Prefabrication experiments - 404 - Open-source kit from Schemata Workshop

 

Industrialized building systems, the topic of abundant literature, are inspiring a new generation toward a revolution in construction. Accentuated by digital manufacturing concepts, modern processes can alter both design and building production. DfMA, «platform» methodologies, or offsite, are all discussed as innovative prefabrication theories improving construction’s stagnating productivity and have increased mainstream attention for preparing building chunks in factories.  

 

Recent, significant venture capital investments have identified offsite as perhaps the next Klondike or at least the sole remaining sector to have escaped high value industrialization; According to many, construction industrialization’s day has finally come. Even architectural firms that have contested the standardization associated with factory produced architecture are suggesting prefab as a better design/building/business model.

 

Schemata workshop, a Seattle, USA based design firm has developed two systems that transcribe digital potentials for design. The first developed with manufacturer Dogwood industries is an integrated service core known as Middlemod. The consortium-based business, Building and Module Manufacturing LLC (BAMM) unites architects and fabricators in a limited liability partnership.  The modular core is designed to fit into any construction system and can adapt to multiple spatial arrangements. The unit is planned to maximize factory preassembly, facilitate just-in-time delivery to any site with simple plug-and-play utility connections, and optimize virtual coordination. The MIddlemod concept sometimes also known as a combo-pod includes kitchen, bath, and utility room.

 

The firm’s other product is a component-based structural frame and kit that speeds up design by systematizing parts, construction, and assembly details from project to project. The steel skeletal and panelized building system includes envelope segments, windows, PV panels for energy production and mechanical distribution in a digital distributable format. The open-source methodology intends to bring affordability to housing production by multiplying the number of projects using the same parts, exploiting serial production. Schemata Workshop along with their partners envisioned this construction system to reduce waste at all project stages.

 

While promising in theory, the open-source concept applied to architecture is still relatively marginal. However, firms like Elemental, 369 pattern buildings and even Wikihouse share innovative building ideas and improve them through harvesting crowd iterations. The digital revolution applied to prefab suggests these platform-based directions to help the building sector at last adhere to industrialization’s promised advantages.

left: Combo pod; right: Kit-of-parts

Prefabrication experiments - 403 - Lego Block Modularity

 

Growing, scaling, and adapting homes according to evolving needs can be governed by systemic modularity. Potentially outlining the intensified use of industrialized building methods for affordable housing, modular flexibility positions standardized or regulated design strategies as well as interoperable sub-assemblies toward many variable housing arrangements. Dimensional coordination, repeating parts and details frame the principles of this ingrained adaptability. Interchangeable pieces and even spaces can sequence generative criteria according to functional parameters. Modularity combined with service distribution grids and networks can structure element-based schemes combining, aligning, stacking, and juxtaposing room fragments or mechanical units to personalize dwelling design. 

 

A group of researchers in South Korea has explored a type of space-block modularity in a core house system. The proposal is conceptually like other core-housing prototypes; The systematized one-storey boxes about the size of a common room surround service spaces. Each box is attached with a vertical sliding lock mechanism used to stitch the system into a single family or multi-unit residential building. The locking curtain wall uses a combination of extrusions that friction-fit and slip together. Their ease of assembly is also reversible making it possible to move entire wall planes to respond to new or evolving family dynamics.  Stair or roof segments complete the dwellings and conform to a set of design rules and dimensional conditions. Technical core spaces include services in a centralized, linear, or even cross pattern; organisations can branch out into larger tract housing subdivisions which link the core dwellings with an underlaid urban distribution.  

 

Pushing this concept even further the proposal includes energy independence using solar roof panels for electricity and central distribution of other active energy systems.  The expanding housing kernels can be multiplied in all directions from the focalized hub unit displaying the analogy to Lego Blocks. The overall modular composition could feasibly be assembled using mass-produced boxes or even reuse existing segments and sections from dwellings that downsize and no longer require all their initial components. Uniting flexibility with adaptability makes this type of scalable system potentially mass manufacturable to optimally control construction costs, increased scalability and quality by monitoring all aspects of the product’s fabrication.

See full article at 

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/20/5561

Prefabrication experiments - 402 - Aqueduct House

 

Service circulation is a multifaceted and unavoidable part of building construction often studied too simplistically when designing industrialized building systems. Except for service cores which integrate disparate technical elements in a manufactured hub or pod, strategies for networking services over multiple homes or types is limited; Off-site construction using mechanical pods is habitually applied to distinct constructions.  Multi storey dwelling blocks usually use similar core principles to stack multiple apartments' kitchens or baths to rationalize piping through vertical chases. Scaling or imagining these practices for civil infrastructure could lead to more efficiently sharing amenities and a more integrated approach to community planning including standardized and shareable schemes. 

 

Servicing dwellings cost-effectively becomes particularly critical in contexts where facilities and their democratization are sparse, at best. Developing countries facing housing crises or building in remote locations require concepts that make allotment of power and water supply or disposal the basic framework of community planning. 

 

Alejandro Aravena's Elemental practice has made sharing universally resilient housing designs based on combining industrialized and low-teck solutions a staple of multiple proposals. Perhaps, best known for their Villa Verde scheme in Chile where occupants could personalize half of a core-dwelling prototype, the firm has deployed similar adaptable principles for larger housing tracts. Their ambitious speculative proposal, Aqueduct House, suggests civil engineering elements, sidewalks and paths, to equip a linear urban plan:  A sidewalk and a first-floor girder span multiple lots as box beams or caissons forming a continuous duct line and a common support system. The reinforced concrete tubes channel mechanical elements across divided parcels to align a band of flexible townhouse spaces.  Demising rectangular concrete columns indicate property lines and support the concrete beam onto which other urban elements such as lighting can be connected. 

 

As in most other core housing prototypes, occupants play a major role in the construction of their dwellings, their evolution, and their community development. The brutalist overhead conduit is proposed as an assembly of modular concrete elements; a type of kit-of-parts civil power bar that could be set up and branched out in any context.

Elemental's Aqueduct House proposal

Prefabrication experiments - 401 - Open-source service core

 

In the field of prefabrication or offsite construction, one concept above all others, has been discussed, tried, and tested, from both architectural and industrial perspectives: the service core. Rationalized as the dwelling’s technical heart, the central appliance, engine, or hub projected all wet and technical spaces within an integrated factory-produced unit. Other conventional systems for structure, skin and circulation would surround these cores in an on and off-site hybridization. Visions of the core proposed plug-in pods containing baths, kitchens, and other mechanical spaces to service flexible arrangements radiating from a productive nucleus. Sometimes compared to subassembly components in vehicle manufacturing, the core implies the same harmonized supply chains for its commercialization.

 

The idea has not evolved much since the beginning of the twentieth century’s first experiments. A non-exhaustive list of cores https://www.arcc-journal.org/index.php/arccjournal/article/view/426 outlines suggested theories and practical applications. While mostly imagined as vertical elements, Italian architect Carlo Ratti known for his ideas and projects uniting design with open-source methodologies has developed a unique take on the core. 

 

Working with not-for-profit Indian firm Werise, the team created a prototype horizontal core inspired by a computer motherboard analogy where the utilitarian plane constitutes the platform of a user-centric housing configuration. The mother board is part of a core-house strategy providing an integrated service space approximately 12 square meters (3m x 4m) encompassing the dwelling’s technical elements from batteries for electricity to water filtration, storage, and distribution.  From this generative cartridge, the house can evolve in any direction while being hooked-up to the power panel. 

 

Proposed as a flatpacked easy to deliver subassembly, the thick floorplate also elevates interior spaces from the surrounding landscape, providing services, protection and a place marker.  The LivingBoard transposes ideas used within the maker movement to empower users to foster tools and devices from simple to use components; Arduino boards are probably the closest analogy to Ratti's living board as they can be tuned to accomplish a variety of programmable tasks. Ratti estimates that his version of a horizontal service core can simplify the house design, procurement and building process. 

Living Board schematic

Prefabrication experiments - 400 - Open Manufacturing

Industrialization altered the way everything was fabricated. Factories became the locus of commercializing everything from utensils to pharmaceuticals, building parts and automobiles. In generally closed loops, businesses safeguarded their commodities and methods through patents and protectionist attitudes underwritten by privatisation. Strategies were outlined to give each corporation a competitive edge over their peers. Design and manufacturing were trademarked, intraoperable and exclusive only to internal stakeholders. Methodological frameworks from Ford to Toyota envisioned their production secrets as their very ethos and core of their potential economic successes.  This closed manufacturing is the emblem of industrialization, and of the free market economy. 

 

Digital principles and societies’ crises are challenging these closed loops in favour of shared access to crowd iterations. Many have been inspired by the open-source revolution in software to apply the same interoperable freedom to hardware and to a diversity of manufacturing sectors. Known as open manufacturing or open factories, these attitudes harness the power of commonalities, democratized designs, innovative processes, and shared research infrastructure crosspollinated across customarily private lines. Trade associations can play an important role in the suggestion of normalized and acquiesced methods to elevate quality through industrial clusters. Collaboration or sharing hubs put forward innovation and expand peer production to explode closed ideological loops.  

 

This type of sector endorsed equity and normalization could offer opportunities in offsite construction, whether modular or panelized.  Currently, most manufacturers protect their production secrets even though most are building in a similar way. Timber based prefabrication for mobile homes, volumetric modular or open wall and floor panels use timber frame principles that are non-proprietary and used onsite to realize the same basic structures as their factory-built analogs; frame details and materials are common construction knowledge. Still, the industry remains very conservative about sharing. Mutual methodologies pushed by trade associations could be a way forward to increase capacity and develop process and design intelligence throughout the industry making it possible for many small companies to compete fairly against larger manufacturers. Even for larger manufacturers, open and peer production leads to knowledge accessibility, potential affordability for the consumer and possibilities for greater growth.

 

 

Automated wood panel production

 

Prefabrication experiments - 399 - customize - 10 - Robots for production or design

 

Current and future digital modelling and fabrication methods advance opportunities for architects and designers to develop complex designs, organizations, and structures. While offering these shape-finding possibilities, design objectives are often conceptually distant from manufacturing targets. If singularity is a definitive objective of architectural design, repeating fundamental characteristics and criteria underwrites efficient production. Even with robotics slowly percolating the construction industry, the contrasting systemic postures of design and manufacturing still underscore certain fundamental snags between architecture and construction. 

 

With robots programmed to cut, lift, nail, screw, or to execute any other task, architects are envisioning and exploring forms and geometries that are only possible through this computerized precision. For both design and simulating fabrication, miniature cobots can be brought into any office to validate this bespoke file to making approach. This one-off methodology is in sharp contrasts to how robots are used to optimize off-site construction to efficiently reduce both costs and schedules. 

 

Autovol Volumetric Modular’s https://autovol.com  use of automation in their factory symbolizes its potential to solve current labour shortages and construction’s lagging productivity. Once robots are programmed to perform a repetitive job, they can be part of a linear or cellular manufacturing process with people only keeping an eye on the machines and making sure materials, nails or screws are in position implementing their ordered tasks. Panelized elements like walls and floors can be fabricated on tables and then assembled into volumes or prisms that are easily stacked on site with robotic prompted precision. 

 

A streamlined mass-production process is based on strict, consistent, and precise automation and dependent on clear standards for construction with the repetition of common design dimensions, geometry and criteria from project to project. Modular automation certainly offers opportunities for major gains in time versus conventional construction. Improvements are made through process replication and optimized by a continuous production loop. These patterns of production are poles apart from the one-off prototypes architects sometimes conceive. Even as robots integrate the construction industry, the conceptual distance between both fields can be bridged or widened according to the same age-old debate between customization and normalization.  

Photo from the Autovol website

Prefabrication experiments - 398 - customize - 09 - Stackable micro apartments

 

The pressure of providing affordable housing in cities is driving an era of renewed interest in the «minimum dwelling». First articulated in 1932 by Karel Teige, the approach argued for inhabitable private cells and shared services to reduce redundant spaces. The inhabitable cell inspired the plugged-in unit on a common core prototypes of postwar Japan’s Metabolist movement. The minimum dwelling, a type of machine for living, was one of modern architecture’s obsessions: fabricating a dwelling from the conceptualizations of the industrial age, mechanization, mass production and Frederick W. Taylor's task separation; The efficient dwelling was a theme for architects to explore and illustrate potential well-run living environments complete with technological devices and built-in furnishings masterfully managing every square cm. 

 

Today's equivalent capsules or tiny houses are suggested not only to be tuned to contemporary living conditions but also to increase density and more critically to decrease building costs. Made offsite and transported to urban building sites, manufactured micro-lodgings can reduce construction time and site disturbance. Further, commonized flats can be stacked, maximize production, and harmonize design with procurement criteria to foster cost effective multi-unit buildings.  

 

MyMicroNY at Carmel Place, in Manhattan, opened in 2016. A series of stacked micro-apartments designed by nArchitects, the proposal outlines the possibilities provided by this budding micro-unit typology for urban housing. The nine-story building is organized by 55 units varying in size from 260-360 square feet (24-28 square meters). Each is a dimensionally coordinated container-like module serially produced in a factory setting. The apartments are a straightforward enfilade of bath, kitchen and living space. Built-in murphy beds convert day spaces into night spaces or provide flexibility for receiving guests. Made from a cold rolled steel framed chassis, the stackable boxes are completely fitted-out for delivery and to be set in place. The steel chassis outlines a precise construction system with a 3mm tolerance making a case for modular construction's stable processes that save time as well as increase construction quality. 

 

Produced by New York City company Capsys corp at the company's Brooklyn naval yard plant, the building was developed from a competition proposal as a pattern for increasing supply of affordable living spaces in cities at the front line of housing crises.

Setting a stackable unit in place from architects'
website https://narchitects.com/work/carmel-place/

Prefabrication experiments - 397 - customize - 08 - Cosmic Buildings

 

The future of construction is being guided and informed by the assimilation of digital technologies in the design and building processes. As climate change imposes reductions in resource consumption as well as adapting new energies, calculating carbon emissions, and reforming present take-make-dispose approaches, policy makers and project stakeholders are investigating parallel industries to generate innovative production ideas for breeding economies, efficiencies, and greater productivity. Streamlining supply chains and harmonizing design with offsite production are key ideas being touted as a path forward. Deploying modular, normalized, reproducible, intelligent and factory optimized assemblies that can be leveraged toward assorted designs is the basis of an industrial product platform ideology percolating from automobile and kit furniture sectors to architecture. While still marginal in construction, innovative start-ups are illustrating the potential for product platform theory to help increase output while making the whole industry more prolific. 

 

Sasha Jokic, a construction innovator well-versed in robotics and their application in construction, is the founder of Cosmic, a company that is proposing a building system to plan and create affordable, efficient, and low-carbon housing prototypes. Jokic’s scheme elucidates an open «product platform» imagined for ease of assembly and standardized component production. The basic volume is outlined by a steel and timber chassis, a modular volume that could be aggregated to produce innumerable patterns. The company is marketing a no-frills Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) that could be added to any backyard on simple tripod, strip or granular foundations. 

 

Cellular web, cold-formed, sheet metal joists are connected to columns to fashion a post and girder framework braced by plywood panels. The open joist floor plates are panelized as a type of cartridge that can be flatpacked to facilitate its bundling and delivery. Mechanical, plumbing, and electrical systems can also be modularized into the floor cores.  All elements are ordered and repeated over multiple units to distribute design and production costs, a basic principle of industrialized production. The first ADU also includes solar panels for energy production conserved in lithium-ion batteries that provide enough energy to run all systems including heating, cooling and ventilation making the unit completely self-sufficient. 

Assembling the floor plate cartridge onto the posts - from Cosmic Buildings https://www.cosmicbuildings.com/

Prefabrication experiments - 396 - customize - 07 - MAAP House panelized construction

 

Prefabrication and customized design have rarely converged. Effective production requires cultivating replicable patterns and designs to guarantee streamlined manufacturing. Personalization challenges are further enhanced when building systems are integrated or fitted out in a factory setting. Modular volumetric is an excellent case and point as big boxes are outfitted up to 70%. While advantageous for planning and climate-controlled task completion, it can certainly limit design freedom. Architects and industrialists have tried to address this difficulty through open systems. 

 

Design limitations, project pipeline forecasting, upfront factory investments, along with greater transport and site staging constraints have produced contrasting results and have even sometimes led to superior overall costs.  In opposition to building with big chunks, panelized surface elements equipped to various degrees, flat-packed and sequenced for onsite construction can provide more design freedom. Panels do require more intensive site work, however, this can be compensated by easy-to-assemble features. Fabricating modular, versatile, and complete panels can vary according to designs and are dimensionally less restrictive. 

 

The MAAP House Company from Australia promotes this type of panelized construction as a way of simplifying transport and project completion. Panels can be used for floors, walls, and roofs in a type of planar shell kit strategy. MAAP panels remain fully demountable after assembly which makes the building envelope 100% relocatable and reusable.  The stressed-skin, lightweight partitions are composed of a cold formed steel skeletal core lined with magnesium oxide board making the system fireproof and mold resistant. Each panel is created in line with the company’s preset dimensional standards, and they can be put together by one or two people in any geographical context. 

 

Like many other panel-based systems, the MAAP house components are delivered to fit seamlessly and form a weatherproof building skin. Limitations include site intensive furnishing of all other building systems.  To commercialize complete kits, MAAP has developed wet rooms, kitchens and bathrooms, as completed volumes, pods or brought to site as cartridge-like mechanical elements. This hybrid approach is promoted by the company as resolving transport issues. The flat pack and pods approach also makes their system adaptable to any architectural design.

 

 

Flat-packed panels from https://www.maaphouse.com/bettermodulartransport.html 

Prefabrication experiments - 395 - customize - 06 - Volumetric Adaptability

Flexibility, adaptability, and malleability are all required in some form in architecture and construction. The built form undergoes alterations, from minor to major, over its service life. A capacity to adapt to these changes mitigates waste resulting from renovations. Prefabrication, specifically with modular volumetric subassemblies, chunks or pods, is not really recognized for its capacity to evolve over time as proprietary, production and assembly constraints have created fixed, regulated, and sometimes overly static load-bearing compositions. 

 

Japanese groundbreaking manufacturing methods in the 1950s and 1960s introduced novel ways of looking at changeability by projecting and producing integrated capsule dwelling units that could simply be bolted to a structural hub and replaced, moved or rearranged as needed. This architectural conceptualization ended with the recent demolition of Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower. Still, the idea of a building that could be built with large factory-built boxes and with reversible connections to allow for its systemic deconstruction still inspires.

 

Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation’s Innocell Tower is a recent adaptation of a type of megastructure by engineers Hip Hing and architects  Leigh & Orange Ltd. The MiC process «Modular integrated Construction», precast and prefinished modular units, is put forward as quicker, more efficient, and better quality. The 17-story building is composed of steel skeletal boxes bolted together and supported by a superstructure to create a multi-use dynamic and open system. The boxes are juxtaposed, fastened, and braced laterally by an onsite poured concrete core and horizontal floor slabs. The hybrid construction system distances itself from Metabolist megastructure aesthetics but remains conceptually similar to ideas advanced more than a half century ago. 

 

Is developing a systemic flexibility in modular architecture a recurring pipe dream or has its day finally come? Programming an edifice for change is challenging as technologies, material conditions, standards, building codes, lifestyles and stylistic choices evolve unpredictably. Imagining simply exchanging old modules for new ones has proven impracticable. A building's obsolescence has less to do with its demountability than its potential to be reimagined and refitted without taking it apart. 

Modular boxes integrated into a collective framework

Prefabrication experiments - 394 - customize - 05 - Framing possibilities

 

Light timber balloon frame and subsequently platform framing revolutionized building culture in North America and then all over the industrialized world. Milled abundant softwood, «2 by» stock, enabled anyone to nail together and erect these simplified posts, beams and joists into load-bearing walls, floors, and roofs. Lightweight timber construction became synonymous with low-density housing and continues to be the go-to system for small buildings. Although rudimentary, it proved affordable and arguably the most adaptable form of construction.

 

Timer framing has few constraints; the structural redundancy of closely positioned nailed studs and joists makes any structure possible. It’s no surprise that this flexibility has provided little need for innovation since its early mass adoption, its accurate normalisation and democratisation through the baby boom of the 1950s and 60s. Prefabrication of wall and floor panels has added some value in terms of saving time and reducing onsite waste, but novelty in framing is limited. 

 

As the mechanized sawmill was the basis for the invention and knowledge spread of stick framing, computerized cutters are influencing and inspiring a new generation to look at framing with state-of-the-art manufacturing methodologies. Wiki-house, U-build, and Xframe are three open systems articulated to new digital fabrication possibilities.  Xframe posits a complete change of construction strategy. The x-braced frame trellis proposes bolted joinery along with dry wood on wood assemblies to keep elements together while ensuring ease of disassembly at the end of the frames’ service life. A plurality of organisations is possible from this cross braced plywood panelized structure including any finishing materials from interior partitions to complete insulated exterior walls.   

 

The structural web is defined by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal plywood elements attached with wooden gusset plates. The pattern, a type of bailey bridge truss, defines a robust and modular repeatable thickness arranged from a 1200mm x 2700mm grid. The plywood strips are placed to structure a surface akin to a vertical waffle or ribbed slab. 

 

The mass cultural acceptance of the light wood frame has impeded the market penetration of any other strategies. Proposals like the X-frame, however pertinent, require such profound reforming of cultural habits and supply chain harmonies that their long-term commercial applicability is difficult to realize and reason. 

Xframe structure see https://xframe.com.au

Prefabrication experiments - 393 - customize - 04 - Expandability and Adaptability

In the vast spectrum of ideas connecting architecture to its potential flexibility or its capacity to change over time, expandability has been a topic of much exploration. From the experimental suitcase house explored by Gary Chang in 2009 to Villa Verde (Chile, 2010) and other incremental open-source housing projects by Elemental architects, the ability for a structure to grow and be redefined according to changing requirements posits a design process coupled with lifecycle evolutions. 

 

One of the dominant spatial concepts of adaptability, a fixed core (service spaces) and flexible periphery (served spaces), outlines the basic elements of the core house archetype; the rational arrangement of all required technical elements in a dimensionally regulated volume leaving the adjacent spaces free from any mechanical constraints. The core is often discussed as a modular capsule or pod, a type of battery pack, that powers dwelling functions. Non-technical spaces can branch out from this hub growing in an organic and informal manner. The core house symbolizes a user-focused approach to dwelling provision and community development.  

 

The Expandable House proposed in 2018 by architecture firm Urban Rural Systems articulates its changeability to an infrastructure service hub, including walls, roof, and foundations to build up a one-story brutalist box with a three-story structural capacity. The spaces adjacent to the core-wall can be used for living or working. More than just a dwelling, the urban patchwork quilt of cores speculates a dynamic horizontal and vertical framework reflecting inhabitants’ and neighborhood evolutions. 

 

The core is structured by a concrete post and beam skeleton with cinder block infill. Other spaces and systems are added as they become economically feasible. The basic enfilade of spaces includes a kitchen, toilet, bath, and rainwater collecting elements in a tightly organized wall. Identified as dynamic urbanism, the architects envisioned their core house as the seed of affordable growth. A steel roof covering is designed to be hoisted like a telescopic umbrella to varying heights to accommodate a plurality of dwelling compositions and elevations.  

 

An alignment of sustainable and affordable dwelling criteria, core house principles can be achieved with local building materials and traditions bridging complex infrastructure distribution with open user-defined planning.

Expandable Core House by Urban Rural Systems (2018)

Prefabrication experiments - 392 - customize - 03 - Plug-in dwellings

 

When it comes to prefabrication and industrialized building systems, it seems everything old becomes new again. Ideas from the past get fresh imagery and are wrapped up in an era’s vocabulary to argue for innovation in architecture and construction. Adaptability is one of these reemerging concepts that entices architects to envision ways of making edifices flexible enough to respond to both minor organizational changes and major modifications required for retrofitting according to evolving requirements. The plug-in rhetoric of Metabolist architects in post war Japan posited capsule living as the future of adaptability. Inhabitable manufactured pods would simply be attached or plugged into a collective infrastructure. These functional commodities could either be moved, replaced, or altered over time. Architecture was viewed as peripatetic.

 

Kisho Kurokwa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower epitomized this concept for generations of architects. Ultimately, it proved marginal and ephemeral with the building coming down in April of 2022. Still, the plug-in concept captivates architectural education and design strategies. Peoples Architecture Office of China has renewed these strategies on recent projects including their plug-in school and plug-in tower. The Plug-in Tower closely mimics the systemic separation of support services from their appended mass-produced dwelling pods. The mega spaceframe structure, an oversized version of the famous Mero^TM space frame node, is intended as an adaptable framework espousing any site; the office’s proprietary plug-in panelized sub-assemblies compose prismatic inhabitable spaces within the steel web. The factory-made panel is described as including all mechanical necessities along with interior and exterior finished surfaces. Other functional systems and circulation elements are added-on to create a total comprehensive building.  

 

The prototype is represented as a single-family dwelling without permanent foundations as the steel trellis structure can be anchored to any site; the plug-in dwellers could disassemble the house and take it with them wherever they decide to live. Further, the space frame structure can grow vertically and horizontally adapting to suit changing requirements. A contemporary version of ideas explored during the latter half of the twentieth century, the romanticized mobility and architectural interchangeability reveal more about the theoretical artefacts produced by the profession than it does about tangible applicable adaptability for housing. 

Plug-in prototype from Peoples Architecture Office

Prefabrication experiments - 391 - customize - 02 - Assembly OSM

 

Founded in 2019 by brothers William and Chris Sharples of SHoP architects, Assembly OSM is a start-up intended to revolutionize the way buildings are put together. The architects’ digital design practise, established in 1996, inspired the firm’s founders through several large-scale urban prototypes to expand their digital principles to the entire construction process. Like the now defunct Katerra before it and a growing list of other ventures into digitally propelled industrialization that would bring manufacturing methodologies to streamlined construction, will Assembly OSM finally bridge the enduring gap between architecture and industrialization? The team is certainly accomplished and leveraging what they’ve learned on several modular projects, Barclay tower in New York is the most famous, may qualify them to achieve what so many others have only proposed. 

 

Automobile production has long been a reference to modernize building and improve stagnating construction productivity. Kieran and Timberlake’s manifesto (Refabricating Architecture) in 2004 shifted the narrative to include airplane production and shipbuilding with complexities which more adequately reflect the systemic organisation of buildings. Assembly OSM’s discourse parallels these ideas and platform theory proposed in 2017 by Bryden Wood. These theoretical outlooks point to a type of mega kit method for making multiple bespoke buildings from the same basic parts.  This is not necessarily a new idea; buildings are always made from the same components from doors to windows and a multitude of other industrialized components.  Endeavours like Assembly OSM strive to streamline design with production through the normalization of parts in matters of dimensions, characteristics, and performance, to address the entangled mess of a highly fragmented building construction sector. 

 

Creating a harmonized procurement, planning and coordination process replicated from project to project is the way forward for Assembly OSM inspired by an integrated design and production process that exists in industrial fabrication. In construction, the IPD integrated project delivery method invokes a similar framework for sharing responsibility among stakeholders and laying out every part of the process before it is undertaken. Groups like Assembly OSM, Bryden Wood, Factory OS are promoting this approach, and while digital innovations hold new potentials, the question of - will this be the one ? -  persists.

Left: 290 Mulberry Street (2008); Center: Barclay's B2 Tower (2016); Right: Assembly OSM value proposition

Prefabrication experiments - 390 - customize - 01 - Renzo Piano's «Platform» approach at Corciano

 

After more than a century of consideration and marginal application of manufacturing principles in architecture, the chief sticky point endures: combining efficient, normalized and reproducible processes to a plurality of arrangements without compromising architectural uniqueness. Offsite construction entails many forms of standardization: from harmonizing supply chains to regulating dimensions for components or systems to amortize and distribute costs over multiple objects. Although variations are possible, normalization is key to economic viability. Component based systems, generic kits-of-parts have been proposed to bridge the need for well-ordered parameters with customization. Bryden Wood's platform DfMA approach proposed the implementation of a steel skeletal framework with specialized connectors to create open frames «hosting or accommodating» variable functional requirements articulated to quantified typological criteria. This type of idea, while certainly flexible, still demarcates architectural compositions, replicating syntax from project to project, limiting architecture’s habitual ambitious singularity.

 

Renzo Piano's Rigo Quarter Corciano, an «evolutive» housing system constructed in Perugia, Italy in 1978, foreshadowed Byden Wood’s «platform» approach long before the term was employed in relation to construction. The design and completion process proposed a coordinated steel frame structure arranging linear dwelling cells divided by concrete partitions. Joists, girders, columns, precast concrete panels, and a plug-and-play curtain wall were the scheme’s main components.   Interiors were generic spaces planned according to inhabitants’ needs. Coloured curtain wall panels composed varied elevations to differentiate neighbouring units. These dimensionally normalized curtain wall façades enclosed the flats’ view-oriented elevation while retaining walls anchored the units’ slope-side ends. The kit ideology orchestrated the building and its sitework as an evolving assembly line. All phases were sequenced with an optimized just-in-time production strategy. Prefabricated service cores or pods provided dwelling services within the flats. 

 

This type of «kit» duality (a mass produced kit uniquely disposed over multiple designs) was specifically rationalized for affordable dwellings and could be adapted to any site. From Gropius' expandable house to Piano's robust process at Corciano and even Bryden Wood's optimistic understanding of innumerable variations from standardized parts, the industrialised repetition is still seen by some, certainly by many architects, as perpetuating the sameness that epitomized prefabrication failures.

Left: Platform approach (Bryden Wood); Right: Housing Project at Corciano Courtesy of Fondazione Renzo Piano

Prefabrication experiments - 389 - Global evolutions - 09 - Germany

 

In the years following the first world war right up until the 1960s, German housing policy deployed prefabrication of reinforced concrete elements to develop low-cost experimental communities (Seidlungs) to test prototypes of modern design and production. A notable example of the centralized strategy, Ernst May's precast slab housing brigade, conceived the «plattenbau»: a large panel standardized, highly replicable system for dwelling provision. 

 

The deep-seated manufacturing culture transformed design education as well. The Bauhaus, Germany’s comprehensive design school headed by Walter Gropius, inspired many young practitioners and artisans to look to industry to reform existing production patterns to shape a fresh aesthetic palette for architecture. The relationship between industrialization and architecture is arguably the most symbiotic when compared to other industrialized nations.  Major players like Christoph and Unmack or Hanse Haus, have been producing precise timber structures for more than a century.

Prefab market share is around 23% of new housing starts, a staggering 1 out of every four. The panelized timber kit is driving a turnkey model with a one stop shop convenience, which is also anchored to holistic sustainability markers. With high social acceptability, prefab in Germany symbolizes precise fabrication, high quality design, advanced production methods, valued materials, and efficient construction.  Brand equity positions prefab zeitgeist on par with industries like German automobile fabricators, Volkswagen or BMW.  Even with the mature market, the industry is fragmented. Five top producers account for 30% of production with the remaining 70% being shared among companies holding 3% of the market. 

HAAS Fertigbau’s kits exemplify the most generalized strategy providing services to design and manufacture timber panel kits according to consumer specifications. The company promotes efficacy, tightly finished shells and energy savings. Another well-known producer, Weberhaus promotes similar construction methods and parameters to achieve a high-performance wall envelope within a conventional stick frame structure. The stud cavity is insulated and a continuous layer of insulation over the skeleton eliminates any thermal bridging. Along with some of the most advanced factory mechanisation and robotization, assembling these kits is material, time and cost efficient. The panels can be flatpacked for optimized just-in-time transport and sequenced for streamlined onsite assembly.

Christoph & Unmack portable buildings (left); Advanced prefab manufacturing (right)

Prefabrication experiments - 388 - Global evolutions - 08 - France

 

France was the birthplace of reinforced concrete’s generalized application in construction. The basic elements of flat slab construction were developed by inventor François Hennebique at the end of the 19^th century and then brought to market throughout Europe and North America. The material's flexibility made it conducive to casting on and then offsite framed by mass production ideas. France’s experimentation with prefab has a long and rich history; The years after the second world war were a particularly fertile time for industrialized concrete construction. Responding to housing shortages or massive rebuilds, standardization made it possible to develop large amounts of low-cost housing using factory cast pieces. 

 

Raymond Camus’ panelized building became synonymous with prefabrication, housing millions of people within what became a connoted building type. The simplified version of wall and floor construction was deployed for dwellings all over western Europe inspiring similar strategies in Eastern Europe and eventually in North America.  Many of the most famous heavy panel systems were developed for the French market and unfortunately some of their negative connotations still affect prefab's penetration in France. Visceral reactions to high levels of standardization with suspect construction and weatherproofing methods connoted prefabrication as a low-cost, low-quality, impersonal form of building inevitably leading to social problems. 

 

The building process itself was not the problem. Isolationist planning strategies and urban renovation policies envisioned these buildings in bucolic landscapes with few local services creating dysfunctional communities that regrettably are associated with and symbolized by the building form. Recently, similar drivers that argued for industrialization in the mid twentieth century exacerbated by current labor shortages, the Covid 19 pandemic, process digitalization, stagnating productivity have inspired a renewed vision of industrialization notwithstanding low cultural adherence.  BIM (building information modeling) is reforming the building planning and construction toward integrated processes bridging manufacturing with design and management. Within the spectrum of possibilities and tuned to ecological imperatives, contemporary industrialized large panel systems using timber (CLT, light wood framing, modular) are being promoted by the government as a carbon neutral building strategy to affordably supply various building types and improve construction’s efficiency.  

From Raymond Camus to CLT - panelized construction systems

Prefabrication experiments - 387 - Gobale evolutions - 07 - China

The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated supply chain issues in the global economy, aggravated isolation challenges for existing health care facilities and combined with the characteristic struggles of the construction industry brewed a perfect storm for increased uptake and worldwide attention toward prefabricated building production. This backdrop along with exponential global population urbanization ballooning from 36% to 62% in 20 years defines an acute need for scaling production of affordable urban housing. In China, the government decreed a 15-year plan to expand industrialized building systems’ use to 30% of all new housing starts doubling the stagnating 10-15%. 

 

Construction in China is a highly fragmented sector; however exports of prefabricated buildings and sub-assemblies have matured to a 1.66 billion dollar industry making China one of the most important prefab exporters. The industry promotes volumetric construction over other systems and mega-hospitals built in a matter of weeks in reaction to the covid crisis demonstrated the extreme speed that can be achieved through the assembly of edifices with manufactured chunks. Contrary to traditional construction, building these health care facilities began while boxes were produced in a factory and then while volumes were assembled on site, manufacturing continued in a just-in-time coordinated effort overlapping site work with manufacturing schedules. Images of these rapidly built hospitals were seen the world over, and prefabrication was promoted as a strategic method to revisit construction’s lacking productivity and to supply all types of buildings affordably. 

 

Even before the pandemic, since 2017, China invested massively in domestic production specifically to define novel construction processes. While building hospitals did rely on prefabrication and efficient manufacturing, it is noteworthy that the entire planning and construction operation was directed by centralized governance afforded all powers and resources to reach a determined goal. Fabricating modules was the easy part of the process; designing a working efficient hospital in record time including all systemic and functional requirements is where the Chinese model supersedes conventional construction. Concentrating all decisions along with investing the required time and labor accordingly shows how a streamlined process could lead to redefining construction from a fragmented wasteful act to a coordinated and harmonized productive process. 

Modular hospital during construction

Prefabrication experiments - 386 - Global evolutions - 06 - Canada

 

Canada is well-known for exporting raw materials. Recently, however, both policy makers and industrial associations have taken note of modular producers from all over the world delivering building systems from as far as Eastern Europe and China sometimes using Canadian lumber. Trade conflicts over timber prices with the USA and increasing tariffs are also politicizing an interest in producing value-added locally sourced construction systems for domestic use and for export.

 

Much like the prefabricated building industry in the rest of North America, the sector in Canada is dominated by panelized wall or modular volumetric manufacturers spawned by the rationalization of stick frame building and the evolution of the mobile home industry. Whether erected on a modular relocatable chassis or delivered to be set up on a site-built foundation, the lightweight timber frames are produced deploying the same systems as their onsite counterparts, except for being fabricated in a climate-controlled environment. A substantial advantage in a country where winter conditions impose increased construction logistics accompanied by greater costs. 

 

Demand for housing is shifting from traditional single-family dwellings to multi-unit residential building and has inspired many manufacturers to redirect their processes toward the open juxtaposition or stacking of premade systems. Modular construction is also being driven by rising construction costs, labor shortages along with increased design and construction digitalization. 

 

Presently, the industry delivers approximately 12% of new single-family housing starts. The objective is to increase market share by at least two-fold of all housing starts in the coming years. Articulated to greater sharing of standards to ensure adequate sound and fireproofing required in the multi-unit space, application initiatives are taking root in different provinces. Specifically, growth in the mass timber sector, glue-lam or cross laminated products are identified as sustainable building materials with high levels of potential prefabrication. British Columbia’s housing authority is proposing a timber based modular Designed for disassembly kit-of-parts. The approach (lighthouse.org) combines the advantages of volumetric construction with the intelligent separation and layering of building systems to achieve systemic adaptability to reform construction’s linear processes and to mitigate waste associated with a building's renovation over its lifespan. 

Modular construction designed for disassembly (lighthouse.org)

Prefabrication experiments - 385 - Global evolutions - 05 - UK

 

Conservatory builder Joseph Paxton’s experimentation with prefab elements to assemble the Crystal Palace for London’s world exposition (1851), Henry Clayton’s brick making machine for Atlas Brickwork (1855), and exporting rolled corrugated iron kit houses to various British colonies, Great Britain, the birthplace of industrialization developed first manifestations of manufacturing harnessed for building construction.  With the success of mass production and commodification, it’s astonishing that conventional construction has not implemented higher levels of prefabrication. Housing shortages, post war rebuilding and redirecting war economies towards construction drove prefabrication between and after the two world wars. Innumerable prefabs were commanded in the years following World War II. Much has been written about these explorations and their non-traditional construction methods.  Like housing, school construction to serve burgeoning communities was also identified as an outlet for British prefab systems. Suspect detailing, lack of weatherproofing with porous envelopes deepened prefabrications’ enduring negative connotations. Only about 7% of new homes use comprehensive modular or industrialized building systems. Schools and houses are once again a priority for increasing construction’s productivity as the affordable housing crisis is a global challenge requiring heroic approaches.

 

The UK has remained a figurehead for prefab’s theorization even with marginal practical applications of modern construction methods. Bryden Wood’s Bridging the Gap between Manufacturing and Construction published in 2017 established the firm and the UK as contemporary trendsetters redirecting effective manufacturing concepts such as Design for Manufacturing and Assembly towards building processes.  The firm explored platform theory’s potential to cross-pollinate building types, their assembly details and mass manufacturing with supply chains by comprehensive centralized data management to streamline design, fabrication, assembly and building operation. This construction 4.0 take on renewing prefab is driving a veritable industrialized building renaissance.  A sign of current attention to the UK’s market, after 60 years in the Japanese sector, Sekisui prefab homebuilder has introduced Shawood, a skeletal timber version of their housing system designed specifically for the UK. Partnering with Urban Splash’s modular housing division, Sekisui’s enduring chassis model was directly in line with platform, modularity and customization concepts more than half a century before Bryden Wood’s manifesto.  

Crystal Palace (left) ; Bryden Wood's systematization (middle); Shawood detail (right)