Above all other systems, one embodies industrialized construction’s input on mass produced serial architecture. From the mid 1940s and throughout the decades following the second World War, the precast concrete panel manufactured to shape hives of dwellings from similar slabs and walls was deployed in Europe and in the Americas as a symbol of construction reform as well as innovation.
Its plainness is at the root of its prolific and large-scale application; sheets of concrete cast in standardized thicknesses, with window openings and facing materials were produced in factories to be delivered and stacked in repetitive organisations. Either dry assembled or bonded with mortar over continuous and extending steel reinforcements knotted in a monolithic framework, the «Panelki» panel building asserted the application of centralized policy frameworks to architecture.
Flying Panels, a recent exhibit, showcased the concept of this building system, lifted buoyantly into place, increasing output on a war-ravaged continent becoming synonymous with post-war prefab. Opened in 2019 at ArkDes, Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design, the exhibit was accompanied by a catalogue including a variety of texts reinforcing the sheer scale achieved by concrete panels. Researched and curated by Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, the project elegantly portrayed the globalized use of these artificial stone plates inspiring offshoots in diverse countries that faced similar challenges in the supply of affordable dwellings. Models, publications, and posters, all relate the attraction and dissemination of a controlled procedure for producing communities. The almost choreographed movement of cranes raising and setting panels horizontally and vertically multiplied identical arrangements, adapted to their contexts through a varied patchwork of facing materials or panel geometries.
While reinforced concrete, in today's carbon conscious construction environment has designers searching for alternatives, the Panel Block’s role in modernity is undeniable as is its contribution to developing our current base of industrialization strategies in other materials. The case in point is mass timber (cross-laminated timber) which is being proposed in an analogous type of sheet and surface-based strategy toward affordable housing.
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| An image from the exhibit |
