Prefabrication experiments - 438 - Concrete Tube Utopias

 

The previous blog posts have discussed housing types from micro-dwellings to industrialized utopias and large-scale urban renewal proposals. Each motivated to efficiently supply quality dwellings for the masses affordably and with sufficient flexibility to respond to varying dispositions. Current generalized urbanization challenges existing models toward the production of dwellings while simultaneously reducing our collective environmental footprint.  Conventional housing construction is a slow go, fraught with planning delays, bogged permitting and symbolized by lagging productivity. 

 

Repurposing ready-made industrialized objects for housing urgencies is a recurring theme and has spawned an assortment of schemes including converted shipping containers or stacked mobile homes. While designed in different eras, two proposals demonstrate the cyclical nature of architects inspired by redirecting manufactured products for other uses. Guy Dessauges (Living Tubes, 1966; blog article 28) and James Law architecture have both represented concrete infrastructure pipe sections as modular building blocks for quickly putting flats together. Dessauge’s tubes were envisioned around a centralized service core or stacked three stories high composing a housing hive. The Opod Tube House (2017) proposal visualized in multiple contexts clearly borrows, consciously or subconsciously, from the same Zeitgeist.  

 

Can lessons be learned from these radical investigations for creating affordable housing or are they just exercises architects have come to adopt as their discipline’s way of addressing crises? The amount of rework needed to adapt products to housing is often absent from designs and sometimes asserts disciplinary caprice. The discipline’s «modern» heritage of rewiring industrial designs to imagine novel building systems reforming classic ways of building is entrenched in this type of poetic license that has often led to socially, economically and culturally untenable proposals. 

 

Most architects are far removed from economics, manufacturing and streamlined production that the only way they feel that they can contribute to solutions is by resorting to romantic views of prefabrication as the simple assembly of premade forms. The truth is that adapting ready-mades can be complex: mechanical systems, interior infill, site infrastructure and other retrofit requirements makes this type of stacking less than credible and financially unfeasible.

above: Opod; below: Living Tubes