Prefabrication experiments - 107 - Open-source architecture for mass housing

The benefits of industrialized building techniques combined with skeletal frame structures and an intelligible design strategy complementing its users’ changing needs or evolving lifestyles helped found the enduring values of flexible planning. Le Corbusier’s generic flat slab DOM-INO housing system and Walter Gropius’ expandable house system showcased early 20^th century architectural variability. Later, experiments like Herman Hertzberger's "in between spaces, or spaces interpreted by their users" offered a type of systemic adaptability through common infrastructure.

N.J. Habraken referred to personal alteration of a generic infrastructure as the natural relationship for MH (mass housing). Borrowed by open building theorists as their common framework, the ideal of nonspecific adjustable/flexible/modular systems is developing into more than just adaptable housing but into a model of open-source sharing of housing concepts for design and construction. Wikihouse and Paperhouses both offer public permissions and argue in favour of sharing designs or systems and maintain the principles of individualized adaptability.

Contrasting with the traditional idea of the «architect» designed original one-off building, Chilean Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena of Elemental architecture has begun distributing cad and pdf files of four adaptable housing projects on a creative commons license. Individuals can download, use, modify and pursue each project according to their personal needs. Revising the traditional criteria for authorship, Elemental Achitecture publicly shares its vision for mass housing. Their «abc of incremental housing» makes a case for open-source distribution and for adaptable, simple and densely organised housing concepts. Of the four open-source projects, the Villa Verde project designed in 2013 for 484 Chilean families most emblematically represents the ideal of a generic infrastructure. The open frame composed of a folded surface plane defines a cross section that can be inhabited from 57 to 85m2 paralleling a family’s evolution.

Based on precepts developed in projects such as Avi Friedman's grow home in the 1970’s and 1980’s the incremental housing strategy is on-line and ready for download. The creative commons license allows users to engage with professionally designed work. This open source ecosystem is set to change the way we think about sharing information. Knowledge is valued above authorship; a major change in Architecture’s singular building tradition.

Villa Verde open-source housing project

Prefabrication experiments - 106 - Shigeru Ban's seven-story manifesto

Readily debarked, cut, divided, carved, sanded, planed, or traditionally hand-hewn with a broad axe, the diversity with which timber can or has been fashioned elevated wood’s artisans to legendary status. As was the case with the master mason, the master carpenter, or the great artisan «daiku» in Japanese building culture, was responsible for both designing and building. Elucidating the tectonics of weaving, interlocking joints, artistry and precision, Japanese temples, Scandinavian log stacking, and European box frame exemplify the master carpenters’ talents in frame as well as mass timber building.

The meticulous crafting of connections associated with traditional timber building was somewhat lost to the invention of steel fasteners. Joinery and its master craftsmen became too expensive to compete with the commodification of wood building. The balloon frame developed into the icon of this commodification. The politics of war and industrialization further strained wood’s use as concrete and steel, icons of development, monopolized civic architecture's requirement for flexibility, height and large spans.

The improvement of wood composite hybrids such as glue laminated or cross- laminated timber products combined with the democratization of numerically controlled cutting and fabrication renew complex joinery as a viable strategy in rationalized building methods. The advancements in wood dividing and bonding have increased wood’s effectiveness on par with both steel and concrete. Modern techniques produce a large range of shapes and profiles for both vertical and horizontal spans and for every building type with comparatively low embodied energy.

Shigeru Ban, a Japanese born architect, well known for his work that explores the links between traditional and contemporary building culture, designed a frame structure that exemplifies the tall wood paradigm while highlighting numerically cut joinery as the structure’s main architectural feature. The seven-story post and beam structure was designed and built for the Tamedia publishing company in Zurich. The exceptional glue-laminated posts and beams are digitally milled with great precision. Vulgar nails and bolts are replaced with dowel pins made of beech plywood, which tie the structural components together. A veritable mega-structure-puzzle of precisely engineered parts, the framework didactically reflects the architect's fascination with woodcraft while the glue-laminated timber demonstrates an intelligent and intelligible use of a sustainable and renewable resource.

Joinery photograph and drawings view from the architect's website

Prefabrication experiments - 105 - Vertebrae vertical bathroom (Patent GB2376183)

Harnessing, tempering and distributing water, heat and power in a building generate their share of design, technical and coordination disputes. Within the spectrum of building’s conveniences, devices and their interactions, the generative relationship between human hygiene and planning has been highlighted by even the most ancient civilizations. Water gives a building its potential to service and underscores architecture’s hospitability. Industrialization domesticated this serviceability through the modern bathroom and standardized its components. This regularity offered design possibilities for arranging a building’s service distribution.

Service cores or utility cores in all shapes and sizes were generated from component standardization. The strategy offered a systemic design and construction process producing self-contained engine-like nuclei, potentially reducing system entanglement. The core was to building what the engine was to the automobile. 

Along with simplifying services, the relationship between the core and its served spaces can engender greater flexibility as the adjacent spaces can be freed from mechanical constraints. This adaptability in planning was taken one step further by the Vertebrae bathroom’s inventor. The bathroom pillar/column is based on the idea of a hygiene hub. The inventor’s main argument is that in a common bath each fixture is only deployed for minutes at a time while permanently taking up space. The inventor proposed a core unit that stacks each fixture enabling its use as required and minimizing overall spatial footprint.

The Vertebrae vertical bathroom commercialized by Design Odysee Ltd was developed based on the patents requested by designer Paul Anthony Hernon. The 150 kg vertical device articulates each common bath fixture including sink, toilet, shower and some storage spaces onto a vertical service conduit. Geared to small spaces, the transformable unit serves as a spatial focal point from which adjacent spaces react. Analogous to a foldable Murphy bed, a reduction of overall spatial requirements could be attained, as the space is multifunctional.

Concentrating services into a simple operable unit, it performs as active built-in furniture relating to the different heights and scales of the human body. All components rotate a full 360 degrees except for the shower elements, which align at 180 degrees. Somewhere between a standard service core and an operable plumbing wall, the vertebrae displays the longstanding principle of containing all services in a contained commodity-like core, which continues to defy and appeal to designers. 

Patent drawing from patent GB2378183

  

Prefabrication experiments - 104 - Ferrocement thin shell structures

Hybrid materials, their implementation, strength and versatility, exemplify the important advances of industrial development. The chemistry of plastics, the metallurgy of alloys aimed at improving steel or the union of steel and cement in reinforced concrete developed effective composite materials for construction. Modern architecture and its new programs benefitted from the large open spans engendered by the innovative use of these composites. Hardened cement reinforced with steel typifies the hybrid «modern» material. First employed as a kind of «magical powder» by Roman builders, the nineteenth century's production capacity directed a renaissance for hydrated and reinforced cement.

Patented in France in 1848, ferrocement preceded basic reinforced concrete by decades. Steel webbing encased in Portland cement produces a thinner, stronger and lighter material. As opposed to reinforced concrete, the cement is mixed without large aggregates and the steel reinforcing mesh is considerably tighter. The pasty mixture of sand, cement and water is troweled over compactly woven steel mesh or expanded metal lath: a fortifying fibre textile like surface. The monolithic hybrid's tensile strength and cracking endurance are superior to those of reinforced concrete. Produced in thin panels for finishes or for wall systems, the lightweight material also contributed to a revolution in structural capacity. Displayed most famously by Pier-Luigi Nervi in some of the most remarkable structures of the 20^th century, ferrocement embodied the idea of structural efficiency and material economy.

The concepts displayed by Nervi early in the 20^th century can also be found in the thin shell ferrocement prototype module proposed by the Leningrad Research Institute of Standardized and Experimental Design as a stand-alone house. The dwelling unit employed a thinly cast eggshell shaped ovoid structure. Weighing five tons with an inhabitable area of some thirty-five square meters the capsule could be airlifted or transported to any site. Its form resistant silhouette defined the thin shell’s sectional dimension of 120 mm.  Akin to fiberglass boat hull construction the composite cement and reinforcing mesh was completely self-sufficient and required no on-site foundations as the capsule could be deposited on  compressed gravel infrastructure. In matters of experimental prefabricated housing or temporary dwellings, Ferrocement is still put forward in developing countries as it requires little specialization and is merely contingent to the construction of a supporting mesh.

The ovoid shaped dwelling structure

 

Prefabrication experiments - 103 - Habitat New York II

Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 designed and built as an experimental prototype of collective housing for the 1967 World Fair in Montreal is certainly one of the most recognizable and distinctive architectural experiments of the 20th century. Renewing the modern tradition of demonstration architecture, it was at once a knowledge incubator and a catalyst for innovation. Proposed as the union of the single family dwelling with the benefits of shared infrastructure, the pyramid shaped utopia of grouped living shells or modules employed a rigorous geometric stacking informed by issues of proximity, circulation and dynamic architectural movement. Engaging a need for density, the experiment at the Man and His World exhibition in Montreal spawned from academic design research engendered multiple prototypes to be tested all over the world. 

One of Safdie’s many proposals explored geometry and modularity with a somewhat futuristic aesthetic. Somewhere between Japanese metabolism and Archigram’s hyper-dense living mega-structures, Habitat New York II was to be built in New York City's east harbour adjacent to the Brooklyn Bridge. The overall composition resembled Habitat 67's pyramidal shape but exhibited a more complex structural strategy. Slip-formed central cores or masts used for circulation anchored catenary structural cables encased in concrete, which produced the sail-like profile. The stacked modules were suspended from these stressed cables and occupied the space between the arc segments and the vertical piers. The octagon as opposed to rectangular prism was used as a basic building block combined in multiple organisations both in plan and in section.

Reintroducing on the era’s plug and play capsule aesthetic each unit's section related to its neighbouring unit. Flats were either one floor or split-level  «raumplan» configurations and the resulting dense interactions were offset by rational placement of both exterior spaces and openings onto magnificent views. The triangulated vertical clusters were placed on site in a diagonal grid pattern that maximized openness from the city to the harbour.

The somewhat artificial geometric aesthetic was a major change from the simplicity of Habitat 67. Habitat New York II was never built, due to lack of funding. It is part of a series of experiments that endeavoured to bridge the need to maximize social collective infrastructure with privacy and individual dwelling units. 

Habitat New York II - building section