Prefabrication experiments - 282 - modular city building - 03 - Mat-building

Coined by author and architect Alison Smithson, mat-building, sometimes known as mat-housing, is a modular strategy or system based on the clustering of mass and voids into inhabitable dynamic architectural fields. The mat component denotes a limitless expanse layered over a rigorous planning grid. While not exclusively structural in nature, the grid circumscribes the edifice’s interrelated scale, span and scope.  Mat-housing usually relates to a modular aesthetic illustrated by iconic projects like Paul Rudolph’s Oriental Masonic Gardens, employing building units and volumes as bricks in an interplay of interior and exterior dwelling environments.  Along with the mat imagery, the theoretical ideal of an integrated adaptability and flexibility underscored the most notable example of Mat-building: The Free University of Berlin designed by Candilis, Josic, Woods and Schiedhelm in 1963 arrayed the basic framework of mat-building to define a campus (field in Latin) building that could evolve as needed over time.  The two to three storey scheme projected variability in plan and section across a horizontal plane characterized by a mass / void relationship akin to a Medina or medieval organization connecting public and common areas with more functional spaces for teaching.

 

The material heart of this mat-building was an innovative building system proposed by Jean Prouvé. Le «Tabouret» or stool building system proposed an open plan grid structural system. A square grid of large spanning beams, girders or even space frames determined floor or roof platforms: the open web structural plates were raised over spaced out columns or posts.  Together, the posts and platforms shaped the simple «stool» suggestion. Familiar to other Prouvé projects, a 1-meter grid of steel lightweight panels were proposed as interchangeable parts of the building envelope. The «plan libre» free of any bearing walls made it possible to change the building's interiors, furnishings and even functions over time.  The building as a type of matrix or normalized field made its components both interchangeable and expandable. Its expandability was put to the test in 1997 when Foster and partners were mandated to add a library and undertake a complete restoration. Thirty percent of the removed components were saved and reused as intended by Prouvé’s original structural system. 

Prouvé's open plan «Tabouret» system

Prefabrication experiments - 281 - modular city building - 02 - City in the Air

 

Dwelling mobility and interoperability were the basis of utopian postwar architectural projects for rebuilding Japan by young architects who in their way were the protagonists of a high modernist architectural regime articulated to technology. A Pritzker Architecture Prize winner in 2019, Arata Isozaki was an emblematic proponent of the Japanese metabolist movement, which perceived and designed the city as an organic organism. Expanding and contracting as needed, urbanity was organized around megastructures that provided the community infrastructure and services for modular clustered dwellings. The city would evolve according to a predetermined cellular structure. Dwellings were imagined as moveable commodities within the overall framework, inserted or replaced as needed. The entire city would be a type of scalable entity established from modular components. Even though Isozaki is known for much more than these ideas, The City in the Air project he designed outlined the basic elements of the metabolist architectural solution.  

 

In Isozaki's vision, horizontal circulation would branch out from vertical cores generating areas for horizontal dwelling distribution akin to linear viewing portals radiating from the central trunks. Further, building this new city infrastructure over the existing one would act as a type of pressure valve allowing the city to scale up or down as required. Metabolist speculative visions inspired architects and academia and repurposed the component based construction systems that were becoming familiar in Eastern European collective housing blocks to apply them to city making. Many megastructures were elaborated around a basic concept; a vertical circulation element anchored to place onto which modular units were attached leaving the ground plane free for urban networks. Perhaps inspired by LeCorbusier's Cité Radieuse, densely packed vertical dwellings would liberate the ground plane and elevate dwellings bringing them closer to light and separate them from perceived unsanitary living conditions closer to the streets.  This vision was applied in both an inverted pyramid towering proposal and an inhabitable bridge truss proposal. 

 

More streamlined versions were explored in many experiments and portrayed most ambitiously by Habitat 67 in Montréal by Moshe Safdie; individualized units had their own personal and private access and further the checkerboard type disposition allowed for each unit to be a singular recognizable element in the overall composition. 

City in the Air model

 

Prefabrication experiments - 280 - modular city building - 01 - City Tower

The correlation between a basic construction unit or element and its multiplication or aggregation into whole edifices is the conceptual starting point for connecting prefabrication, design and construction. Known as modular coordination, this modernist canon argues for component interoperability driven by dimensional standards for materials and assemblies. This idea percolated mainstream construction as of the 1930s and still outlines conventional construction coordination and documentation. Although, not as typical, the same posture was and is still sometimes applied to city planning and building.  The Megastructure with interchangeable dwelling units or the platform modular repeatable building such as the panel building in post-war USSR, posited a standardized approach to housing based on mass-produced parts assembled into urban puzzles. 

 

The next ten posts will examine diverse examples and strategies of modular city building, horizontally (mat housing) or vertically (supports and infill) and the infinite number of possibilities in between. The modular approach even led to exploring the building itself as a city or a microcosm of urban life; Louis Kahn's , City Tower (1956), a collaboration with Anne G. Tyng envisioned a parcel in Philadelphia as a towering framework assembled from industrialized parts to construct a vertical mixed-use support structure. City Tower explored a tetrahedral geometry similar to lightweight spaceframes but at a monumental scale and in reinforced concrete. Alexander Graham Bell, Bucky Fuller and Konrad Wachsmann explored and employed the tetrahedron cell (triangular pyramid) as a robust modular unit capable of formal and spatial multiplication generating large spanning structures with minimal weight.  

 

Kahn’s Megastructure would contain all urban functions and evolve as required to become a complete city fragment functioning independently from the urban field and fabric to which it was moored.  This experiment represented a counterproposal to the «generic» international style office towers sprouting in every city. The expression of structure as architecture would showcase a type of potential cityscape open to the environment relating to light and wind as each platform could be either enclosed or open,  built up completely or partially, reproducing the dynamism of a dense city scape in a vertical composition. 

City Tower representation

 

Prefabrication experiments - 279 - fabricating worlds - 10 - Pattern buildings

Context and setting in architecture habitually refer in some way to a site, a staging area, or a physical, geopolitical place where an edifice is to be moored. This concept implies a singular way of anchoring and differentiates a building from generic commodities because it must address a plurality of contextual factors. Industrialized building systems’ barriers are often discussed with singular anchoring in mind as systems must combine the generic (building as a commodity) with the non-generic (site specificity). 

 

As globalization and information technology reaffirm industrializations basic principles of making quality products affordable and accessible, construction's industrialisation is once more being touted as a way to reform construction, with one major difference from what was the basic value proposition in the past. If industrial driven proprietary models could characterize twentieth century experiments or one-off architectural designed prototypes, a new generation of architects is tackling this problem with an approach to bridge the two fields. Whether inspired by open-source and crowd sourced business models a shareable architecture is taking hold based on principles being applied through DfMA (design for manufacturing and assembly) principles in parallel industries. This new setting for architectural production based on industrialized systems is platform based. Nuanced products, models, types can be created from a controlled set of modular components similarly to how a programmer defines an application from predetermined and shared language and syntaxes. 

 

While certainly not unique within this space, 369 Pattern Buildings is the work of a cooperative of professionals and academics proposing a modular platform of timber volumes applicable to varied building types.   The basic modular component is analogous to an ISO container arranged with timber edges and bottom and top timber ribbed plates that are assembled with steel corner or vertex connectors. The modular unit can be stacked and juxtaposed to create a plurality of organisations. Facade elements, demising wall elements, mechanical as well as plumbing systems can be designed and fabricated according to underlining modular dimensions to easily fit within the system. While the system remains marginally applied, its setting is truly contemporary as it allows anyone to interact, download and iterate components into a personal architectural product adaptable to any site.  

Pattern Building modular components