For many, the idea of prefabrication connotes mass-produced cookie-cutter buildings with little or no customization potentials. The personalization of prefabricated architectural systems is an entrenched obstacle to the industrialization of architecture and construction. The prevailing position of architects exploring prefabrication has been to argue either for uniqueness or for open systems based on component flexibility leveraged toward varying shapes, geometries and uses.
Walter Gropius and Ezra Ehrenkrantz’s positions symbolize the pursuit of an unrestricted prefab. Both argued for an industrialized architecture assembled coherently by talented architects creating a strain of designs from preset parts. In line with this open strategy and while arguing for their Ecologic Building Systems in wood, steel and concrete, Laurence Stephan Cutler and Sherrie Stephens Cutler proposed a metaphor for their kit-of-parts architecture that is still interpreted, used and articulated in both academia and practice to illustrate a permissive relationship between components and their infinite variability. This model is presented below and hinges on sharing a basic structure and syntax. Prefabricated elements are to architecture what the alphabet is to literature, what notes are to music and what colors and shapes are to painting. If a writer develops a style through the same basic use of letters, words and sentences, it is certainly possible for architects to deploy pre-defined components and details to develop their own unique architecture.
Still, the point at issue is - where does singularity lie in architecture ? Most components are mass-produced and so singularity rests in a coherent way these parts are assembled. If industrialized building systems predefine this coherence, then an argument can be made that they stint an architect’s capacity to offer a signature detail. The same kit-of-parts ideal that allowed for the Cutlers to define prefabrication as a language of parts in today’s increasingly digitalized sector would make it possible to define a very personal kit-of-parts manufactured specifically for each project. As digital fabrication evolves the language metaphor can be taken one step further and a designer could envision an alphabet as a singular undertaking. Then prefab could be analogous not with letters and language but with the many typefaces that can be used and developed for personal use.
 |
| Laurence Stephan Cutler and Sherrie Stephens Cutler's representation of the relationship between prefabrication and the alphabet |
No comments:
Post a Comment