Prefabrication experiments - 501 - Wanted : Integrated Product Delivery for Buildings

 

Increasing process entanglement, systemic trade and labour shortages, the colossal environmental footprint of building construction, and skyrocketing costs are all valid arguments leading to the recent renewal of interest in offsite construction. Breaking with longstanding resistance among traditional stakeholders, lobbyists and policymakers are now looking for new ways to stimulate offsite practices and current manufacturing methodologies to address some of the challenges associated with conventional onsite building. 

 

Specifically, when it comes to the provision of quality housing, industrializing production makes conceptual and practical sense; vast amounts of similar housing types with repeating services and organizations are required. Studying these patterns and parameters could help frame the type of standardization needed to implement harmonized systems over multiple proposals, thereby reducing, sharing and distributing initial investments. This cost amortization is the basic framework underpinning the success of mass production for other commodities. 

 

While demonstrated in other sectors, the same question remains: how can these ideas be successfully and perennially translated to construction? If history and the subtexts of standardized versus personalized production have taught us anything about how to move forward, it’s that offsite and industrialization requires fundamental change for the adoption of the product normalization that seems to have improved prefab’s conditions in Asia and Scandinavia but continues to lag in other industrialized contexts defined by a highly fragmented procurement and project delivery process. 

 

The integrated nature of industrialized building culture required inflects the types of reform that would rock conventional construction to its core. The ease and flexibility of one-off projects - getting them started with a trailer, some materials, tools and a small team - is hard to compete with when we imagine the upfront investments required for the manufacture of building subassemblies offsite in sufficient quantities alongside coordinated project pipelines. This is just one of the systemic differences that highlights process disparities obstructing higher uptake. Still, the degree of repetition in housing makes it a prime candidate for the regularity needed for creating patterns for realizing large quantities of affordable dwellings – only time will tell if the industry is ready for internal systemic transformations.

Integrated Process for Building Construction (Bryden Wood)

Prefabrication experiments - 500 - An Ongoing Tale of Two Fields: The Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972-2022)

For this significant milestone - blog post 500 - we close a series on how events, exhibits, publications, and comparisons to other industries have inspired, disseminated knowledge and demonstrated the benefits manufacturing-based methodologies in building production. Exhibits on industrialized construction have also often depicted a romanticized view of two conflicting value sets: design versus production. At the crux of prefab's quandary has been this deep-rooted tension between manufacturers' posture on mass-production as applied to architecture and architects' opposition toward what they perceive as the creation of a standardized built form. 

 

These two fields (architecture and industry) have occasionally converged in fertile experiments aimed at exploring innovative prototypes. The Metabolist era in Japan was shaped by vast post-war investments in production methods and spawned architectural visions of a future city based on an industrialized plug-in mobility: the cellular organization of inhabitable modules connected to service cores; individual dwelling pods or capsules would be mass-produced, delivered, simply connected to a support structure and potentially disconnected from the cores to be repaired or set into another system.

 

An icon of this mutable building approach designed by Kisho Kurokawa and built in Tokyo in 1972, was dismantled in 2022, putting to rest the utopian vision of the mobile capsule-based city. The Nakagin Capsule Tower's modules, intact for 50 years, were not used in subsequent projects, they were neither returned to their factory for repair nor their replacement. The building that represented mobility was revered by some (mainly architects) and regarded by others as a relic of postwar technological optimism never achieving its touted possibilities.

 

Today, the experiment is the object of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (July 10, 2025 to July 12, 2026); the retrospective entitled The Many Lives of the Nakagin Capsule Tower includes a restored unit. Using this icon as an art piece presents the failed experiment as the focal point of architectural/artistic innovation. While the exhibit addresses how cities change over time and evolve, the Capsule tower represents another spectacular attempt that ultimately failed to unite the fields of architecture and production. 

A photo from the exhibit website: see - https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5830

 

Prefabrication experiments - 499 - Automotive Industry versus Building Artistry...498(part 2)

The juxtaposition of automobile manufacturing with architectural prefabrication has predicted paradigmatic shifts in construction, along with productivity rhetoric for over a century. The logic is straightforward: if complex, high-quality objects like cars can be made to such perfected standards with factory methodologies - lowering costs while increasing features - why are buildings stuck and crafted in such one-off wasteful processes?

 

As carriage manufacturers began to include engines in their horseless drawn wagons, the automobile industry matured with pioneers Olds and Ford proposing the assembly line and interchangeable parts by the 1920s.  This burgeoning platform theory initiated normalisation practices by the Big Three in America and the democratization of the same principles in other countries (Fiat in Italy, Citroën in France). The artisanal crafting of motorized wagons was completely supplanted by mass production. During the fertile decades following the Second World War, the automobile industry was further improved through automation and Toyota Production System theory, articulating a highly integrated model from design to parts' manufacturing and final assembly. 

 

The advances and history of car making inspired analogous patterns and experiments in the supply of housing to reform construction practices. Early building industrialization included German companies Christoph & Unmack and Fertighaus Weiss. Both provided a framework for harmonized supply chains of materials, production jigs and hangars to produce pre-cut timber structures. Aladdin (1906) was one of the first companies in the North America to offer prepared bundles and kits, followed by modular volumetric building leaders Atco (1947) and Clayton (1956). Japanese companies (Sekisui (1960), Daiwa (1955)) harvested Toyota's principles to shape successful postwar prefab.  Notwithstanding the rich conceptual links, the parallels between house and car production are tenuous, as prefab and site-built housing evolved differently, with prefab only marginally penetrating the market as onsite's perceived flexibility inhibited scaled design and production. Even with massive government intervention and multi-generational roadmaps for increasing uptake, all failed in implementing industry-wide consolidation leaving the sector highly fragmented and artisanal. Fundamentally, building is and has long been regarded as an art form, structured in a different way leading to the one-off singular building as the valued model producing a long-lasting discord between industry and artistry.

Olds motor company (1897) ; Atco (1947)