The steel house, an icon of progress, remains an icon of prefabrication and a somewhat charged counter-proposal to the established balloon frame or lightweight timber platform frame. The case for steel was intrenched in its newness, stability, normalization, strength, and simplified assembly and disassembly of ready-made and ready to use components. Steel construction in housing proposals, ranged from folded plate elements inspired by car production to the skeletal structures informed by the displacement of timber construction patterns to iron and then to steel. The main advantage of steel over timber or masonry during modernity was conveyed through open frameworks with larger spans. Achieved with fewer material constraints, steel frames liberated classic planning principles as they eliminated the need for bearing walls. Further, the progression of steel components, standardized and catalogued, made it possible to envision customizable, modernized and adaptable prefabrication systems based on off the shelf pieces.
Steel house proposals by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, or Charles and Ray Eames acknowledged steel as a robust, manageable and adaptable material while emphasizing the open frame as a device for shaping spaces for evolving lifestyles. The conceptualization of the steel skeleton associated with modernity evolved into ideals of planning flexibility. Cedric Price’s Steel House project developed in the late 1960s is a notable example of the sequence between frame and open planning. Based on a series of juxtaposed modular steel supports, service and cladding modules orient adjustable planning possibilities underscored by the steel frame’s grid. Articulated to the idea of representing a freedom to plan and change within an evolving lifestyle, Price provided not only a process for open building, but a device for sharing his plan. The Letraset drawing tool, well-known to older generations of architects, provided a transfer method for the predefined kit elements and components to design, organize and draw a steel house according to Cedric Price’s method. The designer simply traces each component to transfer it to a drawing. Perhaps an ancestor of open source design, the shared Letraset transfer overlay included Price’s standardized language for infinite iterations. A normalized understanding of customizable design, Price’s representation tool framed changeable life pattern possibilities through a constant and democratic architectural position.
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| Letraset overlay for Steel House |
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