Prefabrication experiments - 505 - Marrying Design and Affordability - The Modern Split-level

The frictions between quality housing design and affordability are often restrictive but can sometimes generate innovative types. Seriality versus singularity; individual versus collective; productivity versus creativity, these dualities can be distilled down to the idea that housing must balance creativity with streamlined and efficient supply chains. Replicability versus originality is the crux of the conceptual divide between architecture and construction or design and production, long mired in different fields with divergent value sets. 

 

The prejudices against postwar suburban tract housing design are symbolic of this divide with builders producing large quantities of repetitive housing to respond to fundamental needs. This had most architects retreating into positions of passive criticism. However, an engagement of design with production has now and then led to beautiful, formidable and robust housing types by tweaking systems with an ingrained frugality. The platform-framed split-level, synonymous with mid-century development, is one example founded on a fertile relationship between cheap light timber framing and simple spatial ingenuity.

 

The origins of the split-level are explored in literature but the notion that its qualities bridge the gap between design and production is not clearly theorized. Its appreciation by architects, builders and consumers alike conveys elements that cross this cultural divide: simple spatial organization, loftiness of double-height spaces, direct and grounded interaction between interior and exterior spaces, and patios are just some of its valued characteristics.

 

Built in developments all over North America and beyond, with iconic examples by developers like Ralph Bodek, a well-known president of the Philadelphia Home Builders during the 1950s who built more than 6000 homes, and in experimental neighbourhoods by TAC (The Architect’s Collaborative) at Six Moon Hill and Five Fields (both in Lexington, Massachusetts - see blog article 85), the split tuned architectural and productive parameters in a mid-century architectural gem. The simple sectional split illustrated in the image below by architectural historian Nathanael Roesch highlights the vertical dynamism which many adopted as a prototype of single-family dwelling. 

 

Not the only archetype of harmonizing values of design with affordability, the next blog posts will oppose, compare, and define architectural tweaking of systems invented for productivity.

Illustration scanned from: Lane, Barbara Miller. Houses for a New World: Builders and Buyers in American Suburbs, 1945–1965. Princeton University Press, 2015.

 

Prefabrication experiments - 504 - A New Generation of Curtain walls - Unitiwall

 

Modern construction methods generalized the use of new and speculative materials; however, some of these products and systems fulfilled short service lives, and have required buildings to become energy intensive through mechanical systems for heating and air conditioning. The curtain wall is the ubiquitous invention associated with modernity and symbolized the radical transformation of architecture liberated from bearing walls and elements; these lightweight transparent envelopes with glass plates sandwiched within metallic frameworks were suspended from reinforced concrete or steel skeletal structures. 

 

Performance of these glass buildings was largely limited to speed of erection. Glass curtains or heavy precast concrete versions accelerated construction with large, panelized façades dimensioned for optimal transport, setting, and assembly. Responding to an outmoded 20^th century globalized building culture based only on obsolescence and speed, they are being critically re-examined as they’re difficult to retrofit and their replacement results in sending tons of non-recyclable components to waste sites.

 

Today, both heavy and lightweight curtain wall envelopes as well as more conventional non-bearing exterior walls have aged, deteriorated, and need to be updated or renovated according to contemporary normative requirements, evolving building science and in tune with low-carbon alternatives. These parameters are informing a new generation of high-performance curtain walls used to completely overclad / overhaul existing structures. Unitiwall is an example of this new generation of prefabricated, mega-panels and industrialized envelopes that are efficiently designed for new buildings, repair, replacement, or retrofits.

 

The Unitiwall is a Canadian product with a patent covering the unitized panel system. Modular, large panels, with maximum dimensions of 4.3 x 7.3m, are manufactured according to customizable design options; the comprehensive system includes a structural frame, an insulated weatherproof layering of core materials, windows and exterior furring strips for cladding. Just like their concrete and glass predecessors, panels are lifted into place, hung onto frames or attached to an existing façade system at the end of its service life to increase overall energy efficiency. A perimeter gasket creates a pressurized seal at joints between juxtaposed or stacked panels. Based on a synchronized digital DfMA process, the panelized open system can be prepared for on-site cladding or shipped with factory-installed cladding according to predetermined design options. 

An potential installation of Unitiwall^TM

Prefabrication experiments - 503 - The Twentieth Century Brick

 

Blended to renew both affordable housing provision and the mobile home industry in the US, master modernist Paul Rudolph proposed a 4000-dwelling capsule scheme attached to service cores on a site in Lower Manhattan on the banks of the Hudson River.  The ambitious project was never built, however its underlying concepts epitomized one of the 20th century's most contentious prefab strategies - the industrialized trailer home. During his career, Rudolph studied the mobile home as a design module and often defined it as American vernacular or even as a 

« 20th century Brick » (Architectural Record; April, 1968).

 

The object of much criticism including sub-par production parameters and materials, Rudolph suggested reframing housing affordability through modifying the manufacturing of stick-built trailer homes for the mass production of « modular capsules », made from steel or even reinforced concrete, and then stacked or aggregated to create collective housing. 

 

Rudolph's mobile units would arrive on site as prepackaged ready-to-live-in flats. Carried on standard trailers the 12-foot single-wide boxes were designed with fold-out spaces intended to be deployed within the final building's organization. In lieu of stacking which had become the norm for modular volumetric building strategies, the Lower Manhattan proposal's boxes were suspended from cantilevered megatruss elements with cables subsequently encased in reinforced post-stressed concrete. The same concept of modular units was imagined for low-density proposals; however, all showcased the architect’s fascination with the mobile home - not as a trailer for small informal communities, but as a device for teaching architects and project stakeholders about industrialization's possibilities. 

 

Founded on bulk purchases, quick on-site erection, and industrialized efficiencies, Rudolph postulated the future of housing as a progression of the American trailer home into vertical clusters. Operation breakthrough followed a year after the proposal for New York, and many proposals introduced the modular unit either by stacking or hanging them as part of densely packed urban housing strategies. Habitat 67 in Montreal and metabolist towers such as the iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower were all part of this era's fascination with encapsulating the mobile home's affordability and volumetric individual / collective massing as an architectural tectonic harmonizing newness with applied seriality to solve housing shortages. 

Image from Architectural Record, April 1968

Prefabrication experiments - 502 - The Grid and Modern Theory : Christian Norberg-Schulz’s case study houses

 

Well-known for his numerous publications and their contributions to architectural pedagogy in his native Norway and abroad, Christian Norberg-Schulz is one of the most important architectural theorists of the 20th century. From Genius Loci (1980), to New World Architecture (1988), and to The Concept of Dwelling (1993), the author, professor and practitioner examined experience and phenomenology as the basis for a specific vision combining modernism with local traditions in architecture. 

 

These strategies were also articulated in practice with Arne Korsmo and later in his solo studio. A Fulbright scholar at Harvard in the 1960s, he also taught at Yale and MIT and was Dean of Architecture and Design in Olso. He collaborated with Korsmo in 1955 in a notable cluster of row houses originally planned as ten. Only three were built at Planetveien, one of which would become his own. The grouping of single-family dwellings explored open spaces inundated with natural light and the potential to aggregate individual needs with the effective collective massing strategies. 

 

A manifesto of modern design principles, the dwelling reflects the obsession that many modernists had with modular design principles. Each space follows a 12-foot-by-12-foot (3.6x3.6m) major grid as a tool for planning rooms, rigorously organising materials and tectonic details. Like Schindler, Wright, Mies and many others a 48-inch-by-48-inch (1.2x1.2m) minor module regulates everything from partitions to integrated furniture, façades and structures are all anchored by to the all-encompassing, controlling nature of the grid. 

 

For modernists, the grid was a compositional device but also related to ideas of affordability and industrialization as it normalized building systems and materials to be integrated according to their fabrication and production dimensions, theoretically reducing waste. The post and beam system also based on the grid-module showcases the modular coordination theories developed in the early 1920s, the grid also arranges a clear separation of structure and skin, as well as served and service spaces - all iconic elements included in Shulz’s case study of affordable mass housing.

Site massing and modular grid planning strategy