The first 10 blog posts (January – April, 2014) acknowledged both iconic and lesser-known prefab experiments, some productive and many flops, with the intention of elucidating promises and challenges related to offsite construction. Twelve years later, the blog will reach a milestone that seemed at the time, highly improbable: 500 posts. Conferences, articles, publications, research endeavours, study days, and three exhibits have grown out of this ongoing exercise.
Looking back at 489 posts retracing the history as well as current experimentation, the challenges to industrialized construction are unchanged. The increased use of manufacturing methodologies in construction again appears inevitable considering lagging productivity, onsite wastefulness, and reduced affordability, however these methods remain marginally applied relegated to certain types of projects, as architectural singularity, outdated perceptions along with outmoded building processes remain the crux of the problem. Research - historical, creative and codeveloped - particularly within the AEC disciplines remains robust and a celebration of this fertile field of exploration will be the subject of the next 10 blog posts.
Exhibits, literature, and prototypes have all been delivered to highlight how prefab would radically modify construction culture. The Dream of the Factory-Made House (Herbert, 1984), Kelly's The Prefabrication of Houses (1951), Wachsmann’s The Turning Point of Building (1961), The House as a Product (Vogler, 2016) and Refabricating Architecture (Kieran and Timberlake, 2003) all manifested and conveyed the prefab promises of their era. Curating prefab played a similar role. Architecture et industrie (Centre Pompidou, 1983) Home Delivery (Moma, 2008), and Flying Panels (ArkDes, 2019), celebrated the diversity and influence on architectural praxis and education.
Along with curating and publishing, government-endorsed exercises have disseminated knowledge aimed at enabling prefab to successfully infiltrate the market; Operation Breakthrough from the late 1960s remains the most famous. The experiments published on this blog incorporate this rich and diverse history of prefab construction specifically in their effort to reunite two fields represented by conflicting values; architectural values of singularity and the extreme production efficiency values which regard architecture's take as frivolous. These divergent views still embody the inherent complexity associated with construction’s industrialization.
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| An excerpt of experiments from 1-489 |
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