interpretation of prefabrication leaving industry moored to its mass production paradigm. Our next ten blog posts will examine how architects and industry have portrayed prefabrication through drawings or varied forms of representation. 

Opening with the concept of a convergence between the fields of architecture and manufacturing, architect Eliot Noyes’ involvement with the aluminum industry exemplifies the nature of certain key partnerships which informed an American modernism anchored in this unified message between designers and their protagonists. Aluminum, a modern material for a modern discipline was promoted and helped encourage this kind of branding equity. 

Noyes is probably best known for the Selectric typewriter he designed for IBM in 1960. A Harvard school of design graduate (1938), Noyes expressed the corporate design culture that came to define the industrial architect / industrial designer serving to modernize and legitimize capitalist business ethos and its imagery. The modular aluminum structure Noyes designed for Alcoa, never evolved beyond the mock-up pictured below. The structure represented aluminum as an ideal material for a modern lifestyle: multi-use, flexible, and adaptable. The structure would be part of any home requiring extra space for their consumables.   Light and almost, floating on “fingers of light”, the structure was shiny and new just like the future of American society. The modular folded plane roof canopy was rooted in the overhead plane as a universal and essential space/place making device. The structure sat on four posts which composed a completely open space and system that could theoretically be juxtaposed to many more to form carports, garden sheds and shelters of any size and scope.

The aluminum industry was a fundamental component of post-war design as its military development was easily and intentionally transferred for civilian use. Noyes’ modular shelter, an open system, is particularly representative of prefabrication culture within architecture. Contrary to what the industrial sector was deploying, here the architect posited that architecture would be industrialized through an ideal of customizable modularity, a comprehensively adaptable space.

Alcoa add for the modular structure July 25 1959

Prefabrication experiments - 229 - AI and information technology - 10 - Laser deformation monitoring

Prefabricated building systems associated with factory production serve the often-made argument that they offer superior precision and monitoring. Harvested information during fabrication attunes production lines and avoids the repetition of costly errors.  Buildings being prototypes, even manufactured buildings rarely benefit from this type of real-time monitoring and tweaking.  However, as the modular construction industry is leveraged for more than single family dwellings, the need for precise measurement and monitoring becomes crucial. Manufacturers are being urged to produce modules and panels for high rise structures. This uptake in off-site construction is in part driven by new requirements and potentials, including metrics, that are difficult to achieve with traditional methods. 

The factory environment is controlled and conducive to the digital threads, from design to fabrication, to delivery and assembly, that are gaining traction in the industry. Virtual construction models convey and integrate a digital fingerprint based on criteria, parameters and constraints, adjusting schedules, costs and delivery according to evolving factors such as traffic patterns, rising resource costs or other determinants. Pushing monitoring even further, it is possible for a project’s digital thread to include metering of a building’s performance during its entire service life. Climate levels, temperature and humidity, are already monitored to optimize comfort. Structural performance could be verified as a warning tool for impending failure. Applicable most acutely in large structures, bridges and high-rises, displacement and deformation metrics make it possible to track and respond to instabilities. 

Recent research by professor Tobi Haist of the University of Stuttgart proposes the use of lasers mounted on structures linked with receptors and sensors to identify deformation, displacement and movement of structural components. Configured in a simple test structure, the laser’s light sources are read from a distance and recorded as points on a plane. Each point of light can be instantaneously compared to what a normal displacement should look like. In the event of a pattern that is not in sync with what is calculated as a benchmark, a signal could be sent. The research discusses the potentials for such monitoring and it is increasingly possible to imagine its use during component fabrication and construction to adapt the production of volumetric modules or panels according to changing dimensional conditions during a building’s construction. 

Image from Professor Tobi Haist's research project

Prefabrication experiments - 228 - AI and information technology - 09 - Managing off-site and on-site uniqueness - Manufacton's example

Prefabrication was early twentieth century’s response to reform construction. As industrialization transformed every economic sector, construction remained a stronghold of resistance lagging far behind other industries. Proponents of prefabrication argued to apply mass production processes in construction for increased output for both matters of quantity and quality. Construction’s productivity continues to lag behind other sectors even if it has become highly industrialized; Every building component is now mass-produced. Their assembly standardized and their integration in building construction well documented. Construction, however, remains a highly singular operation and even with the potential to normalize assemblies each individual building remains a singular undertaking. Site, program, use and context vary making mass production and mass customization viable for only certain building types. Even where factory production seems like a viable solution, ageing connotations of prefabrication’s sameness still haunt its potential.

The same way industrialization transformed construction, information technology is radically modifying the way buildings are produced. Proponents again argue for streamlining construction through factory production and its nascent ability for uniqueness through information technology. Both software and hardware can link design, fabrication, and construction by managing and manipulating differentiated data chains. Collaboration through virtual design, management and construction tools are making construction more efficient. Off-site construction or prefabrication is no longer just a manufacturing sector, it has developed into a comprehensive means from which differentiated components and coordinated sub-assemblies are designed and fabricated for their explicit on-site assembly. 

The industry is gradually progressing from the coordination of paper-based tools (plans and shop drawings) to greater use of building information modelling as a thread that connects all stakeholders. ManufactON based in Boston USA, is just one of many budding startups racing to develop software platform solutions for this increased and increasingly requested collaboration. Their cloud-based tools admit the uniqueness of every architectural project by offering channels and processes to mitigate the risks of construction projects individuality. The digital thread unites and federates information and stakeholders off-site and on-site constructing an integrated project proposal from beginning to end. It remains to be seen whether construction will massively adopt the ability to align industrial production with the precision and power of information systems or if construction’s longstanding advertence to change will keep this evolution at bay. 

Manufacton's digital thread and software applications for building construction

Prefabrication experiments - 227 - AI and information technology - 08 - Generative design

Switching from parallel rulers, T-squares, stencils, erasers and other analog drawing implements to CAD reformed architecture. Drawing and managing drawing sets, making corrections, iterations or visualizing different options no longer required the tedious tasks of drawing or re-drawing. Still, CAD was basically a cleaner, neater and normalized ruler and pencil. 

As software develops and its streamlined use increases by all construction project stakeholders, the evolution from CAD to BIM is becoming just as, if not more, disruptive as swapping a pencil and eraser for a mouse or tablet. Information technology has become a major tool in all aspects of building from design to construction and even to the operation of buildings. Digital design, visualization and virtual construction are rationalizing communication and management. 

Generative design software revolutionizes planning even further, using artificial intelligence informed by variable data sets to outline the functional, physical and performative criteria of buildings or objects. Design solutions based on generative design are tweaked according to ergonomics or any other design benchmark including historical design precedents or other more conventional narratives. The parameters are tuned to “soft spots” which efficiently address a synthetic and wholistic union-set from each variable. Akin to mixing a recipe’s ingredients to find the best arrangement, an infinite number of iterations could be visualized. This continuous iteration would be unfeasible in an analog model, as each model would require important and precise work even to attain one integrated solution. 

Also referred to as topology optimization, generative design software references the idea of topological development where properties and parameters are interrelated by moving, changing or stretching geometries to achieve an idealized shape and structure. The Rhino 3d plug-in known as Grasshopper is an example in architectural design. Solidworks, Catia, Autodesk Inventor and others are also integrating these capabilities. The design outcome is derived from mathematical variables which organize the design into instantly varying shapes and compositions. These models can then seamlessly be translated into 3d printed-models whose analog testing and adjustments can then be reintegrated into the design process as parameters for further iterations. Generative design accords design schemes a type of tractability throughout their design and production fine-tuning requirements in real-time.

screen shot from Design Explorer software