Prefabrication experiments - 333 - Alside instant house

The connection between architects and industry shaped many infamous experiments toward the factory production of housing or building systems. For a time in the middle of the twentieth century, themes of mass production, architectural ideals and industrial design innovations coalesced contending to reform construction’s lagging productivity. Modularity and dimensional coordination were and remain the conceptual foundations for applying manufacturing principles to architecture to repeat parts and components from design to design; repetition being the mainstay of any manufacturing doctrine. Applying these strategies to architectural design was the objective of  Emil Tessin's partnership with Alside Corporation to market and produce a modular house, also publicized as the instant house. 

 

A graduate of MIT's Building Engineering and Construction program, Tessin, like many of his contemporaries believed the industrialization of construction would reduce costs and increase quality in much the same way other commodity’s fabrication had been transformed by mass production. He worked for the Alside corporation and directed Alside Homes in the late 1950s consolidating the company's foray into housing construction. Alside is probably best known for inventing the first baked enamel aluminum siding in the USA. 

 

Tessin's patent for a modular house (1962) was granted during his stint with Alside. The houses' design employed the proprietary aluminum technology for composite panels, exposed a steel skeletal structure and was assuredly inspired by modernist principles; links with the case study houses realized a decade earlier are evident. 

 

The patent explains the systemic idea of a 8x12x14-foot volume, a prime unit of space that along with other units would organize any number of valid architectural aggregations or juxtapositions. The unit’s construction employed repeating mass-produced parts, connections and details: steel vertical or horizontal structural members formed the volume edges and Alside sandwich panels were used for the volume's faces. The factory was set up to mass produce 200 homes per day in the early 1960s in Akron, Ohio. Even with a sales and production target of 10 000 houses in 1964, the apparent newness factor in both architectural esthetics and construction techniques were too much for the era's conservative consumer. Only a couple of hundred houses were produced and this idealized relationship between architect and industry ended. 

source:

https://thefrosthouse.com/home/emil-tessin/

Prefabrication experiments - 332 - Conzelman Wall Construction

Some names are synonymous with the history of reinforced concrete. Hennebique, Monier, Lambot are three figures that stand out as the great influencers and French pioneers. All three developed processes to reinforce a cement based concrete mixture with iron or steel to harmonize compressive and tensile stresses through the hybrid monolithic material. The Italian lineage owes its development to Hennebique’s licensees throughout Italy. Attilio Muggia being the most prominent who handed the reigns to Pier Luigi Nervi with his version of ferrocement inspired by both Lambot and Monier’s tighter reinforcing meshes. Wayss and Freytag and George Wimpey marketed systems in Germany and the UK as reinforced Concrete construction became the go to material for multi-unit building recognized as durable, strong and fireproof, its most sought-after property for building densely populated buildings in industrial cities. In North America, Ernst Ransome and Julius Kahn are commonly identified with early reinforced concrete frame building. 

 

One name is often absent from historical narratives but is particularly important to the development of systemic ideals of unit or elemental construction applied to concrete edifices. John E Conzelman of St. Louis Missouri applied for multiple patents to protect his innovative approach to both reinforcing, joinery (GB191013782A), and to unitized concrete (US1045521) in his patent for wall construction.  Along with publishing his ideas for post and beam or post and slab construction, Conzelman pioneered precast systems. He proposed and illustrated a veritable concrete kit of parts for every component of the building’s structural frame and external bearing components. Elements were uniquely grooved or profiled to fit together as in a large-scale puzzle assembly. Joints were then filled with mortar and cured forming a monolithic structure.  The structural concept was composed of unit slabs that spanned over precast beams which were then supported by posts crowned by angled capitals. Concrete panels filled-in the structural skeleton and were laid in layers, joined together and to the foundation with beds of mortar as in masonry construction. Internal reinforcing steel bars were protected from the elements and concrete covering ensured adequate fire protection. The precast kit of parts was invented in 1911 foreshadowing industrialized building kits and building platforms that today are considered innovative.

Patent drawings

Prefabrication experiments - 331 - Myton precast concrete Plank construction

Part of vernacular in forest-rich settings, plank construction is a straightforward and widespread manner of constructing walls. Timber board widths share equivalent lengths, widths and thicknesses. The planks are juxtaposed, aligned and joined either horizontally or vertically to form story height load bearing enclosures. Vertical plank systems relate to palisade building, while horizontal systems are akin to Scandinavian log construction as planks are placed one over another with corner overlaps or some type of detailed joinery. Construction methods have also included tongue and groove joints between vertical or horizontal pieces to ensure greater dimensional stability. In all strategies, plank width is the dimensional module for composing partitions.  An alternative system employed vertical and horizontal planks as a post and beam frame infilled with horizontal pieces. This construction method is sometimes referred to as the Québec Plank Frame or pièce sur pièce in French. 

 

Offshoots have been attempted in both steel and concrete. The Myton house system is an industrialized construction system deployed in Great Britain in the outbreak of post-war prefabricated building systems. The Myton unit is a vertical precast concrete strip reinforced with ribs, to shape a shallow U-plan, the ribs are inset in relation the panels’ width generating a perimeter lip that is set against the subsequent panel’s lip forming a continuous modular ribbing pattern on the inside of the panels.  The precast panels infill a precast concrete skeleton composed of corner posts and horizontal floor beams. The concrete wall envelope emphasized greater strength and thermal mass than conventional stud wall construction. Planks were structurally dowelled together, and joints were caulked. The organizing grid was 16 inches in width by 8'-0" in height (one storey). Structurally, the system relates to box frame construction as the planks, posts and beams shape a rigid braced surface area. Conventional floor and roof joists completed the two storey structures. The dowel, bolt and steel plate assembly made it simple to assemble and theoretically possible to facilitate repairs and replacements as the panels could potentially be dismantled. The exterior concrete wall finish was criticized and deemed defective for shoddy construction and premature weathering most certainly caused by inadequate weathertightness.

 

System description from CMHC's Catalogue of House Building Systems (source:  

https://dahp.wa.gov/sites/default/files/Catalogue_of_House_Building_Construction_Systems_1960_0.pdf)

Prefabrication experiments - 330 - Manufacturing methodologies - 10 - A brief tale of production in architecture

A rich list of manifestos recounts the potential application of manufacturing processes in architecture and construction. Albert Farwell Bemis, perhaps the most prolific published The Evolving House in 1933. Almost 20 years later Burnham Kelly's The Prefabrication of Houses (1951) compiled what arguably remains the most comprehensive academic/industrial study of factory production applied to dwellings.  Both proposed industrialization as a rational way forward to alleviate pressing housing shortages.  Masters of Architectural modernism, Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann practiced extensively during this period and authored similar narratives for efficient production while promoting the idea of architectural variability through systemic componentization (Gropius, Principles of Bauhaus production 1926) (Wachsmann, The Turning Point of Building (1959). 

 

In 1980, Barry James Sullivan's Industrialization in the Building Industry presented a broad state of the art in the USA, including the generative collaborative initiatives in the steel industry and successful systems linked to HUD’s low-cost housing competition Operation Breakthrough. Richard Buckminster Fuller's introduction and Moshe Safdie's foreword praised the harmonization of manufacturing with architecture and the resulting economies of scale for providing innovative affordable housing. A contemporary reboot of comparable themes came from Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake in the early 2000s. Their research practice and their prototype houses (Loblolly House (2007), Cellophane House (2008)) presented a framework for harnessing manufacturing methodologies and information technology already present in the automotive, naval, and aeronautic industries. From master builder to master assembler Refabricating Architecture (2004) discussed the changing role of the architect within evolving IoT culture. 

 

These analogies were again brought to the forefront 13 years later in 2017 by Bryden Wood. Bridging the Gap between Construction and Manufacturing even proposed a specific term; platform production, studied in the automobile industry, as a way of cross-pollinating knowledges, commanding efficiencies, and industrial parameters across all types of buildings. Bryden Wood's analogy compares scalable platforms for different buildings to Ikea’s flatpack furniture components: a platform for creating an assortment of  objects from a predetermined set of parts. This comparison brings us full circle to Gropius and Wachsmann's argument for a type of component pattern language. This characteristically architectural vision has often conflicted with less flexible industrial imperatives.   

Bemis' concept compared to Kieran and Timberlake's vision

 

Prefabrication experiments - 329 - Manufacturing methodologies - 09 - Advanced Manufacturing

Modern Methods of Construction, Off-site construction, Industrialized building and Prefabrication are often cited interchangeably to denote efficient factory methodologies applied to building construction. Directing the benefits of manufacturing logistics to building, makes sense as they have bred quality and productivity in most other industries. Still, Generalized use of factory production in architecture has eluded commonplace construction. An ingrained quest for a alleged singularity has disconnected design, fabrication and construction. The evolution in information technology is outlining a digital revolution that some hope will finally tune factory production with construction. 

 

All three previous periods of industrialization, mechanization, mass production and automation generated new and faster ways of making things.  Current digitization of manufacturing, in an interesting way, federates the three previous eras; this 4rth industrial revolution introduces information technology to producing and connecting everything from, toys to clothes and anything in between. 

 

While Industry 4.0 refers to connectivity of processes and objects (IoT), advanced manufacturing (AM) includes a myriad of technologies from advanced information modelling for design, big-data metrics or management, intelligent production systems for controlling logistics, and robotic tools and devices for digital fabrication. In architecture and construction, these ideas all revert to thinking about or controlling a building and its parts before it is produced onsite. Information technology allows this process to be comprehensive and informs virtual design, fabrication and construction. The ability to apply the industrial design product prototyping process - a trial and error course of perfecting a product before it is built - reforms traditional onsite fragmentation. Construction has always been a one-off process and IT is fostering this virtual twin strategy to prototype a building virtually with all stakeholders to rationalize its completion.

 

The imposing advancements in mass timber construction over the last decades has been pushed by this prototyping process as pieces and components are designed, modelled and then precisely cut and logically identified to be arranged and assembled easily on site. The kit-of-parts industrialized construction strategy is facilitated by advanced manufacturing principles specifically from the perspective of design for manufacturing and assembly as the design process continues throughout the entire project schedule uniting design criteria, with fabrication methods and onsite logistics and management. 

WASP large-scale 3d printer