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)