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