Archigram’s flying house, blending a mobile home with a high-capacity military grade helicopter, and Paul Rudolf’s classification of the mobile home as American vernacular define the complex relationship between the industrialized production of homes and architecture’s evolving perception of the low-cost factory built dwelling archetype. Architects have generally understood and promoted the arguments for manufacturing architecture in a streamlined, quality-controlled setting, delivering a 99% complete fabricated house to a client, however, transportation constraints and normalized outputs have been criticized for their inflexibility.
Modular volumetric construction seeks to reform this long-lasting friction by stacking premade customizable boxes, using the manufacturing lessons learned from the mobile home to make large-scale unique buildings.
Whether mobile, manufactured or modular, the same underlying constraints that led to the 12’-wide homes and progressed into 14-foot and even 16-foot-wide modular boxes requiring special permits and chaperons, transport is the number one design criteria limiting modular volumetric’s formal diversification. Large scale chunk delivery limits spans, codifies metrics, and requires structural redundancy to make the large volumes robust enough to withstand rolling and bumping over long distances.
Once delivered to their final destinations, the factory-finished boxes also imply large staging areas and cranes to set them in place to be stitched and weatherproofed. Long distances can also be prohibitive, remote locations, or even dense urban environments, all requiring increased logistics and special permitting for temporarily blocking traffic in tightly packed urban settings. Volume height is equally limited by overpass clearances making anything over 8-foot interior tricky without using low-bed vehicles. Notwithstanding these procedural challenges, the factory-finished large boxes sometimes up to 60’ long make quick work of any residential building as 12 x 60-foot modules can be carried on flatbed trucks requiring no special permits.
Transportability has long been highlighted as a central narrative in prefab architecture representing the freedom afforded by the moveable house able to adapt to any context, brought to site by road, sea or air supplying buildings as commodities ready to be used without the headaches of conventional construction.
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| top left: House 19 (Korteknie Stuhlmacher) ; top center: Sikorsky Sky Crane delivering a home ; right: UFO house carried to its site ; bottom left: The Flying House ; bottom center - modular buildings on a barge |
By streamlining the assembly process, significant time and cost savings can be achieved, which is essential in today's fast-paced construction environment. In a similar vein, effective construction site management is crucial for ensuring that all elements of a project run smoothly, especially when integrating new technologies and processes.
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