Prefabrication experiments - 249 - measuring devices - 10 - NENK modular planning grid and floor system

Through funding of infrastructure, large-scale building programs or housing construction stimulus, governments sustain crucial economic and social industrial sectors, especially during periods of crisis. The post World War II building programs in industrialized nations affected and distressed by years of conflict epitomize how governments braced and maintained economies while preserving specific types of production in the event of other conflicts. Optimizing construction, increasing productivity, applying military efficiencies and lessons to modern building are just a few topics that underscored government programs. 

Housing policies provided a framework for monitoring the building industry, highlighted areas that offered opportunities for productive change and mandated building and resource agencies to ensure building construction would benefit from technological advances. The Directorate General of Research and Development at the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s would express this industrial advisory role through their sponsorship of one of the era’s most detailed, flexible and adaptable modular building systems. The NENK system was named after David Nenk, an architect who had been in charge of the Architects and Buildings branch of the Ministry.

The modular steel-framed skeletal kit integrated efficient steel component production within a reticulated geometric lightweight floor system. Assembled from repetitive and lightweight tubes and struts, the floor structure is ultimately a large spanning (36-foot (12m x 12m)) planning grid. Parts are multiplied, aligned and patterned to outline any space.  The basic unit is a 4-foot (1.2 m) inverted pentahedron, a square-based pyramid with a 16 foot-square area (1.44 m²). Placed and lined up on their apexes the bolted square-bases frame the floor grid, while the 2-foot (600mm) height from apex to base structures an open network of webs for passing ductwork, piping or wiring. Tie rods link all the pyramid tips shaping a rigid three-dimensional space frame. The four-foot planning grid was designed for varied column positions: centered on the apex, on each of the base’s vertex corners or at an edge’s mid point, this variability increased the number of design variables. First used to construct army barracks in the 1960s the grid system could be deployed for any use.

Nenk's assembled pentahedron floor modules