Prefabrication experiments - 286 - Modular city building - 07 - Floating urbanity

  

The rising sea level is one of the most threatening consequences of climate change. Melting ice sheets menace coastal cities and transform littoral ecosystems. This will render large populated territories uninhabitable and defy shoreline communities’ adaptability. Approximately 40% of the world's population lives in coastal areas and depends on them for their survival both economic and social. Building infrastructure that helps mitigate risks can help increase a community’s resilience. Planning can be combined with coastal protective measures to prolong livability and prevent areas from becoming completely submerged. This type of speculative land-farming from the oceans is not new. Buckminster Fuller’s Triton City imagined a floating urban bionetwork for two million citizens in Japan’s coastal waters as a completely self-sufficient living machine as a solution to predicted land scarceness. 

 

An analogous concept of floating cities has emerged from a partnership between Oceanix and architectural firm BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group). The project team includes specialists in every area of city building: planning, engineering, waste management, mobility and energy harvesting. The hypothetical city is a modular composition of 300-person hexagonal floating districts. The 4.5-acre hexagon cells are multiplied and arranged to construct a collective urban constellation. A large portion, approximately 3/4 of an acre of each hexagon is designated for food production.  The concept proposes thematic settlements formed from a group of six hubs relying on a common harbour. These centralized and specialized communities would be based on themes such as health care, culture or education. Loosely reconceptualizing Ebenezer Howard’s circular garden city, the hexagons are connected by loops. A surrounding external concentric loop of modular islands serves energy harvesting or water filtration. The required food, water and waste management systems are all be completely self-generated or sourced from the air or surrounding water. 

 

The floating islands are anchored to the ocean floor with biorock, a type of artifical limestone produced from chemical reactions between electric currents and mineral deposits.  Although all of the ideas applied to this floating oasis are credible and technologically possible, it remains an idealistic mission. Even so, many of the proposed concepts could be applied to city building in general and make landlocked urbanity more resilient. 

BIG and Oceanix's Floating Cities

Prefabrication experiments - 285 - Modular city building - 06 - Container City I

Making architecture from shipping containers showcases the salvaging of ready-made components or materials repurposed toward new functions. Stacking, clustering, aligning and juxtaposing volumetric boxes makes conceptual sense, as it is possible to imagine multiple arrangements, from a standardized chunk, spreading in every direction. Further, the unitary autonomy of each composing box makes it conceivable to define buildings as material banks ready to be disassembled and transported indefinitely or even reusing the boxes as shipping containers if need be. This cyclical adaptability can be part of both a scalable and resilient community development strategy. Especially in areas that are in critical need of rapidly developed and affordable housing. One of the first applications of container building to container urbanism was undertaken at Trinity Buoy Warf, part of London’s Docklands. The first phase of ISO container stacking was finalized in 2001. The 14 dwelling units in Container City I employed 40-foot (12-meter) volumes in a three-storey configuration with a fourth floor added following high demand for the live/work units.  Delivery, setting, positioning and assembly of the building required only four days demonstrating what has become modular construction’s greatest confirmed asset - speed. 

 

A design build experiment by a consortium uniting Container City and Nicholas Lacey architects, the project expresses the containers honestly, as ready-made architecture. Mod-lines (modular volumetric juxtaposition lines) connect and bridge onsite with offsite construction. In this case, mod-lines are expressed on the outside of the building as if it was a simple stacking in a port side shipment. Containers can’t simply be stacked; openings for interior systems, finishes, windows, structural connections and insulation are some of the necessary modifications that transform the steel shipping containers into viable living spaces. At Container City I, interiors dissimulate the underlying containers with conventional systems and finishes. This type of aggregation shows that modular or container urbanism has the potential to provide quality housing both rapidly and creatively. While the container itself with a modular width of 8’ (2.4 m) does not provide for very flexible living spaces, containers could be modified and juxtaposed to compose 16’ (4.8 m) wide spaces, which offer more flexibility. 

Stacked ISO containers at Container City I

Prefabrication experiments - 284 - Modular city building - 05 - Centralized Box-Unit Construction

Even with the current appeal stemming from contextual pressures, modular building and prefabrication are in some ways still mired in post-war undertones. For most, prefab invokes standardized box type architecture duplicated over and over with little regard for habitability or architectural originality. The last century spawned countless experiments or representations and even changes in vocabulary from prefab to modular to manufactured housing and to offsite construction in part to relinquish prefab’s adverse status. This reputation underscores a persistent lack of uptake in the sector. Two of the most productive experiments in industrialized construction and their links with two completely opposed political systems perhaps explain the longstanding resistance even with their specific successes. The mobile home in the USA and the large panel or box unit building in post war USSR are both part of the same vision; providing adequate housing at the lowest possible price quickly and massively. Many disregarded both types of housing or at least, marginalized it. The interest in studying both, is in relating how industrialized construction was applied in the past and how those lessons could be applied or alter present-day strategies. 

 

The Gosstroy in the USSR was a centralized housing provider known as the State Committee for Construction. It was formed in 1950 to organize the reconstruction effort and respond to the overwhelming need for post-war dwellings. The government owned factories would become models of component, large panel and volumetric building inspired by systems that had been previously patented in either Great Britain or France. The Box-unit building type employed modular concrete boxes stacked up to 5 or 6 levels in different configurations. The concrete box units were produced in a sequential mass production system according to particular functions: stairs, kitchens, baths, bedrooms, or living spaces. Each large box would be delivered to site and craned into position and then stacked or juxtaposed to other boxes. Joints were cast onsite to create a monolithic structure. The basic module, 2,7m x 2,7m x 5,4m in length, could theoretically be clustered and expand in every direction with scope and scale being determined by cost and acreage constraints. USSR’s unambiguously centralized vision attained an average rate of 3.5 million dwelling units per year.  

Box-unit types

Prefabrication experiments - 283 - Modular city building - 04 - Moveable modular dwellings

Methodologies from mass to lean production have propelled architectural experiments that would direct industrial principles toward the construction of edifices. Primarily, these experiments were fostered through applying standardization and replicability already used in commodity production. Military-industrial alliances, reconstruction after disasters or massive migration patterns all increased provisional demand for prefabrication. Specifically in the area of volumetric modular construction, to address housing shortages, factory produced dwelling sized chunks would be stacked and clustered into dense and low-cost variable compositions.

Along with the required dimensional normalization associated with mass production, the Toyota model and subsequent lean production tenets introduced the central concept of interoperability; The ability to leverage one type of cog or task toward a great number of arrangements according to preset design or fabrication parameters. In architecture, interoperability guided a systems theory approach where each building sub-assembly could be assembled and rearranged according to underlying ordering principles leading to a comprehensive and flexible adaptability of parts and pieces.

This idealized union of flexibility and interchangeability also sustained a new type of urbanism that conceived the city as a field of tall buildings planned as infrastructure support hubs. Manufactured modular dwellings could be attached, detached, placed or even replaced on these towers attuning to the evolving city. The Plug-in Capsule Tower (Kurokawa-1971) and Future House (Angela Hareiter-1967) famously portrayed this utopian vision for mobile citizens, moving their dwellings as required. Half a century after these foreword-looking experiments, a new generation is embracing similar themes of densifying cities though high rise modular and scalable edifices. Y design Office (a research and design collaborative) imagined an adaptable skyscraper for the centre of Hong Kong. The proposal is not only a modular support tower but is also intended to build itself. The support structure provides infrastructure connections and common spaces. Dwellings are composed from the same basic 2,6x2,6x2,6 m box-unit. They are lifted and positioned according to sizes from small (4 modular units) to extra-large (20 modular units) and plugged-into service connections that can easily be disconnected to relocate one’s dwelling. Each unit is part of an adaptable and interoperable whole as volumetric apartments could be delivered, lifted and placed or replaced within minutes.

 

Kurokawa Capsule Tower (left) Y Design Office (right)