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
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