Prefabrication experiments - 237 - drawings and representations - 08 - Car Production as an Analogue

As a result of the process evolutions brought on by the industrial evolution, many sectors progressed concurrently while others were invented and offered opportunities for cross pollinating new methods and knowledge. Automobile production and the Ford assembly line specifically epitomized how complex products could be made affordable while gaining in qualitative aspects like quality control, metrics and repetition. Car production still symbolizes industrialization’s gains and advances. After Ford, the Toyota «lean» production method and more recently mass customization models continue to inspire builders, architects, industrialists and inventors to appropriate car production and leverage its instructions for the building sector. This ideal, supported by many during the 20th century, is still in many ways haunting the prefabricated building sector. 

One of many representations that compare building prefabrication to car production, Albert Farwell Bemis’ model in the schematic below is perhaps the theory most architects modelled their practice for achieving an architecture made from industrialized parts and pieces. Postwar tract housing, also validates this model; individualization was kept to a minimum. The model identified industrialization as a coordinated layering of systems. Even as it is clear that buildings and automobiles share certain systemic principles as frame and chassis (today’s industry sometimes uses the equally connotated car terminology: platfom), the building has one main differentiating element: Site and context. The systemic layering admitted that houses, while idealized as singular productions, share most of the basic housing elements, materials and methods. Bemis imagined the foundation as an anchor as other building components could be repeated from project to project – a personalized modularity. 

Bemis’ research and proposals addressed every aspect of building production as harmonizing mass production with supply chains through a regulated layering of systems and coordinated dimensions so that architects could manage projects holistically. Still widely applied, his layering acknowledged that a building would never be completely mass produced, along with aesthetic reasons, anchorage, earthwork, and grounding define architecture’s unicity. Even today, as prefab / industrialization and off-site construction are revived by issues of productivity and technology so are some weak, archaic and outmoded production models for architecture’s mass production. Bemis’s analogue identified similarities and sought to define a manner to attain uniqueness.

Bemis' rationalized comparison with car production