Modelled on industrialized and centralized production concepts that evolved in the automotive sector at the beginning of the twentieth century, the utility or service core was proposed for dwellings as analogous to an automobile’s engine. Service spaces, kitchens, bathrooms, technical rooms, laundry rooms, appliances and required connections for wiring, piping, or ducting would be combined in an integrated element delivered to operate or control inhabitable space. Referred to interchangeably as pods, cores, heart or core unit, the concept argued for a serial standardized production in the form of an architectural accessory.
The architectural rationalization of service spaces was driven by new mechanical facilities and a representation of this can be traced to the American Woman's House by Catharine Beecher (1869): a centralized space for production and a flue for extracting air and other waste from the home. The clustering of technical spaces permeated the discipline and architectural pedagogy. The April 1937 issue of Architectural Forum proposed the term “the house's engine” or “power plant”. The spatial and material expression of served and serving spaces became a canon of modernism.
Besides developing design elements and advanced technologies, the service core continues to uphold the same rhetoric: simplifying the provision of mechanical spaces for dwellings. Two models of the utility core show how little this innovation has changed: Published in an issue of Life magazine in April 15th 1946 as complementary to a series of measures that would help tackle the housing shortage, the Mobilecore developed by a timber frame contractor proposed a service box around which the house could be built conventionally. In the same vein, California company Protohomes, founded in 2009, has devised a house building platform based on the separation of an open adaptable space “hyperspace” and their two-story technical hub “protocore”. Protohomes proposes a completely digitally integrated and smart hub coordinated in the factory and delivered as a product providing and controlling dwelling amenities in line with modern day needs and further can been seen as a totally connected core.
Even with a rich heritage of exploration, the service core remains marginally applied, mostly driven by producers, but has found certain success in hospitality architecture with repetitive planning patterns. While arguing for flexibility over time, the factory produced core has often proved to precluded adaptability as its proprietary nature impedes repairs or even finding parts for replacement.
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| comparative analysis of two cores |
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