Prefabrication experiments - 305 - Then and now - 05 - Universal Connectors

 

The essence of architecture can be defined by well-thought-out connections between elements, components, materials and systems. How things are juxtaposed, secured, fixed, or joined become iconic representations of an era and even narrate changing styles in architecture. For modern architects, the honest illustration of connections or the camouflage of systems under a coat of white was emblematic of either a rejection of ornament or exposing technology as new form of representation. During modernity, influenced by military engagement, industrialized and standardized connections became the focal point of much research proposing variable building kits from a limited number of interchangeable parts. Konrad Wachsmann’s contribution is well documented and was inspired by his training as a furniture maker. His work on prefab houses with Christof and Unmack, his explorations for mega-spanning space frame hangars for the US Air force and his most iconic collaboration with Walter Gropius, the General panel House were all based on his obsession with inventing a universally applicable connector.

 

Other well-known connectors, Unistrut's Moduspan, Mero’s sphere, the Abstracta modular system and the Canadian Triodetic aluminum connector, carried the same vision articulated to maximum architectural variability and structural potential with minimum components. The universal connector is based on the idea of connecting lines or surfaces from points or vertices which inform a geometric play of struts, posts, columns and beams, to achieve any shape or form: spheres, vaults, slabs or more organic free-forms. Reticulated structures, trusses or space frames famously deploy this vision toward maximum span with minimum weight and continue to inspire new generations looking to explore formal possibilities offered by new digital modeling, fabrication, and management tools.  Universality today no longer relates uniquely to the plurality of forms, but also to data richness integrated in the connector’s underlying parameters making it possible to envision a type of self-developing connector coded to respond to all manner of generative data. Even with all these potentials, connectors like Unistrut and Triodetic still are used in the same way not because of a resistance to technology but because of this joinery's capacity to adapt to any forms, designed by digital or analog means, and flexible enough to respond to any era’s functional demands.

 

comparative analysis of two universal connectors

Prefabrication experiments - 304 - Then and now - 04 - Dwelling Capsules

Capsule dwellings are in a way the architectural discipline's counterproposal to the development of the commercially successful mobile home. Making houses as manufactured commodities drove a host of proposals by architects. From an industrial design perspective, the capsule or dwelling pod would be an efficient machine, employ new methods, demonstrate new material potentials, and optimize each square centimeter of space. Inspired by modernists and their obsession with the Minimum Dwelling (1932), the capsule evolved as a response to housing crises, affordability and post war rebuilding policies. Conceptually distant from the more conventional mobile home, the minimal dwelling was hyper-designed as an entirely autonomous unit, adaptable to any context and as a complete work in the modern sense.  Imagined concurrently to both the mobile home and the Levittown bungalow, capsule dwellings eliminated any traditional iconography, made place or context indeterminate, and increasingly borrowed from parallel industries, vehicular design or even space age design that idealized mobility.  Pushed by post-war rebuilding and industrial automation, the metabolist architectural movement in Japan was the most obvious demonstration of the capsule dwelling and its aesthetic. 

 

In the Prefabricated Home (2005), Colin Davies argued that this idealized representation of the house as a manufactured, mechanized and mobile product contributed to distancing the capsule's founding fields (architecture and industry) with architects moving toward an idealized and marginalized version of the prefab house.  As the pendulum swings back in the direction of manufacturing technologies bridging both fields, we are seeing a resurgence of the architect-industry partnership.  Richard Roger’s Y-cube, Kenzo Kuma's experiments with MUJI,  and Renzo Piano’s Diogene Retreat with Vitra are just a few recent examples of the capsule anchored to contemporary lifestyles. The Koda microhouse, from Kodasema, frames this current segment's objectives. Similar to Kurokawa’s Leisure Capsule, the Koda series is defined and designed in its most precise details, but is not represented as a futuristic system as it conforms to present day design conventions.  Separated by half a century, both proposals eloquently demonstrate the enduring obsession with the machine for living. Today’s dwelling capsule speaks to our connected culture combined with a nostalgia for a David Thoreau-like lifestyle. A union of these opposed ideals frames the integrated capsule as a wearable commodity, a mass customizable inhabitable and ergonomic skin offering a perceived simplicity with a complex globalized connectivity. 

Comparative analysis by pre [FABRICA] tions