Friday, December 20, 2024

Prefabrication experiments - 2024-25 - Joyeuses Fêtes - Happy Holidays

 


Prefabrication experiments - 450 - Chemehuevi prefabricated housing tract by Pierre Koenig


Modern as well as neo-modern architecture theories and ambitious social reforms aimed to democratize quality design cultivating some of its most well-known canons. From Jean Prouvé's Citroën worker Shell Dwellings in the 1950s to Kieran and Timberlake’s Cellophane House in the early 2000s, modernist prototypes envisioned industrialization as a tool to reform housing production. Among these initiatives, California Arts and Architecture’s Case Study House Program sought to bring European modernism's tenets to the USA. The program outlined some of the most iconic examples of mid-century modern houses including the grandiose Case Study House 22 (The Stahl House) designed by USC graduate Pierre Koenig. Steel and glass framed a dynamic spatial composition that could be generalized to develop reproducible (in theory) dwellings based on these new materials and methods. Koenig advanced these experimental strategies in his own house, while still studying at USC in the early 1950s. Promoting modernist principles remained Koenig's obsession until the late 1970s. 

 

Convinced of good architecture's potential to serve, Koenig accepted a mandate though the University to work with the Chemehuevi native American tribe for a new tract. From 1970-1976 the project for a series of prefab houses was mired within a process more complex than he initially expected. Working within HUD’s parameters and discussions with the tribe demonstrated the inherent difficulties of providing affordable dwellings go well beyond architectural composition and require political will as well as design talent. 

 

The small 20x20-foot grid Koenig developed could be expanded to a 20x80-foot longhouse type. The prismatic steel structures included appendages for exterior living spaces, carports and used a basic grid to suggest an open variable construction system where kitchen and bath locations could be determined and varied individually. The proposal for the reservation developed upon a specifically modern esthetic using design elements the architect explored in far more luxurious houses. The small modern prototype positioned the potentials of new materials and methods against government prescriptive policies on housing which limited innovation. As Koenig himself observed and related, «in the end the houses were too nice, politicians didn't want the Chemehuevi to have better houses than they had themselves».

 

For more information see:

deWit, Wim. (2011), Modernism Thwarted: Pierre Koenig's Work for the Chemehuevi IndiansGetty Research Journal, no. 3, p 87-98


Chemehuevi prefabricated housing tract, on Lake Havasu, Calif., 1976


 


Monday, December 16, 2024

Prefabrication experiments - 449 - Mass Affordability - 10 - Quonset Huts...again

 

Affordability and prefabrication have been correlated in the production of mobile homes, postwar bungalows, and largescale panelized concrete buildings throughout Europe. Manufactured housing replicates housing processes and elements over many instances decreasing costs through harmonized supply chains, bulk orders, and standardization, all principles of mass production. Rationalization is articulated to minimizing specialized or individualized demands. Another strategy normalizes similar systems for varied uses. The same free-spanning structure determined for storage can be transformed by adding prefab stairs, bath or kitchen pods producing a ready-made flat, temporary or permanent. 

 

Reducing the number of composing elements and parts to build multifunctional inhabitable structures is based on structurally efficient shapes and geometries that are easy to assemble and disassemble. The A-frame, Butler frames, and barrel vault huts are examples of low-cost structures that combine walls and roofs into a simple space defining and covering approach to building. Architects and industrialists have seen ready-made kit dwellings in these unpretentious volumes to efficiently address housing shortages. 

 

A recent proposal in Detroit designed by EC3 architects showcased the SteelMaster manufacturing capabilities to revive the affordable dwelling possibilities of the Quonset Hut Prefabrication experiments 15. The semi-circular extruded vault gained popularity as an instant airplane hangar, storage unit or emergency hospital during the second World War. Just outside Detroit's downtown disrict, eight barrel vaults are aggregated into a community. The steel structures are domesticated by adding curtain walls to each gable end. Polycarbonate panels and personalized lighting accents add touch of contemporary design to the manufactured arched elevations.  

 

The eight units provide rental spaces for live-work spaces for artists or start-ups.   The restrained interiors are organized around a wood framed wetcore, which also includes a staircase and supports a loft sleeping area. The ribbed corrugated arches are insulated by interior curved plywood or timber framed enveloping ceilings that weatherproof and conceal the steel vaults on the inside while their extrados surface is a completely recognizable community figure.  The simple to produce and build elements highlight that reducing a house to its most basic elements, floor, curved enclosure and a service hearth contain some answers to the affordability dilemma.


Barrel vaults during construction

 

 

 

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Prefabrication experiments - 448 - Mass Affordability - 09 - Refitting existing buildings with Kit Switch

 

The pressure on affordable housing supply is continuously increasing.  Accumulating shortages are overwhelming, construction costs are ballooning and productivity stagnating. These challenges affect the provision of everything from single family dwellings to collective urban blocks. Conventional construction and its supporting supply chains are inconsistent, new building construction requires long drawn-out permitting procedures and developing unbuilt sites is wasteful compounding environmental challenges. 

 

Densifying existing neighbourhoods and infrastructure can reduce pressures associated with delivering entirely new tracks. Retrofitting, reusing, and adapting existing buildings that are less than optimally occupied can be explored as levers to provide housing opportunities: Building over strip malls, adapting disused commercial buildings, repurposing high vacancy office towers can relieve pressure on new lot and infrastructure planning. 

 

Hacking existing open-plan buildings with simple structural systems or grids potentially also decreases pressure on permitting processes.  Most commercial floor plans based on a 7,6-meter grid could be redesigned into loft spaces as has been demonstrated time and again by transforming factory buildings in gentrifying industrial neighbourhoods.  However, the complexities of adaptive reuse are not specifically linked to architectural potentials or structural challenges (which can sometimes exist with new seismic or even fireproofing constraints) but to mechanical transformations. Office and open-floor plates were rarely designed for the required multiple service networks needed to juxtapose flats, most were planned with one centralized service core.

  

To address these opportunities and challenges, Kit Switch https://www.kitswitch.com , an industrialized service core producing start-up is developing flat-packed industrialized wall-packs for fitting kitchens and baths into existing buildings. Panelized with coordinated distribution of power, water and HVAC equipment, these service-cores streamline fit-outs by standardizing and modularizing typical dimensions, distributions and connecting them to vertical chase elements that are cut or drilled into existing floor plates. While these modifications can be time and resource intensive, they imply much less extraction and resource use when compared to new builds.  Costs as well as gains of retrofitting existing infrastructure should be weighed against the important carbon footprint of producing new concrete, steel, aluminum and all other materials that go into the erection of equivalent buildings.


Image from the Kit Switch website