Prefabrication experiments - 234 - drawings and representations - 05 - The Metabolist Instruction Manual

Architectural drawing’s use for communicating construction knowledge is well documented. Technical drawings are crucial legal documents and important for a building’s design, construction and subsequent operation. Made up of plans, sections, detailed views and explicit descriptions, a complete drawing set is an essential tool to track and consign any changes or alterations made to the building or its components. Along with their contractual and prescriptive nature drawings are equally essential in transmitting design possibilities or normalized building strategies. Pattern books have been a fundamental tool for marketing, selling and manufacturing buildings and their parts. Similarly, the renaissance’s technical “field measuring” of classical examples identified key proportioning elements and regulating lines for architecture. 

Architects elucidate their conceptual, technical and administrative vision for buildings. Technical drawings can in some cases also portray how a building is to be used, a type of instruction manual for edifices.  Modernity’s disavowal of historical references inferred a renewed importance for drawing to illustrate newness and the technological components of industrialized construction.  Metabolists cultivated by modernism used drawings to develop utopian views of future cities of mobility. More-over these visionary cities were inspired by and based on industrialization and automation sustained by post war Japan rebuilding programs. Metabolist drawings metaphorically articulated an optimism for a highly adaptable architecture.

Kisho Kurokawa’a capsule tower built in 1971, has in a certain sense become the symbolic model of the Metabolist movement. Along with this modular tower, Kurokawa proposed renewed housing prototypes as the union of collective infrastructures onto which individualized dwelling units could be plugged, added and removed according to a building’s life-cycle needs.  Developed in 1975 as a tourism hub in Bagdad, Iraq, the systemic illustration below pictures a typical metabolist comprehensive strategy for building and housing. The cylindrical infrastructure tower was conceived as a prestressed concrete, load-bearing servicing core, a tall “cob-hive” structure. The core would also act as a crane during construction and could conceivably continue to help maintain the structure over time. Capsule service space units plugged into the vertical core define living spaces while balcony platforms and curtain wall elements complete open served spaces and the architectural proposal. Kurokawa’s drawings represented the medium and message of this adaptable urbanity.

Kurokawa's proposal for a a vertical dwelling cluster

Prefabrication experiments - 233 - drawings and representations - 04 - The axonometric view of prefabrication

A clear and concise representation of an idea is fundamental to architecture. The axonometric drawing, a parallel projection composed in isometric, dimetric, or trimetric projections, is perhaps the most widely used form of three-dimensional visualization. Rules for isometric drawings were established by William Farish in the 18^th century to accurately represent scale without completely distorting an object’s dimensions. 

Employed in architecture and industrial design, the axonometric drawing is a universally applied device for rendering architectural and design ideas. The axonometric is one of the modern architecture’s preferred tools depicting the components, elements and mechanical imagery of the machine age. It also symbolised a break with more classic illustration. The axonometric is suited to monolithic, planar or assembled objects and a favoured illustration method for sharing instructions of all forms of predesigned productions. 

Particularly well-suited for explaining systems, elements and identifying the varied components needed to edify a work, the axonometric democratizes design for the masses. As shown in the Seco building system catalogue (illustrated below), these types of axonometric drawings intertwined with the very concept of prefabricated building and design for assembly. Associated with a kit-of-parts approach, the axonometric not only defines lines, edges and descriptive geometry but it showcases a total understanding of the built-form; Unlike plans and sections, this 3d representation requires the additional feature of juxtaposing various faces and defining their assembly and joinery and what, if any, folding or unfolding exists along an object’s axis. 

A variation of the axonometric drawing, the exploded axonometric has evolved into a device for architects or designers to depict the layering of a coherent thought process. The Diogene Retreat designed by Renzo Piano, illustrated in the image below famously represents this type of view and its use in architecture. Displaying parts, pieces, components and their relationship to the whole this design tool fits nicely in the contemporary idea of architecture as a comprehensive discipline. More-over architects like Piano use the exploded axonometric to portray their understanding of how every part is interrelated and to demonstrate their capacity to organize, compose, distribute, regulate and synthesize a complex architectural mandate into a succinct architectural view. 

Left - page from the Seco building system catalogue
Right - Exploded axonometric diagram for the Diogene retreat.

Prefabrication experiments - 232 - drawings and representations - 03 - Elucidating Simplicity - The Utility Core

Printed in 1869, An axonometric drawing of Catherine Beecher’s American Women’s Home exposed a modern house as a total environmental system. Each mechanical component was connected to a central flue. From evacuating foul air to distributing water, fresh air and power, the stack was also the focal organizing point for the house’s spaces and functions. Kitchen and bath areas were juxtaposed to this central distributing element. Shaping the house around its technical spaces evolved with this conceptualization and informed one of modernity’s key tenets, the division of served and service spaces. The construction and manufactured housing industries also followed suit with the development of standardized core elements that would facilitate the mass production of houses.

Services cores replaced the hearth of traditional dwellings, the centrally placed technical heart or the building’s engine would be a founding element of modern architecture. Somewhere between a specifically technological element and the representation of a talented architect’s capacity to contain all technical requirements in one excellently designed element, the service core is a design topic explored and considered by many. 

Drawing is organizing and organizing is designing. The ability to coherently devise a strategy to motor a home represented a modern design skill. The centralized core defined this capacity and implemented a greater association of architecture and construction as technical elements and design elements were harmonized.

The core was expressed in a specifically modern manner and perhaps most stringently in Mies’ prototype for individualized living, the Farnsworth house. All of the houses technical elements were linked to one tube that connected the house to infrastructure and eliminated waste. One tube or one flue as in Beecher’s diagram from 1869. In the Farnsworth design, Mies illustrated two modern obsessions with drawing and representing space, the grid and the core, both were tools to regulate or rule over any design elements. Prefabricated or not, the core predesigned and established a guide for its user and eliminate any systematic entanglement.  Mies’ core, contains in its essence, what drawing and representation are to architecture: language, a rationalizing element, clearly evoking what the building is, how it is organized and how it works all rolled into one simple concentric element.

Left: Catherine Beecher’s American Women’s Home
Right: Mies' core at Farnsworth

Prefabrication experiments - 231 - drawings and representations - 02 - Sharing the Balloon Frame

At once sign and signifier, drawings are to architecture and building culture what words and syntax are to literature. Representing worlds, spaces, edifices, temples, techniques and procedures, drawings depict, indicate, measure and specify. As such drawings are an essential device for sharing knowledge. A Longstanding tool in architectural treatises, architectural illustration is understood and used by architects and builders to speak skillfully about construction. 

R. Scott Burn’s treatise «Building Construction; Showing the employment of Timber, Lead, and Iron Work in the Practical Construction of Buildings» published in 1877 used drawings to elucidate strategies that could readily be applied to any building type. The timber details specifically, showcased a relatively recent building system, that would transform building culture. Complex notches, joinery and woodworking were being replaced by nailing and years of carpentry training could be supplanted by a good set of drawings depicting a number of important structural details and nailing principles. Based on the machine operated saw-mill and nail cutters the use of mass-produced nails and timber sticks simplified skeletal construction. Heavy timber box frames evolved into lightweight versions with corresponding composing parts spaced closely for bearing walls (studs), floors (joists) and roofs (rafters and purlins). These main constituting parts transformed construction and a nation’s landscape. 

The balloon frame would be shared by drawings in architecture, building and agricultural journals and would altogether reform industrialized building culture. Clear and concise instructions for joining, cutting and matching expounded a Do-It-Yourself culture for housing. Drawings and their subsequent open sharing allowed anyone with access to timber, nails and a saw to become a builder. Craft was in a sense replaced or perhaps more correctly usurped by drawings. There are numerous examples of balloon frame drawings in trade journals or catalogues. The balloon frame’s and subsequently the platform frame’s (a-one story variation, attributed to William J Levitt) circulation gained popularity in mass literature. “Raising Walls on a Slab Floor” published in the August 1946 issue of Popular Science exemplified this. The article’s beginner's illustration described the manageable construction of a timber framed walls. These drawing types are an integral part of balloon frame history and D-I-Y culture in construction. 

Burn's treatise (left) - Popular Science - August 1946 (right)