Prefabrication experiments - 419 - SM(semi-detached) - Les Maisons Loucheur

 

City form is dependent on housing patterns. Urbanity stems from tuning how services are allocated, distributed, and pooled. From the row house to the collective housing block, amassing dwellings around collective infrastructure is an effective and frugal approach for streamlining services while deploying less space to accommodate more people. Sharing a wall is the most elemental way to breed commonalities from single family houses. 

 

The semi-detached house unites two dwellings that can be clustered to form larger tracts. The party wall divides and defines ownership while reducing construction costs as two holders share what would be the 4th wall of a detached dwelling. The partition is habitually codified to be built in masonry to protect neighbouring spaces from fire. The demising partition could also be combined with linear zoning of service spaces to reduce sound transmission through units. The low-rise semi-detached home also reduces costs associated with civil infrastructure provision as connections are optimized to serve two homeowners. Developing tract housing from a repeating semi-detached module demonstrates a potential seriality to improve housing supply. 

 

Le Corbusier's Loucheur Houses (1928) and Rural Houses (1950) were never built, however both proposals illustrate how semi-detached houses could be deployed to structure efficient schemes. The Maisons Loucheurwere designed as part of a government program (The Loucheur Law) aiming to stimulate social housing and reap the steel industry’s potential toward building industrialization. Arranged in a garden city like framework each dual-dwelling would be manufactured down to interior furnishings and a patented sanitary unit using industrial materials (steel, glass and aluminium). 

 

Conceived as mirror images, opportunities for customization were limited and the objective was to achieve economies of scale comparable to those made possible in car production. The thick party wall served a double function of separating and insulating both houses. The floor plan of each dwelling combined core service principles with the reproducible potential of the semi-detached type. The 68-unit sprawled suburban plan for Lagny, France elevated each unit over a liberated ground plane used for vehicular parking, an entrance and an interior garage, workshop or flexible space to suit its specific user’s preferences.

Le Corbusier's semi-detached prototypes

Prefabrication experiments - 418 - M(dwellings) - Driemond Core House

 

Industrialization impacted the design of everything from cars to utensils. Once, artisanally produced objects were democratized by repetitive ingredients, flows, supply chains and mechanized fabrication. These ideas reduced costs per unit while stimulating similar organizing principles in all sectors; products were made up of manufactured subcomponents that played specific roles in their functions. In architecture, rationalization played out using rigorous grids, component cataloguing, assembly details along with zoning of served and service elements. The service core, an integrated unit incorporating wet and technical spaces, is symbolic of these design tenets, material frugality and potentially applying mass production to house construction. 

 

Theorized often but marginally applied as a manufacturing methodology for homes, architects and architectural pedagogy explore the core extensively to clearly define, separate and celebrate the relationship between served and service spaces. Strategically located, the core expresses a specifically modern vision for designing small dwellings related to the principle of a machine for living. Tuning and containing these spaces in a simple shape also contributes to a flexible or adaptable interaction between the anchored core and its surrounding spaces. 

 

Dutch Architects, The Way We Build have masterfully redeployed these modern canons in a 170 square meter detached home in the Dutch town of Driemond. A perfect 10 by 10 meter square, the ground floor plan is arranged by an asymmetrically placed core to achieve a clever interaction between the functional hub and its surrounding spaces. The core, a green one storey box delineates two principal areas and 4 smaller sectors: entry, kitchen workspace, flexible space and living, dining areas. Each relates formally to adjacent exterior spaces. The volume includes kitchen, integrated storage, bathroom, and a staircase to the upper floor. A murphy bed also included in the core transforms the flexible sector into a guest bedroom. A large gliding partition slides to separate the living area and fashion a guest bedroom around the deployed bed. Another smaller sliding door integrated in the core seals this flexible bedroom space. This small house is an artful presentation of the core’s potential to rationalize domestic amenities.  

The Driemond House by architects, The Way We Build

Prefabrication experiments - 417b - S(dwellings) - The Umbrella House

Small generalizable dwellings like the Levittown bungalow made famous in the United States, make creative use of simple organizations that serve inhabitants’ most basic needs in an affordable and productive fashion. Small houses respond to vital needs that have been interpreted since ancient times to include four basic components: protective roof, dry earthworks, clear demarcation of space, and a distinction between common and private areas for cooking, socializing, and sleeping. No architectural prototypes celebrate these inspiring principles of dwelling construction quite like Japanese traditional dwellings with their deep overhangs, vented crawlspaces, and modular structural grids based on centuries of links to territory, climate and reoccurring seismic activity. 

 

Japanese modularity and a strong bond to locus inspired modern architects to reproduce these values in their prospective proposals for original housing patterns. Frank Lloyd Wright and Antonin Raymond are just two iconic architects whose designs include core Japanese analyses to generate creative arrangements. Specific to both figures, the  horizontal link to place was deployed by a strict planning grid and based on the tatami proportions in the case of many of Antonin Raymond’s designs.

 

A beautiful manifesto of traditional dwelling tenets was disassembled, transported and set on Vitra’s Museum campus in Weil am Rhein in Germany to save the architectural prototype from demolition (https://www.vitra.com/en-gb/about-vitra/campus/vitra-design-museum). The Umbrella House designed by architect Kazuo Shinohara in 1960, was articulated to field studies of domestic architecture examining and extracting configurations from urban, village and countryside case studies. 

 

Transported from Japan in an ISO shipping container as a kit-of-parts, the streamlined disassembly and reassembly by a few master carpenters is a testament to the traditional crafting infused in this 1961 design and elucidates the potential for Japanese domestic practices to be as effective today.  The total 10m x 10m footprint is composed by radiating rafters from the center of the 7.5m x 7.5m square plan. A master class of organization, the plan is divided into two equal 3,75m x 7,5 m rectangles, one for cooking and eating and the other includes an elevated tatami room for sleeping and dressing.   

Umbrella House; Japanese small dwelling patterns

Prefabrication experiments - 417 - S;M;L;XL(dwellings) - The Prefab Villa

 

Standing, sprawling, expansive, and anchored to a picturesque setting, the villa connotes luxurious detached dwellings. In the countryside and usually articulated to its landscape by some type of monumental relationship, the villa is associated with architectural opulence. Axiality, symmetry and summits were used in classic architecture, sometimes referred to as Palladian architecture, to showcase this dwelling typology’s potency by dominating its environment. Modern architects implemented infinite horizontal free space to achieve a similar goal. Large panes of glass, continuous open spaces, and generous roof overhangs came to represent the modern villa.

 

The Case Study houses explored in California, Le Corbusier's iconic villas, and even Mies van der Rohe's Tugendhat villa inspired these novel tectonics and fabrication methods; balloon frames, steel skeletons or concrete flat slab construction were applied as efficiently produced systems that could bridge the gap between standardization and customization. Still, industrialization was only marginally harnessed by these affluent properties as their scope, size and highly customized nature had little to do with prefab approaches, which usually denoted affordability. Current interest in sustainable building, modern architecture's aesthetics along with mainstream media’s distribution of dreamy architecturally defined villas with industrialized lines has driven some manufacturers to the niche villa market: Turkel Design is a Boston based firm that conceives and manages the production and delivery of customized site-specific home kits. This is not a new idea; Carl Koch’s Techbuilt brand, also based in Massachusetts, idealized an analogous kit format for his clients in the 1950s and 1960s. 

 

Turkel has taken Koch’s business model to next level by offering superbly designed prefab. Their process has underlined the potential of contemporary design and manufacturing tools to streamline the house procurement process. Using the same materials, methods and third-party factories from project to project, the process is highly normalized without standardizing design. This design – fabrication - construction integration harmonizes architects and builders by placing factory optimization between the two fields. Each villa is a mass-customized production. Applying the same design attitude, components, teams, and systems thinking across multiple projects not only leads to a coherent architectural language for the Turkel villas but also to a highly perfectible process.

see Turkeldesign.com (portfolio)

Prefabrication experiments - 416 - S(dwellings) - The Patio / Courtyard House

 

The characteristic difficulty with tying standardized planning principles with architecture’s site specificness has long been a challenge for prefabrication and building industrialization. Vernacular, classic and modern homes have this required connection to locus in common. Climate, topography, and traditions inform regional particularities that disavow normalized designs or so it would seem. Notwithstanding this required singularity, even the most regionally specific architectural canons carry some generalizable principles; from modularity in traditional Japanese building, to stacking log joinery in Norwegian vernacular or even curved trunk blades in medieval English Cruck frames (early A-frames) were all democratized in their time and place.

 

An almost universal generic archetype used to define a house's attachment to place is the central patio. Atriums, positioned to concentrate and relate surrounding spaces, establish a focal void which opposes the way small tract bungalows are related to site. The patio house creates a specific focal point, while the typical bungalow is the center point; the two arrangements express very distinct ways of relating to positive and negative space generated by their geometries.  

 

The twentieth century Patio House was imagined by many architects as a counterproposal to the standard house to garden configuration for creating specific from generic lightweight timber framing to maximize interior and exterior connectivity. Alvar Aalto’s experimental summer house in Säynätsalo, Finland exemplifies these modern themes. The design is a modular grid planning masterpiece and deploys geometric proportions to define an anchored courtyard. 

 

Using the patio house as a central prefab idea, differentiating designs according to dynamic spatial arrangements, Australian House producer Fabprefab with CHROFI architects assembled their version of a courtyard house. Two principal volumes are placed in enfilade and contain living spaces, a reading room and a covered exterior space. A third, shorter manufactured box, is set partially against the first two generating a void defined by the flanking living box. The small house is a dynamic organization of day and night spaces clearly separated by two modlines attached by a bridging segment.  Enclosed by full height glass walls that reveal a spatial promenade between both patios, the exterior spaces can anchor this simple generalizable plan to any expansive site.

CHROFI architects and FABPREFAB's courtyard house

Prefabrication experiments - 415 - S(dwellings) - The Prefab Bungalow

The automobile transformed territorial planning; leaving the city for its surrounding suburbs or countryside fostered demand for quickly built homes and subsequently for leisure dwellings. A by-product of Henry Ford’s assembly-line principles applied to housing, the small serially produced bungalow on site or in a factory suburbanized America and converted house building into a promoter-based commercial transaction. Tracts of flattened sites were seeded with small reproducible fully-furnished homes. The bungalow, a one floor dwelling designed for the nuclear family is the symbol and central focus of formidable off-site built failures (Lustron) and prolific onsite built successes (Levittowns). The American dream of the utilitarian affordable single-family dwelling produced in an industrialized process was perfected in North America and idealized in globalized literature.

 

German author Walter Meyer Bohe’s  Prefabricated Houses studied the bungalow, outlined its concepts and design parameters for the production of what was put forth as a flexible type for the masses. A published case-study defines a straightforward building strategy not linked it to any specific construction system, but to strict systemic dimensional coordination; generating a harmonized material supply chain, reduced waste and iterative optimizations - all serial production ideals.

 

The manufacturing process could feasibly be mechanized but could also allow site customization by sharing the same spatial elements and parts; An alphabet of components adapted to multiple schemes or arrangements.  Houses respecting the strict modular framework could be scaled and expanded over time using basic panels catalogued with design features including elements like doors, small windows, or even large curtain walls. Today’s term used to describe this type of customizable pattern language would be:  a platform approach to design and construction.  The representation manifests a no-frills structure deploying normalized planning principles articulated to a 125mm grid and a night-day segregation elegantly positioning all private spaces around a collective living space extended by an exterior garden. The central bearing wall reduces spans to a manageable 3,75 meters and even demonstrates the ability to assemble this clear-cut plan from two factory-built boxes. The 94 square meter scheme is a superb illustration of a small modern dwelling.    

Bungalow from Walter Myer-Bohe's Prefabricated Houses (1959)

 

Prefabrication experiments - 414 - XS(dwellings) - Stardust Container Home

 

XS houses are normally associated with mobility or at least transportability.  They can be fabricated from lightweight materials to be easily lifted, carried or built like trailers on a mobile chassis ready to be towed to any site. Their flexibility and diminutive size do not impede their more permanent anchorage with regards to views or according to site conditions; even if the structure you are anchoring was originally sized for movement. These tiny houses can also be made from repurposed volumes meant for other applications.

 

Adapted shipping containers are a case in point and have come to represent a type of subculture dwelling type, recycling the steel boxes as tiny or even large dwellings that stack multiple volumes. Eight feet wide by a standardized length of ten, twenty or forty feet, the conversion from shipping volume into domestic space requires organizations that are both savvy and rational.  ISO boxes can be fitted-out and converted-to-order with amenities, insulation, weatherproofing and permanently fixed to a site-built foundation. 

 

Dream Tiny Living, brandishes many container homes; One specific model, The Stardust, stacks a 20’ unit over a 40’ standard shipping container to outline two exterior living spaces: a deck at the front end of the box and a roof terrace above creating a luxurious composition of spaces. As an ADU or as a permanent micro-dwelling, the space gains a full 4’ of exterior living space when the front doors are open. The interior includes, built-in storage units and a small kitchenette aligned with a dining space. A shower and bath space complete the basic enfilade of functions through the 40’ extrusion. A steel staircase adjacent to the container leads up to a second unit and a large roof terrace suited with fit garden furniture to create a roof deck with a Palladian villa vibe floating above the surrounding landscape. 

 

Exposed steel corner posts and fork-lifting apertures ensure the shipping container’s previous function is not forgotten. On the inside, however, the shiplap white timber cladding, elegant finishes, large openings and sliding barn door portray an aesthetic which would be at home in any contemporary setting.   

Extra-large views in an extra-small frame

Prefabrication experiments - 413 - XS(dwellings) - Nolla: a zero emissions A-frame

Extra-small permanent dwellings come in many shapes and can often be characterized by their relationship with extraordinary sites. Sheds, cabins, huts are rarely bigger than one room. What they lack in size, they certainly make up for in their relationship to a type of reverie and nostalgia for living modestly anchored to the earth by an extraordinary view, a rocky outcrop, or the silence of wooded homestead. 

 

Originally published in 1943 by Conrad E. Meineke, Your Cabin in the Woods depicted a myriad of small shelters along with their potential benefits for communing with nature, self-building and creating an individual haven. Pages were illustrated with plans and detailed instructions for straightforward builds using the most basic architectural and structural organizations. 

 

The «Squatter» built in one day by two men used the iconic A-frame structure. The 150 square foot tiny home highlights the triangular structure’s enduring attractiveness : uniting roof and walls, inherently stable, undemanding assemblies and off the shelf timber components easy to source in any context. From early cruck frames deploying divided curved tree trunks to fashion a compressive arch structure, to assembling dimensional timber stock or leaning two prefabricated oblique panels together in equilibrium, the A-frame is potentially the oldest representation of prefabrication as its elements were prepared in advance of their use. 

 

Extra small, the A-frame has certainly had one of the largest symbolic influences on leisure dwelling construction and is still relevant. The Nolla cabin, built in Finland by designer Robin Falck, is a contemporary expression of the Squatter type presented by Meineke over 80 years ago, showcasing its productive legacy. Nolla means zero in Finnish. The one-room shelter reimagines the A-frame as a modern off-grid - low emissions micro-dwelling. Fashioned entirely of pine and plywood, rafters are fixed to the bottom chord of the composing triangle truss with reinforcing plywood gusset plates. Extending oblique members are adjusted to and lift the cabin over any setting. All components can be precut, flatpacked and delivered to any site. No specialized details and the didactic nature of the triangle truss make it a breeze to build and to comprehend. 

Nolla, a reconceptualized A-frame for contemporary leisure

Prefabrication experiments - 412 - XS (dwellings) - Hitching a home

The ability to carry a home to any setting according to basic needs, employment opportunities, economic challenges, for leisure or simply to respond to a transient lifestyle is an enduring vernacular in architecture. Rational dimensions and ease of assembly/disassembly matters when it comes to moveable dwellings. Freedom will always be dependent on lugging capacity, trail accessibility and material constraints. 

 

The trailer home is the icon of movability and minimal dwelling aspirations. As early twentieth century automobile manufacturing improved, it inspired many to use this newfound affordable mobility to envision hitching houses to Henry Ford’s assembly line principles. 

 

Pioneer Arthur Sherman first built a box timber-frame trailer for a family camping trip in the early 1930s. The 3-meter long  x 1.8-meter wide no frills volume included sleeping bunks, a coal burning stove and a rear trap door to reveal an exterior kitchen increasing livability. Sherman’s trailers became so popular that the simple camping unit became the sustaining product of a prosperous 3-million-dollar company by 1936 selling 6000 box trailers. The mobile home is still one of the most successful products of industrialized housing. Manufacturing on a portable foundation, a steel skeleton, is certainly an intelligent way of travelling but is also a manufacturing «coup de génie» as the product moves around the workshop on a stable, working surface. Whether produced on a linear line or in a cellular production process, once finished, the house is simply hitched and carried away.   

 

Both conventional factory-built mobile homes and homemade tiny house trailers can afford luxuries found in permanent housing including push-out spaces, fully functional kitchens and even second story spaces. Some contemporary models are veritable rolling villas that have little to do with the liberties associated with XS dwellings.

 

From Sherman’s modest solution for leisure to subsequent 10’ wide and 12’ wide evolutions proposed by another pioneer Elmer Frey, the mobile home is a testament to the American speculator exploring opportunities and valuing housing as non-site-specific commodity; a conceptualization that has led to negative subtexts at odds with a longstanding architectural position of dwellings’ necessary anchorage to the spirit of a place. 

The Rollohome movable dwelling as an example of XS-S dwellings

Prefabrication experiments - 411 - XS (dwellings) - Sanyo Living Pod

 

Extra-small housing encompasses any dwelling that is small enough to be labelled as a tiny house or a micro dwelling, usually between 10 to 40 m², roughly the size of one or two rooms. XS housing archetypes can be set up as single family or multifamily dwellings when aggregated as kernels in patterns highlighted by Japanese Metabolist architecture. Geared for mobility, they abrogate permanent anchoring associated with conventional housing construction. Micro-dwellings can be both self-propelled and hitched. Today’s comprehensively commodified culture associated with intelligent connected objects has renewed interest for integrated capsule dwellings ready for purchase and delivery. 

 

Notwithstanding current interest in tiny homes, Capsules are a product of modernist design principles. The machine for living evolved into the optimistic and space age architectural imagery diffused post-World War 2. Not exclusive to Japan's design culture, capsules were however propagandized during the Expo70 international World Fair presented in Osaka, Japan under the planning authority of Metabolist architect Kenzō Tange.  The exhibit theme «Progress and Harmony of Mankind» underlined the high-tech culture fostered through Japan's major support of automation and manufacturing methodologies applied to housing production. Japan’s prefab housing industry progressed and exalted prefab capsules as a serialized product incorporating technological advancements. 

 

Case in Point, Sanyo, an electronics producer showcased their living pod during Expo70. The micro-unit suggested a future of technological integration in every part of our homes with electronic baths, television sets and mobile communications. The Sanyo Living Capsule, a spherical individually sized biosphere, also labelled as the Health Capsule, synthesized every living function in one extra-small ergonomic form. Perfected living conditions, light, atmosphere, heat, and ventilation were automatically controlled and would remain at monitored levels. Mass-manufacturable, they could be adapted for any collective support structure. 

 

The recent demolition of the Nagakin Capsule Tower stipulated a pragmatic end to the capsule culture associated with 1970s Japan. Still, the XS housing pod continues to be linked to prefabrication. Its diminutive size agues for and makes it feasible to control and finish work in a factory setting leaving minimal disturbance and simplified infrastructure connections to the job site. 

Sanyo Living Pod placed within a housing typological matrix

Prefabrication experiments - 410 - Modern Modular : Housing and Offsite Construction 4.0

The association of housing supply with offsite construction has been described as a union of reason. Notwithstanding prefab's potential considering the high levels of repeatability, the industry is still characterized by one-off projects - prototypes - even though details, components, arrangements, and materials affirm consistency. For varied scopes and scales the argument in favour of offsite is increased affordability, sustainability, productivity, and quality through systematized processes. Current design digitalization supplemented by democratized digital fabrication technologies suggest possibilities for outlining parametric cataloguing and modelling of housing systems outlined by reproducible configurations. 

 

Resolution 4 Architecture's «modern modular» approach examines these potential links between architectural housing arrangements and modular volumetric building dimensional criteria. While their mass-customizable schemes expose the idealized perfect storm driving current offsite constructions uptake, prefabrication and housing have been similarly federated before. From a precisely modern perspective, diverse housing typologies were devised to organize prefabrication's theories to address past housing crises. The mobile home, Levittown bungalows, Metabolist capsules and most notably the slab panel block, pointed to mass-manufacturing to simplify supply of affordable dwellings. These proposals were developed for two urban forms: suburbanization valued the bungalow's seriality and ambitious postwar urban renewal guided the development of the panelized block. The entire spectrum between individual and collective was explored by architects or inventors to reform housing from vernacular construction to standardized processes citing the advantages industrialization brought to other consumer goods. 

 

Resolution 4 Architecture's exploration renews these patterns by providing a glimpse into how contemporary digitalization can inform a conceptual framework for housing. The catalogue of modules contains basic «manufacturable» fragments for users to customize their own home as one would aggregate building blocks, composing a home from predetermined integrated chunks. As manufacturing in architecture can be linked to both Ford's assembly line (component catalogues) and Toyota's production system (lean construction), the current era of smart technologies is propelling a new generation of prefab ideas. Open-source software development theories have already spawned prototypes like the Wikihouse and other digitally conceived catalogues that pursue the enduring objective of reasoning architecture through generative tessellations.

Typological matrix by Resolution 4 Architecture https://www.re4a.com/the-modern-modular

Prefabrication experiments - 409 - Housing affordability through prefab ?

Prefabrication, offsite construction, and industrialized building systems are high on everyone's agenda for tackling affordability in housing. In print, on the web or even on the evening news, age-old strategies are being discussed to address systemic issues augmenting the present crisis' increasing acuteness. From catalogues of pre-approved designs to standardized dwelling blocks, policy makers are scrambling to increase supply as construction costs keep rising. Prefabrication is being promoted as a way of reducing timelines and costs up to 50%; Suggesting unrealistic promises based on reduced planning as projects will be repeated from site to site with little variations. This idealized view of prefabrication is how the unfavorable preconceptions toward industrialized construction evolved: shoddy cookie-cutter models produced quickly and cheaply often also implying weaker designs. The truth is, when done well, prefabrication can be beautiful and contribute to a setting’s heritage along with optimizing both costs and schedules. Seriality or even standardization do not imply banality; Good design can be produced for the masses.

 

Certain elements can certainly be repeated from project to project; however, architecture is anchored to a particular place that implies detailed planning to respond to zoning, climate, structural criteria, or material restrictions. These conditions enumerate a few site-specific elements that can’t be standardized. 

 

So, can prefabrication contribute to addressing the housing crisis? Guidelines should consider holistic and integrated supply chains with stakeholders, from manufacturers to professionals discussing potentials honestly without the need to promote or demote offsite with outdated attitudes or untenable promises. Prefabrication and offsite can be an important component in reducing waste while controlling quality. Adapting manufacturing methods to make building parts is already used in the industry for all disparate components needed to assemble a building. A breakthrough would offer complete subassemblies that reduce on site labor to a minimum and standardize shared processes through developing patterns for customizable designs. 

 

In similar times of crisis, architects imagined factory production as a tool for increasing production capacity. The next blog posts will share some housing proposals according to their scale and relative success in applying mass production strategies to the architecture of dwellings. 

Mass produced components for a Levittown bungalow

Prefabrication experiments - 408 - Kit-of-parts and Standardization

Jaimie Johnston, Head of Global Systems at Bryden Wood and Design Lead for the Construction Innovation Hub, has spoken enthusiastically about the changes taking place within the construction industry, specifically the shift toward offsite construction. The Bryden Wood approach is articulated to the same kit-of-parts strategy deployed for post-war housing crises but described in contemporary terms.  The current Modern Methods of Construction / Platform construction space, suggested by Johnston and his firm influenced the UK Government’s Construction Playbook, whose core policy «harmonize, digitize and rationalize demand» creates new opportunities to apply a consistent set of technical standards to assets being built across a given sector. This «platform» level of standardization has the capability to streamline design and construction, giving the industry a lever to scale supply. 

 

Johnston defines this standardized, foundational approach as a springboard, setting up the prospect of working with more sophisticated industrialized manufacturing methodologies like DfMA. The idea of standardization is important for achieving economies but should not be an obstacle to architectural innovation. Efficient production applied to building must be done the right way including all stakeholders including the creativity that goes along with architectural design. The standard, normalized, terminology associated with past prefab experiments has long challenged offsite uptake to reform construction.  

 

The kit-of-parts or platform DfMA processes do not refer to the end products (traditional or alternative structures), but rather to the design criteria and choices marking-out building needs. As such, the kit-of-parts methodology does not relate to one strategy either modular or panelized but to a symbiotic use of materials and assemblies to facilitate everything from supply chain management to onsite coordination. Each industrialized construction strategy can be looked at as a tool in the overall construction process adapting to projects, sites, and functional requirements, reforming the «silo» nature of the construction ecosystem; Platforms are toolkits for building singular projects from cooperating sources. Whatever vocabulary is used to portray a novel approach to industrialized construction the underlying benefits of standardization are clear: sharing and defining elemental logistics across multiple projects increases efficiencies at every level.

Modular vehicle platform

Prefabrication experiments - 407 - Incremental Housing

 

Open Building theory encompasses several concepts that mark out a prospective systemic adaptability in a building’s design and production: modular construction details, flexible planning principles and user participation. Founded on the idea that malleable and interoperable systems could evolve readily according to changing needs or requirements during a building's lifespan, the theory recommends fluid or circular processes rather than fixed linear ones. Planning for change in function and lifestyle requires a holistic view of how patterns fluctuate over time. Open building protagonists have developed products, techniques, and methods to mitigate the waste that usually goes along with inevitable change.  

 

Two approaches that are sometimes related to open building and adapting to change are unfinished housing and core-housing which relate to the supply of necessary functional elements around which a more complex system could stem. Both strategies are extracted from understanding that populations might not have the resources or the need to build a complete housing infrastructure from the onset. 

 

Incremental housing, a combination of unfinished and core, has been promoted by Priztker Prize winning architect, Alejandro Aravena in multiple projects as an instruction manual to develop resilient communities from first core-service elements to planning strategies for aggregating all appended spaces over time. A series of predetermined elements (basic needs) designed as linear, radial, or dynamic arrangements outline networks onto which private and individual units can organically take shape matching their community’s evolutions. 

 

Incremental housing also involves indetermined spaces that are added, adapted, constructed, or deconstructed over time. Gradual adaptations link two complementary spaces, a first step core and an adjacent flexible space. From this simple juxtaposition, neighborhoods could expand horizontally or vertically. This core principle has informed many experiments in developing countries where informal or even crisis planning principles sometimes impede the bulk supply and rationalized procurement of edifices. Planning informal, undetermined infrastructure over 5, 10,15 years commands systematic governance where inhabitants are given authority over certain types of changes made to their environment while other modifications are approved by the group. A symbiotic relationship between collective and individual is the most basic criteria of incremental house planning.    

 

Top: Incremental Housing by Elemental
Bottom: Incremental housing principles -
Module https://moduledesign.weebly.com/incremental-housing.html

Prefabrication experiments - 406 - Modular naval construction as a model

Industrialized building / offsite construction protagonists have contemplated successes in bordering industries for inventiveness to increase productivity in construction. Automobile manufacturing served as one of the earliest benchmarks of serial fabrication potentially suitable for architecture. Assembly line principles led to the development of the mobile home and later to more factory intensive building systems, namely heavy precast panels in Germany, France and beyond. Recent digital advances in manufacturing methodologies have reinvigorated the links with car production as an icon of platform thinking, making differentiated products from the same composing parts, underbellies, or chassis. Aeronautics has also been projected onto building production as planes are assembled with large factory-made hunks that are seamlessly integrated according to models, known as digital or fabrication twins. 

 

Perhaps the most compelling comparison is with shipbuilding, as it has evolved into a type of coordinated stacking of big chunks inspiring construction of buildings with similar large-scale factory-finished boxes. An example of multi-trade prefabrication or near-ship prefabrication, parts are fashioned into large blocks which are then assembled as a complete hull. Further, shipbuilding, especially cruise ship building, addresses the same challenges posed by buildings, as they are basically large floating hotels with spaces, functions and even components that collective housing blocks include. 

 

Modularity in shipbuilding is also suggested as a way of reducing costs, delays and waste associated with complete ship overhauls to face changing and evolving needs. As in buildings, ship life spans can be increased substantially by integrating intelligent assembly and disassembly principles to make any modifications or updates simpler. Interoperable components, dimensional coordination, plug and play self-contained boxes and repeatable ship segments that can be used across multiple crafts are all elements that cross the boundary between naval architecture and building design.  Commonalities between ships can be typical galleys, medical facilities, rooms, and service cores that can be designed to fit into multiple ships distributing their planning costs over multiple product lines. This modularity and platform theory applied in naval yards is seen as a strategy to combat premature obsolescence and to harmonize complex supply chains, an estimable model for modular buildings.     

An example of modular ship hull composition

Prefabrication experiments - 405 - Interior Partition Systems

 

Current practices and literature affirm the construction industry’s wastefulness and suggest that adaptability policies, while adopted marginally, can reduce waste during an edifice’s lifespan. Walls and partitions are still fashioned with plasterboard to be surfaced with joint compound and then painted. Conventional methods impede any changes over time without messy demolition. Streamlined construction has resisted the potentials of simple dry reversible connections and components. Designed-in malleability could make an important contribution to buildings’ interior systems evolution. 

 

Buildings functional evolution over time, constantly requires some wall relocation or reorganization. These reworkings fill dumps as internal rearranging of service spaces can occur every 10-15 years, sometimes even more frequently.  Programming or including dry construction / reversible assemblies in wall erection reduces required demolition, new resource harvesting and material refuse.

 

This is not a new idea. In the early 1970s Nijhuis Bouw BV a Dutch builder proposed a manufactured partition system: the 4 dee Inbouw. The wall kits included all framing, floor sills, top plates, and variable infill opaque or transparent patterns. All system elements adhered to a modular grid of 30cm with two height options, 2,4 or 2,6 m. A basic 1,2m wide panel, composed of 4 grid modules, slid into removable floor, and ceiling channels, making the system fully relocatable. Suggesting a more circular approach to construction, impermanent partition systems can reduce a building’s environmental footprint as materials can be recovered and employed over multiple life cycles reforming the extract, use, dispose methodology that characterizes modern construction. 

 

DIRTT is a Canadian company commercializing the same type of panelized wall kit to facilitate long term flexibility. The multi-trade interior construction system is related to Nijhuis' system, components for framing are dry assembled and can be as easily disassembled as they are assembled. DIRTT takes the idea one step further in panel customization:  A vast cloud catalogue of materials and finishes make the system fully mass customizable using the company's planning software to streamline the planning, fabrication, delivery, and assembly process.

Left: 4 Dee Inbouw system; Right: DIRTT's multi-trade interior construction system