Polymers have completely integrated and in a sense taken over our material culture. Everything we own is somehow associated to plastics, from the keys on our keyboards, to the cases that guard our smart phones and the countertops where we prepare our food. Plastics are lightweight, durable, malleable, and cheap to manufacture. Plastics are also omnipresent in architecture and construction, employed as pieces, elements in every building system including insulation, sealants, roofing and even polymer-based reinforcing or aggregates for concrete.
The 1950s and 1960s were a heyday for plastics, promising to completely reform our dwellings. Traditional design iconography would be replaced by the form generating possibilities of molding. Further, the plastic capsule house along with its production methods would make houses commodities free from the vernacular habitual constraints of locus and setting. Prototypes of the plastic house idealized mobility, transportability and eliminated massive earthworks as in masonry and timber-based building cultures.
Matti Suuronen’s Futuro and Walt Disney’s Monsanto House are probably the most famous of these prospective proposals. Other more marginally known prototypes were equally important to the development of plastics as a futuristic material representation applied to house construction. A notable example was designed by architect Dieter Schmid in 1963 and demolished in 1975. Lifted off the ground on thin stilts, the habitable prism was composed of glass reinforced plastic composite panels. The dry assembly would make the house a breeze to assemble and eventually disassemble, making it moveable. Inspired by the molding process, exterior wall panels were shaped to enhance, frame and celebrate openings, sills, and windows. The cast stressed skin monocoque included walls, roof and the prism’s undersurface as an idealized continuous envelope. Each modular panel, recognizable in the overall structure, was simply fixed to the adjacent panel. A weathertight strip covered each joint.
An access stair and an extruded reinforced concrete space for servicing the upper volume are the only spatial elements that contact the ground. Even if plastics could reform conventional construction in matters of materials and form, a house’s anchorage to site remains a fundamental factor in its capacity to serve its function. This anchorage was often an incongruous element in the designs for an idealized plastic house.
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| Dieter Schmid House |
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