Digital technology applied in design and fabrication is shaping a revolution in construction methods. Also driven by stagnating productivity and progressing agendas for sustainability, prefabrication, off-site construction and industrialized building are being federated with data manipulation design tools to address long-standing prefab stigmas: repetition and inflexibility. Within this paradigm, system modularity is proposed as a type of pattern language to inform customization potentials.
Connecting customization with modularity is not new, transcends digital technology and relates industrialization’s mass production principles with diversifying its business model to adapt supply to consumers’ demands. Modernity in architecture replaced classical proportioning measurements with production criteria and material grids to define open systems, which predate digital mass customization and celebrated modularity as the basis for individualization. Many such proposals identified a set of rules, based on open planning, employing the modular grid as a type of chess board onto which many strategies could be developed according to predefined pieces. These modular tessellations used another of modernity’s tenets: the plan libre (free plan) liberated from bearing walls, as Le Corbusier posited in the DOM-INO system, emancipated the user and architecture from classical and structural constraints.
Inspired by these concepts Yona Friedman, best known for his megastructure cities and adaptable urban environments proposed a modular housing unit in 1949, the Movable boxes. More of a system than a unit, aligned party walls determined a basic row-house type from the multiplication and juxtaposition of equally distanced partitions. Within this basic shell, front and back walls could be user-defined. Living spaces were specified according to a linear one-meter (estimated from drawings) modular grid system perpendicular to the dividing walls. Onto this regulated field, predetermined service cores or boxes «movable boxes» would be placed, affixed and deployed according to evolving user needs. The service space boxes for kitchens, closets and bathrooms define open served spaces without predetermined functions easily modified from living to sleeping or working spaces. Foreshadowing Habraken’s supports and infill, Friedman’s basic dwelling shell with individualized infill patterns was elaborated as sharable design process where each box unit provided a basic measuring device to create, figure out and customize dwelling patterns.
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| Movable Boxes from «Yona Friedman.com» |
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