Prefabrication is a straightforward concept describing making parts and components in advance of their use to construct edifices. This notion is at least as deep-rooted as construction or architecture. Nomadic hunters, Japanese master-carpenters, Roman master-builders, and medieval cathedral stone cutters prepared elements to ensure intelligibility and easy assembly. Since industrialization, prefabrication has often been used inaccurately as a synonym for mass produced architecture. The pre-made component is not necessarily mass produced or even factory produced, it is simply a unit or element ready for use. This «ready-made» methodology also intimates using, reusing or repurposing objects. The assembly of housing from train cars studied by Bertrand Goldberg, the stacking of ready-made shipping containers, or the construction of earth ships from recycled tires all speak to this type of «ready-made» strategy; Architecture cobbled together with these components, subassemblies, or pieces is the basis of a more frugal way of approaching design and construction. The use of ready-made objects or even the objet trouvé transferred from its original use to dwelling underlines a sensibility usually associated with vernacular construction. Bottles, tires, or concrete infrastructure pipes can be stacked, juxtaposed, aligned, into a dense framework creating walls, inhabitable hives or any inhabitable device.
Another architectural option in the «ready-made» realm is to design an object shape or space that is the key unit of a modular building system; a type of predetermined large chunk of a building. Guy Dessauges living tubes from concrete cylinders demonstrates this specific type of ready to use component system. Concrete tubes cast orthogonally on one end and obliquely on the other become the basic shapes stacked and attached to a vertical service core on their straight end and open to the environment on their oblique end. Similarly shipping containers continuously inspire box-type construction from ready mades. The Plug-in school from People's Architecture Office uses this basic idea to design a scalable system from interchangeable volumetric units that are designed to work and connect like containers. Inspired by the simple corrugated shell construction or concrete shell both proposals imply a type of batch production of elements that can then be assembled in a variety of compositions depending on function, span, scope or context.
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