Organized in the late 1960s, it is unclear how much influence, if any, the building experiments undertaken in the Man and his World (Expo 67, Montreal, Canada in 1967) universal exhibition had on Operation Breakthrough’s proposals and processes. Moshe Safdie and August Komendant, architect and designer of Habitat 67 surely inspired a generation of architects through their vision of housing and construction’s industrialization. Many proposals conceived for Operation Breakthrough argued for similar concepts, pushing the idea of modular boxes, stacked, amassed, clustered or juxtaposed to breed new housing patterns.
Exhibition pavilions have long informed and guided architectural advancements and Expo 67 included many accounts of formidable structural units deployed in multiform varieties. The lineage from exhibit structure to inhabitable space frame was also displayed in metabolism experiments. This theme is also evident in one particular proposal for Operation Breakthrough. The Optor Corporation project, designed and developed in Montréal, offers a glimpse into potential cross contamination between exhibit structures and housing. The space frame structure of inhabitable tetrahedrons assembled from tubes and hubs defined an open structural concept divided or enclosed by stressed skin panels, service walls or functional units. The support and infill strategy would be easily assembled and as simply disassembled stacked, packed and redeployed for other sites.
The slotted aluminum hub fasteners secured flattened tubular ends slipped into the cylindrical hub’s grooves in a similar fashion to the already well-known Triodetic connector used for many exhibit buildings (see blog post 149). The exact source of Optor Corporation’s design is an architectural mystery. A clue for further investigation may be found in an article that appeared in the ABC journal (Architecture Bâtiment Construction) in may 1968. Author and architect Étienne Dusart described a space frame building system that in all respects seems to be the ideological basis for the Optor system. The author describes the same basic framework and stressed skin fiberglass panels. Sprawling horizontally and vertically the space structure would shape a new type of urban structure that could theoretically grow in every direction as a structured geometric trellis. Both systems also share the basic triangulated support system and functional units delineating a multiplicity of infilled dwelling patterns.
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| Images above : Article from ABC journal ; Image below : Optor proposal |
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