The Second World War devastated many cities and countries. The war effort also delayed housing construction and expended resources both human and material. The acute need for housing that followed was an accumulation of prewar and wartime shortages. The postwar baby boom also increased demand for affordable housing as well as every other type of social service edifice from schools to hospitals. Governments invested massively in redirecting military-industrial complexes toward housing to improve production capacity and maintain power in the event of future conflicts.
Japan was particularly affected and invested heavily in the development of technologies for the housing industry. Influenced by architectural modernity, vertical, collective housing became a focus of rebuilding. Industrialization with an important emphasis on automation introduced new ways of making things and eventually led to the Toyota Production System, equally as disruptive as Henry Ford's model had been in early 20th century USA. The Japanese prefabricated housing industry evolved in this context and inspired the stacking of manufactured units onto vertical support structures. These open structures, analogous to a mega-shelf, provided all the essential common services for the amassed dwellings. Mass produced integrated capsules could be inserted, moved and interchanged in a variety of support structures. A somewhat impractical solution as the stacking either requires redundant structural components or a secondary structure, which increases costs and resource use. Still projects like Habitat 67 epitomized the application of this architectural utopia. While related to Japanese metabolism, this same mega-structure strategy inspired less architectural visions; Elmer Frey explored the simple stacking of his mobile homes to create vertical mobile home parks.
Today, the megastructure containing customizable housing units idea is seeing a resurgence driven by rapid urbanization and a significant need for housing construction around the world. Prefabricated units that can be inserted into a support structure is theoretically suitable for vertical density since the units can be produced concurrently to the onsite megastructure’s assembly reducing construction time and in principle, costs. The Townland system (Boeing) produced for Operation Breakthrough and Vending Pod Skyscraper Tower (Haseef Rafiei) share this heritage of the construction of a common infrastructure into which lightweight units can be aggregated. The pod tower goes even further showcasing that today's rapidly evolving digital fabrication technology that makes it possible to literally print or produce dwellings onsite combining two concepts of 20th century prefabrication: mechanization and the megastructure.
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| comparative analysis of two megastructure proposals |
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