Prefabrication experiments - 458 - Notes in passing - 03 - Transatlantic sharing - Alvar Aalto's timber houses

 

 

Spreading knowledge globally about new systems was instrumental in bringing industrialization principles to the normalized construction of massive amounts of housing during the postwar era. The impetus for standardisation to increase housing supply was directed by the diversification of production. Everything from framing materials, to doors and windows, all of which had been produced in artisans' workshops were now being made in a factory setting. This novel approach to making was suggested by production methods promoted by parallel industries sustained by new tools and materials. Mechanization influenced global construction methods and, in some way, even inspired architects to become protagonists in their own countries to showcase industrialization’s potentials.

 

An interesting case study in this globalized cross-pollination is the impact Alvar Aalto had in bringing American framing models to Finland. Collaborating with forestry vertically integrated giant Ahlström, Aalto was familiar with the company’s understanding of oversees innovations concerning sawmills and dimensional mass production. To push this collaboration further and because of his growing reputation, Aalto was invited to teach at MIT in 1940 where he also learned from the Bemis Foundation, a pillar of research toward building standardisation in the USA. Albert Farwell Bemis, the research foundation’s founder partnered with the MIT to explore modernising construction methods, specifically through dimensional coordination. 

 

Aalto’s time in USA was short but intense while MIT and outlined timber framing standardization principles for affordable housing. When he returned to Finland, he continued his partnership with Ahlström developing a series of AA houses based on the principles he had learned in his transatlantic mission. Finland was undergoing a housing crisis as many new towns had to be built to accommodate displaced populations from ceded territories. The transformation of Finnish building culture from onsite intensive craftsmanship to high levels of prefabrication differed from the American model in as much as it contributed to inventing a new player in the Finnish context: the integrated home builder.  The American model remained highly fragmented divided up amongst multiple stakeholders. The AA system deployed technological dimensional coordination principles, identified as flexible standardisation as the homes could be serialized as well as lightly customized though repeating underlying framing systems, details and components.

Alvar Aalto's AA type houses

Prefabrication experiments - 457 - Notes in passing - 02 - Customization and industrialized building

Demand in line with scaled production with little or no changes in manufacturing processes is industrialization’s recipe for offering quality products at low prices. Mass customization yields these advantages without compromising replicability through manufacturing a product offering that can be diversified by purchase options. In cars, shoes, boats, or smartphones this diversity is often limited to colors, aesthetic add-ons, and performance options. Selected modifiers adjust production processes marginally. Spreading branding, design, planning and investments over a stable client pipeline demand is the basic principle of effective manufacturing. As it relates to industrialized building, variety challenges and difficulties lie in how to frame choices or options. Consumers have grown accustomed to the high level of fragmented trade-based personalization in the built environment.

 

In the prefab sector many companies relay individualization as a strength; Customizing options include everything from exterior materials to faucets and flooring materials. While this certainly leads to a distinction in the final product and an ability to sell prefab as, just as customizable as conventional construction. Many options are counterproductive to a successful business model. Harmonizing supply chains for bulk purchasing implies a sameness through projects to reduce costs. As the prefab industry has often been compared to the automobile sector, it would seem ridiculous for clients to demand a particular steering wheel or an analog dashboard in lieu of a digital one. Options are limited to what is manufacturable within the same optimized processes tweaking them minimally for product differentiation.

 

The same type of standardization would be required to elevate offsite construction to the status of industrialized construction at least for it to be profitable and affordable. Making multiple products the same doesn't only revolve around dimensional sameness as has been the case for prefab for decades; Repeating products, patterns, finishes, materials, and methods is instilled in a building manufacturer’s genes. Does the drive to please consumers oppose the need for replicating models ? Companies like Boklok, founded by Skanska and Ikea, have directed personalization to interior lifestyle choices within an identical shell gearing repetition as a selling point. 

Housing development by Boklok (Skanska and Ikea)

 

Prefabrication experiments - 465 - Notes in passing - 01 - Brand Equity

 

Several rebranding efforts throughout the 20th century from prefabrication to manufactured housing to factory-built and to offsite have struggled to shed biases against prefab. Digital technologies frame DFMA and platform theory as the latest labelling and a reenergized position for industrialized building systems. Virtual design tools, coupled with housing crises, labour shortages, climate change and a better grasp of modern methods of construction potentials to address the cited challenges add up to a fertile era for factory-built architecture.

 

Prefabrication still deals with postwar connotations which have impeded a more generalized use. Even with companies using robust marketing, buy-in from architects and consumers remains tenuous. Katerra's meteoric rise and subsequent equally quick demise is a case in point. Even with massive investments supporting it, the once flagship of innovation failed. Was it bad planning, bad branding, or too big too fast ? Certainly, a combination of many factors led to its shutdown. 

 

While branding yourself as an innovator elevates your position as a potential disruptor in a slow-to-move construction industry, it also supports the idea of being off the mark, unconventional and risky for an industry mired in perennial habits. Some see brand equity as a solution to the bias problem for offsite construction: In acquiring a large portion of Stack Modular, a North American modular volumetric producer, Bird construction has incorporated an offsite solution to its service list. 

 

As a general contractor Bird understands the role and responsibilities of construction as a service coordinating many offsite produced components and onsite trades. Merging this integrator capacity with the speed and efficiencies of modular volumetric elevates both parties with an idealized business proposal based on their strengths. Being associated with Bird's 100-year history in the construction space, modular volumetric gains instant credibility as a relevant construction method. In turn, being associated with Stack Modular's innovative manufacturing methodologies elevates the general contractor to an agile innovator capable of adopting new business models as they become available and applicable. Uniting onsite services with offsite production in a seamless manner creates a formidable business model to develop and build projects of any scope. 

Bird and Stack Modular - brand equity

Prefabrication experiments - 455 - Dodecahedron Dwellings

In the interest of reducing production and construction costs, architects have been fascinated by simulating dwellings using geometric shapes. Along with modern tessellated patterns, the fundamental links between architecture and geometry are deep rooted; circles, triangles, golden rectangles are all part of a compositional repertoire since the beginning of a formalized academic education and earlier as vernacular building approaches used geometry to anchor buildings. Modernism’s thirst for newness emphasized geometry as part of systemic solutions with grids and modular shapes in tune with the rhetoric of industrialized construction. 

 

Buckminster Fullers’ use of the octet truss and icosahedron, Zvi Heckers personal brand of modular geometry along with Gerard Caris’ deployment of regular pentagons all undertook the challenge of demonstrating efficient spatial organizations from unit-shapes.  Caris’ aggregated dodecahedrons embraced the same conceptual undertones of the megastructure movement along with modernism’s obsession with manufacturable units into an exponential multiplication of unique housing landscapes. 

 

Dodecahedrons are composed of twelve regular pentagons with 5 equal length segments. The Pentagonism explored by Dutch artist Gerard Caris in the 1970s as sculptural form, patterned the same massing geometry as architecture. Juxtaposed sliced half solids could be set on any flat surface and used as an autonomous shelter or clustered in a radiating pattern of rooms by matching their planar surfaces. Unique in their underlying shapes, Caris' experimental models remained conventional in their planning articulated to a two-dimensional separation of day and night spaces which filled the volumes without exploring either their spatial or geometric potential to develop innovative interior architecture.

 

Marginally applied, these geometric experiments showcase a representational obsession of fractal and serial artistry. The seemingly simple to arrange shapes and their mathematical connectability proved awkward articulated to overly complex juxtaposition details suggesting spaces that are difficult to inhabit. Unlike Fuller’s octet truss based on equilateral triangles to simplify a structural complexity with a robust shape, pentagons implied a flatness and planar fields that when constructed with conventional means bring no structural advantages and remain an experiment in textural form rather than structural or architectural form. 

Half dodecahedrons set flat on any site