Prefabrication experiments - 273 - fabricating worlds - 04 - The Fun Palace

Sometimes referred to as twentieth century cathedrals, skyscrapers spanned precipitously and used materials to their limit states, in the same way the ribbed vaults and flying buttresses of the middle ages did. Technology evolved significantly during the first half of the twentieth century making possible the construction of commercial buildings at never before seen scopes and scales. New materials and methods offered potentials for a burgeoning service economy demanding agility and flexibility. The open and free planning of floor plates resulted directly from the removal of load bearing walls replacing them with distanced slender posts and beams. Moreover, spans made from mass produced, repeatable and scalable components could be expanded in all directions. The tall buildings’ modular skeletons were adaptable to any use and inspired new urban visions based on office blocks as great evolving machines for a serviceable urbanity. 

This type of programmable urban and civic infrastructure inspired even further reflection on technology’s role in the construction of civic infrastructure. Cedric Price's Fun Palace is perhaps the emblem of using technology to shape adaptable social interactions free from classic civic conventions. A metallic cathedral erected to unite folks to learn and experiment with developing techniques and theories. Even its name denotes great exhibit palaces of the 19th century; The Crystal Palace (1851), a conservatory showcased the way forward for modern building culture. In the Fun Palace, Price along with theatre director Joan Littlewood conceived an open framework for exploring and communicating knowledge.  

Cedric Price argued for a common architecture that reformed archaic civic and social conventions. In Price's work, technology was the backdrop, an open building framework for stimulating spatial and social possibilities. The Fun Palace's reticulated skeletal megastructure was proposed as a completely open plan that could be assembled on any suitable site and disassembled to be erected later in another context. The prefabricated kit-of-parts contributed to constructing the ideal of adaptable structures: flexible, malleable and mutable. The Fun Palace's skeletal structure was a complete revolution and foreign from the massive and classic civic buildings of the past; architecture was stripped of its permanent monumentality and represented a way forward to adapt to a constantly shifting world.

Cedric Price's Fun Palace rendering

Prefabrication experiments - 272 - fabricating worlds - 03 - The Eden Biomes

Prefabrication embraces many topics: simplifying construction, making processes more efficient, coordinating practises in a factory setting and standardizing materials or systems. Among these themes, making building systems lighter engendered and continues to motivate innovation. Both architects and engineers have designed frameworks outlining optimal material use. Examples of optimum structures have repeatedly addressed spanning across great expanses with a symbiotic relationship between, shape, geometry and matter. Arches, vaults and domes are three building and geometry archetypes that illustrate the potential for shaping structural performance. The upward curvature imparts a vertical thrust that reduces tensile and horizontal stresses, making it possible to develop an efficient relationship between vertical rise and horizontal spans. 

 

Grimshaw and Partners’ Eden project, a series of interrelated domes, showcases two of architectures enduring strategies to cover architectural space. Inspired by geodesic domes and inflatable structures, the architects designed a prodigious conservatory programmed for biosphere teaching and discovery. The structural concept by engineer Anthony Hunt was dictated by local weak soil bearing capacity; the greenhouse cupolas pose themselves daintily on sloped earthworks. Conceptually related to masters like Fuller and Nervi, Hunt argued for maximum result with minimal effort. The Eden domes employ a double shell triangulated truss construction repeating a tessellation of hexagonal shapes braced by ties and node anchors.  The central argument for the use of geodesic domes continues to be small, light and easily transportable parts, and in this case, each component was modeled and calculated for their streamlined production. 

 

Keeping the domes weathertight, luminous air-filled pillows add relatively little weight to the overall building. The greenhouse structure is entirely covered with a translucent skin composed of triple-layered inflated pads. Made of a state-of-the-art plastic foil, ETFE Ethylene tetra fluoro ethylene, the inflated casings’ edges are melded to create a perimeter border or lip that is inserted, sandwiched and compressed into a skylight type aluminum frame attached to the geodesic lattice.  A network of gutters follows the underlying framework collecting water and directing it to perimeter collecting units. 

 

The Biomes (bio domes) launched in 2001, pursue the same basic goal of answering Fuller’s famous dare: How much does your building weigh? 

Conservatory structure and skin detail

Prefabrication experiments - 271 - fabricating worlds - 02 - Bubbletecture delivery

 Prefabrication’s basic definition is about anticipation. Anticipating site challenges, labour or workforce shortages or delivery constraints, to suggest simplified building methods that consider onsite construction’s perceived obstacles. Anticipation can also relate to technical processes like cutting, folding or boring a component in advance of its use to calculate and determine how it will be assembled on site. This type of calculation and prediction underlines the architect's role in detailing a building by foreseeing problems and proposing solutions. Prefabrication, industrialized building systems and Offsite construction proponents argue for systems that at the very least address building system resolutions. 

 

Some prefabrication experiments go even further projecting entire narratives for design, construction, assembly and scalability over time. Architects at times have even devised instructions or guidelines for a system’s livability. The 1960s and 1970s, reflecting the era’s optimism arising from space exploration and the democratisation or adaptation of wartime advances applied to civilian use, were a fertile time for speculative architectural and prefab experiments. Predicting major transformations in how people would live in cities, proposals, their environments, their applicability and their comprehensive adaptability circumscribed a type of architecture that could be applied to any context.

 

An emblematic vision of these architectural worlds and their impending colonisations, Pascal Haüsermann, a Swiss French architect applied his knowledge of composite shell structures to develop what has become referred to as bubble architecture. The cellular and organic shapes of Haüsermann's architecture were tailored from developments in reinforced concrete or polymers both suited to monocoque shell systems. Meridian sectors and segments of these circular dwellings would be produced as complete floor, wall and roof elements and assembled into modular elliptical volumes. 

 

In his proposal for a city of 1500 dwellers, the pattern-based housing system illustrated the potential for a multidirectional arrangement. Arguing for construction’s industrialisation, Haüsermann’s vision of transportation predicted the delivery of buildings as commodity kits and packages. Representing the use of helicopters, parachutes and trucks, Haüssermann posited multimodal transportation of buildings anywhere one earth. If the same proposal was drawn-up today, he most certainly would have added a computer controlled giant drone as a way of simplifying architecture’s distribution. 

Haüsermann's vision of delivery

Prefabrication experiments - 270 - fabricating worlds - 01 - Undersea Island

 270 – fabricating contexts – 01 – Undersea Island 

 

Prefabrication is in its most basic definition is contemplating something before producing it. Controlling every part of an architectural thing before connecting it to its functional context or environment. This ideal of a manufactured product in architecture has always sat of a fragile limit between architectural idealistic visions of outlining a complete work and a more pragmatic posture stemming from mass manufacturers perspectives.  As the twentieth century progressed, the conceptual divide between architects’ speculations and mass-produced prefabrication increased to a point where the disparate fields rarely interact. Further architects moved from an early construction / technical based prefabrication linked to making to fabricating made up worlds. Creating or fashioning new contexts or artificial settings addressed a two-fold objective: reframing architecture and reinventing cities. The experiments of Archigram, a group of speculative architects, are typical of this era symbolizing the architect as social constructor. Many architects elaborated their visions disconnected from the idea of context or place as we know it or refer to it in architecture. 

 

Projects were developed for extreme polar climates, under water or in extreme environmental conditions; the architect could imagine beautiful and creative communities even in the most challenging conditions. Largely represented and published, most shared the idea of integrating communities through innovative building systems. In the 1960s many such proposals involved a robust colonisation argument showcasing that people could live in any context and architects would show them how and why they should accept these visions.  

 

Speculative experiments were often spawned from parallel industrial examinations as was the case for Bucky’s submersible. Buckminster Fuller patented an undersea island in 1963 (US patent 3 080 583). The underwater oil platform would protect equipment and workers from storms or unstable weather. Stabilized by tension anchors and kept afloat by buoyant caissons in the cylindrical structures, the megastructure section showcases a multi-functional and environmentally controlled interior space. This type of architectural conditioning of architecture sought to create new building potentials arguably inspiring other imaginary settings for dwelling. The next nine blog posts will look into this idealized view of prefabrication not as way of resolving technical production but as a way of modeling novel living conditions. 

Undersea Island Section