Prefabrication experiments - 257 - Operation Breakthrough - 08 - Birdair and Poly Petro Chem - inflatable forms

The most noteworthy aspect of Operation Breakthrough is the amount of partnerships formed to respond to the challenges of construction’s lacking productivity and reinvent industrialized building. This reinforced George Romney’s affection for cooperative capitalism and cross-pollinating stakeholders. The result, leveraging the construction industry and its composing partners toward an open source sharing of strategies - a catalogue of construction techniques - could be an example to today’s still lagging construction industry. Expressly within the framework of identifying affordable housing systems, Operation Breakthrough provided a space and platform for presenting well-known as well as more marginal systems, materials and methods. A prime example of an inventive industrial partnership was provided by the consortium identified as Housing Advocates composed of Birdair (a tensile structure producer) and Poly Petro chem (a plastic producer). Both companies came together to imagine a building system and process articulated to their specific areas of expertise. 

 

Birdair is well known for their tensile structures.  The company’s foray into inflatable and reusable concrete formwork leading to the publication of a patent (US723751A) was the main element of their proposal. The idea is to employ Birdair’s knowledge of inflatable tensile structures to produce an inflatable, fill it with enough pressured air to shape a compressive geometry and its structural formwork. Fluid material could then be poured or cast onto the inflatable and left to set and cure. Once cured the reusable formwork could be deflated, removed and set-up to cast other structures. For Operation Breakthrough, the on-site concrete was replaced by a material identified as Carbalon; a two-part urethane compound sprayed, or cast onto any mold. This material would be hardened over Birdair’s reusable and inflated forms to shape exterior walls, and interior walls, while service cores and other required components would be produced by third party partnering manufacturers. 

 

The inflatable forms would be anchored in place by strapping the tensile structure over a foundation. Door and window openings, part of the casting mold, would also be positioned in place while casting the material and allowing it to cure into a monolithic structure, which could then be finished in a variety of ways from traditional siding to stuccoing. Along with the casting controlled on-site with portable equipment, the pneumatic formwork creates a site intensive industrialized construction process. 

Sketch of the Housing Advocates proposal