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