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
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