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