Prefabrication experiments - 316 - Icons - 06 - Carl Koch Unfordable House Package

Facilitating onsite construction has been and remains the chief argument for prefabrication. Ordering materials, contracting tradespeople and mandating professional services make the process of building daunting even for the most ambitious. Simplifying and streamlining every part of the home building and purchasing process has constantly motivated industrialists, inventors, and architects. 

 

Simplifications have encompassed dwelling systems that can be delivered and literally build themselves with little human effort and minimal onsite assembly. Particularly in the mobile home sector, making house parts extendable, retractable, or even telescopic were conceived to augment space, function or flexibility once unpacked after delivery.

 

Well-known for his Techbuilt house timber kits based on simplified and contextually adapted modernist principles, Carl Koch also experimented with an unfolding house package.  Through a partnership with John Bemis (son of prefab pioneer Albert Bemis) they envisioned a low-cost home package from modular components and repurposed surplus military materials. Their objective was to mass-produce a box-type packaged house for approximately 7000 $ per unit to serve an acute postwar need for affordable housing. 

 

Like other similar experiments, the house design isolates service spaces (core) from served spaces (flexible unwrapped spaces). The central core container unit (8’x9'x23' or 2,4mx2,7mx7m) incorporated kitchen, bath and all technical spaces. The standardized dimension would make it simple to transport. Pivoting bearing panels were attached to the core using giant steel hinges. Once delivered and fixed to a concrete foundation, the stressed skin panels, made from a phenolic paper honeycomb core laminated with plywood, opened outward to arrange floors, walls and roof elements outlining a livable space of approximately 800 square feet. The honeycomb composite panels were inexpensive to manufacture, lightweight, easy to work with and integrated advances made in glues and polymers; An impregnated resin made the panels, robust, rigid and waterproof. Exterior laminating skins in plywood or masonite could be produced with any coating. The unfolding process would only require 32 man-hours to configurate the house platform. However, bogged down by local resistance and code issues only one prototype of Koch and Bemis’ vision was built in 1947.

Container before and after unfolding