Prefabrication experiments - 508 - Natural Pavilion

Associated with authors and researchers N. John Habraken (Supports and Infill) and Stewart Brand (How Buildings Learn), adaptability includes strategies that facilitate a building's evolution and its functional changes over time; converted to new needs, uses or simply to be renewed with replacement parts as needed. Material circularity principles take this one step further as architecture is conceived and produced to be completely dismantled into its constituent components and potentially delivered as a kit to a new site and toward multiple service lives.  

 

From individualized fit-out (Habraken) and systemic autonomous layering (Brand), both proposed design solutions framed by their permanence: long-term durability for infrastructure and at the other end of the spectrum easy to replace and redesign elements for short-lived banalities. These strategies outline «open building» theories that have been and continue to be explored most proficiently in the Netherlands. 

 

The 1000-square-meter Natural Pavilion test structure assembled in 2022, designed by dp6 architectuurstudio in the city of Almere, well-known for its architectural prototypes, combines an «open» modular timber framework with bio-sourced and recycled materials. The structural platform frame is completed with CLT floor plates. Wall panels and other flexible infill elements include bio-based or recycled materials along with reused plate glass elements harvested from buildings that no longer required them; all elements are dimensionally coordinated to create many possible configurations.  

 

The structural frame is based on an analogous principle to shipping containers where standardized connectors facilitate stacking 3x3x3m cubes composed of similarly profiled posts and beams. Three-faced heavy-duty moment connector plates fixed to the end of each timber member constitute the vertices of the off-site or on-site prefabricated modular volumes. The built-up perimeters of these open box frames are then simply bolted together at the plates' extending intersections. Steel bars are placed diagonally as needed to brace certain faces against lateral loads.The steel connectors have a furniture-scale quality, like those used in standard modular shelving.  

 

In opposition to the seamless continuity, we have come to expect from our modern building interiors, this pavilion shows the cultural leap required for the design-for-disassembly approach to be more than just another pipe dream in the history of adaptable prefabrication.

Modular open frame boxes designed for disassembly

 

Prefabrication experiments - 507 - ...in passing, again

Providing high-quality, creative as well as comfortable, affordable and resilient housing is a contemporary challenge, with demand not seen since early industrialization, urbanization, and world wars drove population displacements, shortages and massive rebuilds. The impetus to supply housing productively has renewed discussions around factory production and its potentials to improve conventional construction's degrading productivity. 

 

Policies pushing for greater uptake include road maps, building type catalogues, centralized building designs, all pushing the idea that efficiency is related to normalized patterns outlined for quicker and cheaper production. However, the standardization that succeeded in other industrial sectors is difficult to reproduce in construction where local traditions, regulatory frameworks, civil infrastructures, and climate conditions particularize project criteria and characteristics limiting architectural or systemic repeatability. 

 

Regularity in design is the basis for mass production's capacity to reduce costs while increasing quality and output. From mass customization to platform approaches promoting design families for different residential assets, these methodologies have garnered interest, but remain marginal, as both fields architecture and manufacturing remain mired in their anchored values. 

 

A fundamental cultural shift is required for architects and designers to understand industrial processes and their application; at the same time manufacturers in the building sector need to be educated in what constitutes quality architecture. The automobile, ship, aircraft, and mobile phone industries along with many others integrate design criteria values from the start of product development. All too often, industrialized production of architecture is seen as just another sub-trade in the construction process which makes it extremely difficult to become cost and design effective on a project-by-project basis. 

 

Systemic change is difficult to replicate within a construction culture ingrained in its artisanal fragmentation. Still, the change is necessary and could eventually provide outlets for a new type of industrialized architecture defined by some form of content standardization that supports innovation. The argument of singularity is moot, as architecture already repeats many processes; it is time to harness greater collaborative efforts between fields to achieve design productiveness. If the discussion continues to oppose unique design to cookie-cutter repetition, no advancement is possible. 

Resolution 4 architecture's take on normalization and singularity

 

Prefabrication experiments - 506 - Jean Barets' Near-site Prefabrication

 

The number of building systems invented to quell housing shortages in the wake of the Second World War is impressive. Lightweight experimental building kits in steel, timber and aluminum, plastic composite shell prototypes and most prolifically heavy panelized systems in reinforced precast concrete were deployed to rebuild and affordably house the masses. Most benefited from some form of government sponsorship using policies to initiate large-scale building underscored by the need to reform a stagnating construction industry. Factory production had been a determining factor in advancing wartime technologies and the optimism linked to new technologies propelled the following thirty years of building programs. 

 

As systems were designed and tested the tension between individuality and serial production became a central focus - some remained anchored to the mass production of elements scaled for a myriad of repeating buildings, while others projected variable near-site production and assembly as a bridge between productivity and customization. These different approaches were embodied by two French heavy precast systems with iconic names, Camus and Barets; both achieved success, with thousands of flats produced all over Europe and abroad. 

 

Most large panel blocks seem to have been cut from the same cloth, but they contain some important differences. Camus - see blog posts 131 and 311 -  relied on greater initial production investments and factory-intensive processes, while the Jean Barets system proposed near site assembly lines for frames, panels and floor slabs assembled monolithically with site-cast concrete or mortar filled joints. 

 

The near-site agility made it possible to bring fabrication to any context and reasonably sized projects without relying on the vital upfront project pipeline as was the case for the Camus panel blocks. Project specific finishes and profiles could be determined by architects and designers with an open system nimble enough to adapt to any residential building type as was shown in a beautiful example by architect Marcel Breuer at the Z.U.P. project in Bayonne (1964-68) using the panel production process which when all told would be used to develop 16 000 flats of different sizes and scales. The project specific panels, modulated as thick architectural envelopes, were nuanced to develop rich textures and profiles from tweaked repeating moulds. 

Section through panels in the Bayonne project