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)