Prefabrication experiments - 350 - Prefabs from generation to generation

 

Prefabrication appears as a solution to building crises for designers of every generation. The twentieth century bred its lot of challenges to which both industry and architects responded with factory made proposals and narratives. Through all the experiments, it’s interesting to see how little things change from one generation to the next. The genealogy of prefab generates new ideas from old ones, repeating a history that is at once exasperating, ironic and rich in terms of how approaches are represented, explored, dropped or even simply rediscovered. 

 

This is particularly noteworthy when it happens within the same family. The «Société industrielle de recherche et de réalisation de l’habitat» pursued factory production of architecture through Claude Prouvé, the son of French pioneer, Jean Prouvé, related with many prefab experiments in post war housing. Another family affair, Tom Risom recently continued where his father left off some fifty-five years ago. Jens Risom, well-known for his furniture experimented with prefabrication as an open alternative to site intensive construction by tweaking an A-Frame design. Illustrated in Stanmar Leisure Homes catalogue, the fine-tuned timber kit provided an opportunity to argue that prefab in the late 1960s could avoid the repetitive mass-produced types familiar to the post war generation; further, kits would generate customization potentials and quality for a reasonable price. Published in Life magazine in 1967, Risom’s design was proven affordable at a price tag of 25000$. 

 

Like his father, Tom Risom has now built his own kit home on Block Island. A partnership with GoLogic, a panelized kit prefab home producer that attains passive house standards, the company provides a one stop shop for prefab / architect collaborations. The Tom Risom home continues the legacy of Jens Risom's vision of creating quality spatial relationships and detailing from catalogued components. The 2022 Risom prefab goes beyond the simplicity of a type of do-it yourself design, with criteria for high performance in matters of construction and energy efficiency; each generation addresses its own challenges though prefab’s both enduring and fluid narratives.

Left: Jens Risom house in Dwell; Right above: Stanmar Leisure Homes examples; Right below: Tom Risom House

Prefabrication experiments - 349 - Generative design for modular building

 

Modular volumetric construction is an efficient process for buildings when spatial arrangements are repeated from one floor plate to another. Transportable dimensionally coordinated boxes or prisms can be factory produced, delivered on site and piled into shape. The difficulty in applying this industrialized process in more generalized terms evokes the enduring question: what kind of architecture is produced from stacking premade boxes ? Impressions of mundane, repetitive, cookie cutter designs have precluded architects’ adoption of modular construction except for one-off prototypes that have not proven viable or even credible in terms of manufacturing. 

 

Managing architectural singularity in modular construction is at odds with its required reproducibility. Currently, new modelling and digital technologies are offering new potentials for redefining modular’s variability. Specifically with Artificial intelligence integrating streamlined design and building, project variations are studied within the framework of generating data informed iterations from dimensional and production parameters. The Gensler Research Institute has devised a generative design tool adapted to modular building. Applied, for now, to hotel design and architecture, which has the definitive advantage of using predefined plans for rooms and even common areas, the generative software uses a simplified box as a kernel to generate multiple plans from the same encoded database. Criteria includes building typology, height requirements, floor to site area restrictions, unit dimensions or corridor widths. All of which are deployed to define floor plans according to optimized relations.  Reminiscent of Steven Holl’s publication Alphabet city in the 1980s, the generative tool uses letters T, H, I, L, C, O as basic aggregation layouts that are then adjusted to site shapes, zoning bylaws, orientation, and other contextual elements. By tuning elements with data informed sliders, it is possible to adjust their hierarchal relationships and evaluate multiple possibilities in real time. 

 

Plans integrate elements like exit distances and shafts for elevators creating an optimized diagram for a repeating pattern. While efficient, this type of artificial intelligence applied to building design will probably not end the difficulty in getting architects’ adoption of modular methods but perhaps only make another forceful argument against it.

Generative design tool from Gensler Institute
https://www.gensler.com/gri/generative-design-tool-for-modular-buildings

Prefabrication experiments - 348 - Demountable Football Stadium for the Qatar World Cup

 

Impermanent and short-lived events such as the Olympic Games or universal exhibitions have certainly been the setting for the development of innovative infrastructure or edifices, and they are always the locus of important government spending. Investment and spending to organize these events culminate in the best and the worst that humanity has to offer; for some, games improve international relations, while according to opposing views their infrastructure disrupts territories and neighborhoods for a shortly lived marketing stunt. The objective of providing adequate facilities for the scale of an international competition with the least possible disturbance seems to be difficult to achieve and events often generate white elephants that still require maintenance, are swiftly forgotten, or even abandoned, once the event ends.  The concept of mobile or demountable buildings has been explored from time to time to respond to events’ specific needs and the challenges of impermanence.

 

Already making headlines for many of the wrong reasons: the preparations for Qatar’s world cup coming up in November 2022 have been cited for malpractices including forced labor and inadequate safety and living conditions for workers.

 

Responding to the temporary nature of the World Cup of Football, Fenwick Iribarren Architects have designed a modular and demountable stadium. On a site near Doha's port, the design includes elements inspired by the intermodal shipping presence in the city. The Ras Abu Aboud Stadium Structure is a modern-day colosseum designed as a skeletal megastructure infilled with ready-made boxes. The steel post and beam framework supports steel girders for roofs or platforms to create a type of scaffolding structure laid out in an oval annular shape to circumscribe the football pitch. Recycled shipping containers are carried by this steel scaffold to serve functional needs from seating to food service, concession stands, bathrooms and other amenities. The structure is conceived with spans and dimensions that are generic enough to be disassembled and reassembled in other contexts or even to be built in smaller stadium formats.  The reversible system potentially avoids the waste that comes with building a once in a lifetime transient edifice.

Qatar demountable football stadium

Prefabrication experiments - 347 - SAMVS modular open system for dwellings

 

Industrialized building systems can be categorized as closed or open with the two concepts framing potential flexibility and adaptability. Closed systems are proprietary in nature and are controlled within the limits of a production system usually relating to specific company tooling, a patent or some form of intellectual property that restricts the development of interfaces with existing building technologies. On an opposing end of the spectrum, open systems are structured by the notion that building combines shared processes, systems, materials and methods which adapt freely to changing needs or to changing techniques and technologies.  Architects generally design buildings with an objective of open evolvability; the whole being detailed, assembled and coordinated with industrial products. Manufactures on the other hand are looking for distinction and usually propose systems that are linked to specific fabrication parameters. Prefabrication’s marginal use can arguably be traced to its lack of openness. 

 

Recently, partnerships between industry and architects in the prefab building space showcase a renewed interest in the development of open and interoperable systems to increase offsite construction’s uptake while maintaining adaptability. Architecture firm Cso Arquitectura from Spain along with construction firm TORSAN 1 have developed a house building system based on an open modular volumetric system. Each coordinated container-like box corresponds to a dwelling function and can be fitted according to a consumer’s choices and specifications. The boxes are bolted together on site and can be disassembled, removed or added to an existing space or relocated. The box's dimensional standards regulate design elements. Known as SAMVS, the boxes are produced in a factory, which reduces onsite waste, disturbance and labour. The architects affirm that the home can be produced in just 45 days and for 800$ per square meter (1800$ is a comparative average). The dwelling includes a list of ecological strategies that range from green materials to water recycling and solar panels for producing energy. The system argues for a low cost industrial approach.  It is unclear if demand will be sufficient to justify its production and if the very personalized nature of its conceptualization will once again show that open systems are more difficult to frame in a highly industrialized process.

Modular volumetric dwelling system