With a flattering foreword written by Moshe Safdie and an auspicious introduction by R. Buckminster Fuller, Barry James Sullivan's Industrialization in the Building Industry (1979) encapsulates an era's zeitgeist by composing a comprehensive and optimistic overview of offsite construction presenting its diverse potentials to tackle onsite-building challenges. Called a masterpiece by Fuller, the publication outlines how industrialization of the building industry shifts paradigms in design and construction to develop the built form quickly, more efficiently and with greater quality.
Sullivan leveraged knowledge from prewar and postwar experiments, from academic research in California notably on school construction systems, and from the lessons of Operation Breakthrough to present industrialization's state-of-the-art in the USA and abroad. One chapter tells the tale of successful standardisation in the steel industry, relating an evolution that Sullivan defines as a model for collaborative sectoral advances. Metal/Steel building manufacturers like the Butler Manufacturing (1901) deployed a pattern-building approach to coordinate everything from design catalogues to material attributes, span tables and joinery through cross-pollinating founding companies' experiences.
Their shared knowledge, specifications, and modular coordination principles helped the industry grow from a $250M dollar industry in 1966 to a $770M dollar industry in 1974, an incredible growth in less than 10 years. Four basic building frames were agreed upon, the rigid portico frame, the tapered beam, the post-and-beam and finally the truss beam. Everything from panel design, to cladding and insulation types would be included in design-build packages or turnkey proposals to erect buildings cost-effectively, safely and with equivalent performance parameters in any part of the country.
The steel industry as a whole benefited from this normalization and continues to benefit and build on the systemic work done during the 1960s. Shared specifications have evolved to include current criteria, and the same coordination principles that led to model buildings are being included in virtual building configurators, or BIM models, to pursue the same simple streamlined design-to- fabrication-to-site process highlighted by Sullivan's analysis.
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| left: progression of metal building industry ; right: typical building frames |
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