Prefabrications experiments - 239 - drawings and representations - 10 - Cedric Price's Steel House and Letraset drawing device

The steel house, an icon of progress, remains an icon of prefabrication and a somewhat charged counter-proposal to the established balloon frame or lightweight timber platform frame. The case for steel was intrenched in its newness, stability, normalization, strength, and simplified assembly and disassembly of ready-made and ready to use components. Steel construction in housing proposals, ranged from folded plate elements inspired by car production to the skeletal structures informed by the displacement of timber construction patterns to iron and then to steel. The main advantage of steel over timber or masonry during modernity was conveyed through open frameworks with larger spans. Achieved with fewer material constraints, steel frames liberated classic planning principles as they eliminated the need for bearing walls. Further, the progression of steel components, standardized and catalogued, made it possible to envision customizable, modernized and adaptable prefabrication systems based on off the shelf pieces. 

Steel house proposals by Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, or Charles and Ray Eames acknowledged steel as a robust, manageable and adaptable material while emphasizing the open frame as a device for shaping spaces for evolving lifestyles. The conceptualization of the steel skeleton associated with modernity evolved into ideals of planning flexibility. Cedric Price’s Steel House project developed in the late 1960s is a notable example of the sequence between frame and open planning. Based on a series of juxtaposed modular steel supports, service and cladding modules orient adjustable planning possibilities underscored by the steel frame’s grid. Articulated to the idea of representing a freedom to plan and change within an evolving lifestyle, Price provided not only a process for open building, but a device for sharing his plan. The Letraset drawing tool, well-known to older generations of architects, provided a transfer method for the predefined kit elements and components to design, organize and draw a steel house according to Cedric Price’s method. The designer simply traces each component to transfer it to a drawing. Perhaps an ancestor of open source design, the shared Letraset transfer overlay included Price’s standardized language for infinite iterations. A normalized understanding of customizable design, Price’s representation tool framed changeable life pattern possibilities through a constant and democratic architectural position. 

Letraset overlay for Steel House

  

Prefabrication experiments - 238 - drawings and representations - 09 - Prefabrication's open language

For many, the idea of prefabrication connotes mass-produced cookie-cutter buildings with little or no customization potentials. The personalization of prefabricated architectural systems is an entrenched obstacle to the industrialization of architecture and construction. The prevailing position of architects exploring prefabrication has been to argue either for uniqueness or for open systems based on component flexibility leveraged toward varying shapes, geometries and uses. 

Walter Gropius and Ezra Ehrenkrantz’s positions symbolize the pursuit of  an unrestricted prefab. Both argued for an industrialized architecture assembled coherently by talented architects creating a strain of designs from preset parts. In line with this open strategy and while arguing for their Ecologic Building Systems in wood, steel and concrete, Laurence Stephan Cutler and Sherrie Stephens Cutler proposed a metaphor for their kit-of-parts architecture that is still interpreted, used and articulated in both academia and practice to illustrate a permissive relationship between components and their infinite variability. This model is presented below and hinges on sharing a basic structure and syntax. Prefabricated elements are to architecture what the alphabet is to literature, what notes are to music and what colors and shapes are to painting. If a writer develops a style through the same basic use of letters, words and sentences, it is certainly possible for architects to deploy pre-defined components and details to develop their own unique architecture. 

Still, the point at issue is - where does singularity lie in architecture ? Most components are mass-produced and so singularity rests in a coherent way these parts are assembled. If industrialized building systems predefine this coherence, then an argument can be made that they stint an architect’s capacity to offer a signature detail. The same kit-of-parts ideal that allowed for the Cutlers to define prefabrication as a language of parts in today’s increasingly digitalized sector would make it possible to define a very personal kit-of-parts manufactured specifically for each project. As digital fabrication evolves the language metaphor can be taken one step further and a designer could envision an alphabet as a singular undertaking. Then prefab could be analogous not with letters and language but with the many typefaces that can be used and developed for personal use.

Laurence Stephan Cutler and Sherrie Stephens Cutler's representation of the relationship between prefabrication and the alphabet

Prefabrication experiments - 237 - drawings and representations - 08 - Car Production as an Analogue

As a result of the process evolutions brought on by the industrial evolution, many sectors progressed concurrently while others were invented and offered opportunities for cross pollinating new methods and knowledge. Automobile production and the Ford assembly line specifically epitomized how complex products could be made affordable while gaining in qualitative aspects like quality control, metrics and repetition. Car production still symbolizes industrialization’s gains and advances. After Ford, the Toyota «lean» production method and more recently mass customization models continue to inspire builders, architects, industrialists and inventors to appropriate car production and leverage its instructions for the building sector. This ideal, supported by many during the 20th century, is still in many ways haunting the prefabricated building sector. 

One of many representations that compare building prefabrication to car production, Albert Farwell Bemis’ model in the schematic below is perhaps the theory most architects modelled their practice for achieving an architecture made from industrialized parts and pieces. Postwar tract housing, also validates this model; individualization was kept to a minimum. The model identified industrialization as a coordinated layering of systems. Even as it is clear that buildings and automobiles share certain systemic principles as frame and chassis (today’s industry sometimes uses the equally connotated car terminology: platfom), the building has one main differentiating element: Site and context. The systemic layering admitted that houses, while idealized as singular productions, share most of the basic housing elements, materials and methods. Bemis imagined the foundation as an anchor as other building components could be repeated from project to project – a personalized modularity. 

Bemis’ research and proposals addressed every aspect of building production as harmonizing mass production with supply chains through a regulated layering of systems and coordinated dimensions so that architects could manage projects holistically. Still widely applied, his layering acknowledged that a building would never be completely mass produced, along with aesthetic reasons, anchorage, earthwork, and grounding define architecture’s unicity. Even today, as prefab / industrialization and off-site construction are revived by issues of productivity and technology so are some weak, archaic and outmoded production models for architecture’s mass production. Bemis’s analogue identified similarities and sought to define a manner to attain uniqueness.

Bemis' rationalized comparison with car production

Prefabrication experiments - 236 - drawings and representations - 07 - The weightless adaptability of the Plas-2-Point

Fostered in an industrial society and influenced by historical processes, construction has developed into the articulate assembly of disparate elements for each individual project. Technical drawings associate individual parts to a whole. The unit to whole correlation is fundamental to the conceptual language of architectural design and elucidating how elements fit together. During modernity in architecture, this unit to whole synchronisation underlined a component based and systematic layering of pieces, parts, functions and spaces. Architecture and its manufactured parts were to be easily assembled or even disassembled to be redeployed in any other contexts or to serve varying needs.

While this unit to whole connection was in essence an interpretation of industrial production and its techniques, it endorsed the notion of a universally adaptable and flexible space idealizing a democratization of architecture. Two of the main themes of this universality included minimal building footprint, keeping earthwork to a minimum, and eliminating any bearing elements restricting planning freedom. This idealization of free panning and simplicity was translated by representations that expressed three modern tenets: mobility, assembly and adaptability. 

Rendered by Marcel Breuer in the drawing sheet below, the Plas-2-Point prototype certainly checks all the parameters; An open and free space floating over two bearing elements. The house’s structural system, envisioned as a shell or wing structure included identical but mirrored roof trusses and floor trusses tapered from the outer points toward a central vertical girder or beam that transferred the loads to two vertical stone posts. The space between the inverted floor and roof structure was completely free of structural constraints and could be organized according to user needs. 

Breuer’s representation of balance and harmony is an equally modern canon. The house is symmetrical both in plan and section and could theoretically use the same components for the floor and roof structure. Although the Plas-2-Point was never produced, Breuer’s design identified and underlined the era’s zeitgeist for creative building systems inspired by a type of weightless architecture. The house’s representation also epitomized a perception of mass production - a house could be designed and its methods represented on one drawing sheet. Analogous to a patent drawing, the vision was whole and comprehensive.

Plas-2-Point prefabricated house, elevation drawings, designed by Marcel Breuer, 1942. Marcel Breuer papers, 1920-1986. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Prefabrication experiments - 235 - drawings and representations - 06 - Glenn Murcutt and the exactness of drawings

The practice, scope and exactitude of today’s architectural drawings derives from an important evolution in architectural communication before and after industrialization. Architecture and construction influenced by mass production developed into the rational assembly of manufactured and catalogued components. Post-industrial technical drawings instructed builders replacing clerkships and craft-based traditions and knowledge sharing. The extent to which an architect details his/her designs signals how obsessive he/she is about how things ought to be put together. The modern architect used drawings to verbalize knowledge about components and processes. Systemic integration was key in drawings as they indicated the coherent union of disparate building elements. Holistic architectural thought merged with industrial production to underline modernity’s obsession with detailing. 

A masterful talent for drawing posited a comprehensive attitude toward architecture and construction. This relationship between drawing, architecture, assembly and construction is remarkably displayed in the drawings of Australian architect Glenn Murcutt. By integrating industrialized components in an overall project vision through careful and meticulous detailing, Murcutt’s work is recognized both through beautiful built works and intricate drawings. Murcutt’s conversant assembly of basic industrialized components was arguably shaped by the colonization of Australia, perhaps best represented by the Iron houses shipped from Great Britain during the gold rush. Corrugated iron simply fastened to iron struts and beams made for a simple no frills building system. This type of simple building strategy anchored in tradition produces a specifically rooted modernism in Murcutt’s designs. 

Murcutt’s drawings reveal a preoccupation for describing, listing, itemizing, juxtaposing and ordering components and their fastenings. The section drawing shown below for Murcutt’s Alderton House (1992) is a typical Murcutt production. The architect’s attention to detail is applied to every aspect of systemic integration from the project’s anchorage to its site through foundations to how piping from plumbing equipment can be organized. The section uses varying line thicknesses to masterfully illustrate parts that are is sectioned from parts that are not, to clarify depth, space, scale as well as specific components. Murcutt’s drawings are fundamental to understanding how detail is perceived in contemporary architecture. Not only is it a way of bringing building parts together but doing so to achieve an overall harmonic understanding of the total project.

Alderton house section - scanned from private book collection

Prefabrication experiments - 234 - drawings and representations - 05 - The Metabolist Instruction Manual

Architectural drawing’s use for communicating construction knowledge is well documented. Technical drawings are crucial legal documents and important for a building’s design, construction and subsequent operation. Made up of plans, sections, detailed views and explicit descriptions, a complete drawing set is an essential tool to track and consign any changes or alterations made to the building or its components. Along with their contractual and prescriptive nature drawings are equally essential in transmitting design possibilities or normalized building strategies. Pattern books have been a fundamental tool for marketing, selling and manufacturing buildings and their parts. Similarly, the renaissance’s technical “field measuring” of classical examples identified key proportioning elements and regulating lines for architecture. 

Architects elucidate their conceptual, technical and administrative vision for buildings. Technical drawings can in some cases also portray how a building is to be used, a type of instruction manual for edifices.  Modernity’s disavowal of historical references inferred a renewed importance for drawing to illustrate newness and the technological components of industrialized construction.  Metabolists cultivated by modernism used drawings to develop utopian views of future cities of mobility. More-over these visionary cities were inspired by and based on industrialization and automation sustained by post war Japan rebuilding programs. Metabolist drawings metaphorically articulated an optimism for a highly adaptable architecture.

Kisho Kurokawa’a capsule tower built in 1971, has in a certain sense become the symbolic model of the Metabolist movement. Along with this modular tower, Kurokawa proposed renewed housing prototypes as the union of collective infrastructures onto which individualized dwelling units could be plugged, added and removed according to a building’s life-cycle needs.  Developed in 1975 as a tourism hub in Bagdad, Iraq, the systemic illustration below pictures a typical metabolist comprehensive strategy for building and housing. The cylindrical infrastructure tower was conceived as a prestressed concrete, load-bearing servicing core, a tall “cob-hive” structure. The core would also act as a crane during construction and could conceivably continue to help maintain the structure over time. Capsule service space units plugged into the vertical core define living spaces while balcony platforms and curtain wall elements complete open served spaces and the architectural proposal. Kurokawa’s drawings represented the medium and message of this adaptable urbanity.

Kurokawa's proposal for a a vertical dwelling cluster

Prefabrication experiments - 233 - drawings and representations - 04 - The axonometric view of prefabrication

A clear and concise representation of an idea is fundamental to architecture. The axonometric drawing, a parallel projection composed in isometric, dimetric, or trimetric projections, is perhaps the most widely used form of three-dimensional visualization. Rules for isometric drawings were established by William Farish in the 18^th century to accurately represent scale without completely distorting an object’s dimensions. 

Employed in architecture and industrial design, the axonometric drawing is a universally applied device for rendering architectural and design ideas. The axonometric is one of the modern architecture’s preferred tools depicting the components, elements and mechanical imagery of the machine age. It also symbolised a break with more classic illustration. The axonometric is suited to monolithic, planar or assembled objects and a favoured illustration method for sharing instructions of all forms of predesigned productions. 

Particularly well-suited for explaining systems, elements and identifying the varied components needed to edify a work, the axonometric democratizes design for the masses. As shown in the Seco building system catalogue (illustrated below), these types of axonometric drawings intertwined with the very concept of prefabricated building and design for assembly. Associated with a kit-of-parts approach, the axonometric not only defines lines, edges and descriptive geometry but it showcases a total understanding of the built-form; Unlike plans and sections, this 3d representation requires the additional feature of juxtaposing various faces and defining their assembly and joinery and what, if any, folding or unfolding exists along an object’s axis. 

A variation of the axonometric drawing, the exploded axonometric has evolved into a device for architects or designers to depict the layering of a coherent thought process. The Diogene Retreat designed by Renzo Piano, illustrated in the image below famously represents this type of view and its use in architecture. Displaying parts, pieces, components and their relationship to the whole this design tool fits nicely in the contemporary idea of architecture as a comprehensive discipline. More-over architects like Piano use the exploded axonometric to portray their understanding of how every part is interrelated and to demonstrate their capacity to organize, compose, distribute, regulate and synthesize a complex architectural mandate into a succinct architectural view. 

Left - page from the Seco building system catalogue
Right - Exploded axonometric diagram for the Diogene retreat.

Prefabrication experiments - 232 - drawings and representations - 03 - Elucidating Simplicity - The Utility Core

Printed in 1869, An axonometric drawing of Catherine Beecher’s American Women’s Home exposed a modern house as a total environmental system. Each mechanical component was connected to a central flue. From evacuating foul air to distributing water, fresh air and power, the stack was also the focal organizing point for the house’s spaces and functions. Kitchen and bath areas were juxtaposed to this central distributing element. Shaping the house around its technical spaces evolved with this conceptualization and informed one of modernity’s key tenets, the division of served and service spaces. The construction and manufactured housing industries also followed suit with the development of standardized core elements that would facilitate the mass production of houses.

Services cores replaced the hearth of traditional dwellings, the centrally placed technical heart or the building’s engine would be a founding element of modern architecture. Somewhere between a specifically technological element and the representation of a talented architect’s capacity to contain all technical requirements in one excellently designed element, the service core is a design topic explored and considered by many. 

Drawing is organizing and organizing is designing. The ability to coherently devise a strategy to motor a home represented a modern design skill. The centralized core defined this capacity and implemented a greater association of architecture and construction as technical elements and design elements were harmonized.

The core was expressed in a specifically modern manner and perhaps most stringently in Mies’ prototype for individualized living, the Farnsworth house. All of the houses technical elements were linked to one tube that connected the house to infrastructure and eliminated waste. One tube or one flue as in Beecher’s diagram from 1869. In the Farnsworth design, Mies illustrated two modern obsessions with drawing and representing space, the grid and the core, both were tools to regulate or rule over any design elements. Prefabricated or not, the core predesigned and established a guide for its user and eliminate any systematic entanglement.  Mies’ core, contains in its essence, what drawing and representation are to architecture: language, a rationalizing element, clearly evoking what the building is, how it is organized and how it works all rolled into one simple concentric element.

Left: Catherine Beecher’s American Women’s Home
Right: Mies' core at Farnsworth

Prefabrication experiments - 231 - drawings and representations - 02 - Sharing the Balloon Frame

At once sign and signifier, drawings are to architecture and building culture what words and syntax are to literature. Representing worlds, spaces, edifices, temples, techniques and procedures, drawings depict, indicate, measure and specify. As such drawings are an essential device for sharing knowledge. A Longstanding tool in architectural treatises, architectural illustration is understood and used by architects and builders to speak skillfully about construction. 

R. Scott Burn’s treatise «Building Construction; Showing the employment of Timber, Lead, and Iron Work in the Practical Construction of Buildings» published in 1877 used drawings to elucidate strategies that could readily be applied to any building type. The timber details specifically, showcased a relatively recent building system, that would transform building culture. Complex notches, joinery and woodworking were being replaced by nailing and years of carpentry training could be supplanted by a good set of drawings depicting a number of important structural details and nailing principles. Based on the machine operated saw-mill and nail cutters the use of mass-produced nails and timber sticks simplified skeletal construction. Heavy timber box frames evolved into lightweight versions with corresponding composing parts spaced closely for bearing walls (studs), floors (joists) and roofs (rafters and purlins). These main constituting parts transformed construction and a nation’s landscape. 

The balloon frame would be shared by drawings in architecture, building and agricultural journals and would altogether reform industrialized building culture. Clear and concise instructions for joining, cutting and matching expounded a Do-It-Yourself culture for housing. Drawings and their subsequent open sharing allowed anyone with access to timber, nails and a saw to become a builder. Craft was in a sense replaced or perhaps more correctly usurped by drawings. There are numerous examples of balloon frame drawings in trade journals or catalogues. The balloon frame’s and subsequently the platform frame’s (a-one story variation, attributed to William J Levitt) circulation gained popularity in mass literature. “Raising Walls on a Slab Floor” published in the August 1946 issue of Popular Science exemplified this. The article’s beginner's illustration described the manageable construction of a timber framed walls. These drawing types are an integral part of balloon frame history and D-I-Y culture in construction. 

Burn's treatise (left) - Popular Science - August 1946 (right)

Prefabrication experiments - 230 - drawings and representations - 01 - Eliot Noyes' aluminum modular structure

In his 2005 book, The Prefabricated Home, Colin Davies identified the sometimes confluent but often divergent relationship between architecture and industry. Davies argued that a post World War II deviation lead architecture toward an idealized interpretation of prefabrication leaving industry moored to its mass production paradigm. Our next ten blog posts will examine how architects and industry have portrayed prefabrication through drawings or varied forms of representation. 

Opening with the concept of a convergence between the fields of architecture and manufacturing, architect Eliot Noyes’ involvement with the aluminum industry exemplifies the nature of certain key partnerships which informed an American modernism anchored in this unified message between designers and their protagonists. Aluminum, a modern material for a modern discipline was promoted and helped encourage this kind of branding equity. 

Noyes is probably best known for the Selectric typewriter he designed for IBM in 1960. A Harvard school of design graduate (1938), Noyes expressed the corporate design culture that came to define the industrial architect / industrial designer serving to modernize and legitimize capitalist business ethos and its imagery. The modular aluminum structure Noyes designed for Alcoa, never evolved beyond the mock-up pictured below. The structure represented aluminum as an ideal material for a modern lifestyle: multi-use, flexible, and adaptable. The structure would be part of any home requiring extra space for their consumables.   Light and almost, floating on “fingers of light”, the structure was shiny and new just like the future of American society. The modular folded plane roof canopy was rooted in the overhead plane as a universal and essential space/place making device. The structure sat on four posts which composed a completely open space and system that could theoretically be juxtaposed to many more to form carports, garden sheds and shelters of any size and scope.

The aluminum industry was a fundamental component of post-war design as its military development was easily and intentionally transferred for civilian use. Noyes’ modular shelter, an open system, is particularly representative of prefabrication culture within architecture. Contrary to what the industrial sector was deploying, here the architect posited that architecture would be industrialized through an ideal of customizable modularity, a comprehensively adaptable space.

Alcoa add for the modular structure July 25 1959