Prefabrication experiments - 260 - Connectors - 01 - The Universal Building Joint

Architecture and construction in their basic essence are related to joining. Connecting, linking, aligning and fitting materials together require knowledge of both crafting and detailing. Joinery reveals how architecture is made. The modern architect streamlined design and construction through systematized thinking translated into translatable and intelligible building assemblies. Factory production made detailing into a language for the architect to showcase how to build through drawings and specifications. The search for the universal connector was an underlying theme of the modern architect’s new role of detailing construction.

 

The most cited and prominent example of this ideological vision of a multifunctional building joint leveraged toward multiple patterns is the General Panel House connector created by Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann in 1941. The heart of the modular panel house system, the pluri-directional surface connector, was developed to join panel edges horizontally and vertically to arrange an infinite number of dimensionally coordinated variations. Inspired by his training as a cabinetmaker and as chief designer for the Christof and Unmack timber house producer, Wachsmann devised a steel biscuit joint precisely shaped and connected through a plate and wedge system. The plates were cut and shaped to match-up with the precision of a lock mechanism.  The hook-type metal clips would be kept in a latched and locked position by a compression steel plate wedge inserted through the panel’s thickness attaching panel and joint. Modular stressed skin panels and planning modules were outlined by what at the time had become the standard for material coordination: 4-inch module and 40-inch grid. The connectors were positioned according to the grid creating a repeated stitch pattern. 

 

The General Panel Corporation set up in a repurposed aircraft factory was to be highly automated and influenced by the era’s highest production standards. In 1984 Gilbert Herbert recounted the story of the General Panel Corporation in his book The Dream of the Factory Made House and cited many reasons for the company’s failure to attain what Wachsmann had promised. 

 

Architecture’s and architects’ fascination with joinery is still an obsession throughout the discipline and the quest for a universal connector is the theme of the next 10 blog posts which will present a number of connectors designed to attain a universally applicable joint.

The universal connector