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.
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| Alcoa add for the modular structure July 25 1959 |
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