Prefabrication experiments - 426 - SML(urban blocks) - Tenements and industrialization

 

Planning dwellings vertically around a common circulation core is symbolic of 19th century urbanization.  The urban block of flats is a fundamental component of the modern city. Characterized by repeating flats stacked 4-6 stories high, this type evolved and guided the development of emblematic localized patterns: tenements, in New York rose out the rapid urbanization of the city. Their organizations were based on a centralized stair well and sometimes a series of lifts giving access to each floor plate. The New York tenements built on 25 foot by 100 feet parcels divided for high density, allocated industrialized city form. Urban blocks have remained consistent and are both an affordable and sustainable strategies for housing provision. 

 

Offsite construction can be leveraged toward the urban block as dense housing has an engrained repeatability in spatial organizations, systems, amenities and interior functional elements such as rooms, baths and kitchens. Independent of any industrialized building strategy, rationality and frugality were the keys to the speculation that spawned these housing solutions. The typical floor plate layout is an example of standardization applied to housing design. Each unit could then be constructed from similar potentially mass-produced components.

 

Today’s affordable housing crises and the continuing urbanization of populations tends to both reviving the collective housing block and industrialized building strategies. From stacking reinforced concrete modules at Habitat 67 to the precast panelized blocks built throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War 2, prefabrication was used to invent and develop the collective housing typologies of the 20th century harnessing principles of bulk procurement and centralized logistics. Still, while stacking similar flats and floorplates lends itself to prefabrication, it has been marginally applied as each edifice in a series is usually built as a prototype. The postwar Eastern European socialist model deploying the pattern urban block repeating the same building systems and designs from context to context spearheaded a vision of industrialization underwritten by political choices; this model seems to be the only way of achieving the mass-scale application of offsite construction in collective housing supply.