Prefabrication experiments - 282 - modular city building - 03 - Mat-building

Coined by author and architect Alison Smithson, mat-building, sometimes known as mat-housing, is a modular strategy or system based on the clustering of mass and voids into inhabitable dynamic architectural fields. The mat component denotes a limitless expanse layered over a rigorous planning grid. While not exclusively structural in nature, the grid circumscribes the edifice’s interrelated scale, span and scope.  Mat-housing usually relates to a modular aesthetic illustrated by iconic projects like Paul Rudolph’s Oriental Masonic Gardens, employing building units and volumes as bricks in an interplay of interior and exterior dwelling environments.  Along with the mat imagery, the theoretical ideal of an integrated adaptability and flexibility underscored the most notable example of Mat-building: The Free University of Berlin designed by Candilis, Josic, Woods and Schiedhelm in 1963 arrayed the basic framework of mat-building to define a campus (field in Latin) building that could evolve as needed over time.  The two to three storey scheme projected variability in plan and section across a horizontal plane characterized by a mass / void relationship akin to a Medina or medieval organization connecting public and common areas with more functional spaces for teaching.

 

The material heart of this mat-building was an innovative building system proposed by Jean Prouvé. Le «Tabouret» or stool building system proposed an open plan grid structural system. A square grid of large spanning beams, girders or even space frames determined floor or roof platforms: the open web structural plates were raised over spaced out columns or posts.  Together, the posts and platforms shaped the simple «stool» suggestion. Familiar to other Prouvé projects, a 1-meter grid of steel lightweight panels were proposed as interchangeable parts of the building envelope. The «plan libre» free of any bearing walls made it possible to change the building's interiors, furnishings and even functions over time.  The building as a type of matrix or normalized field made its components both interchangeable and expandable. Its expandability was put to the test in 1997 when Foster and partners were mandated to add a library and undertake a complete restoration. Thirty percent of the removed components were saved and reused as intended by Prouvé’s original structural system. 

Prouvé's open plan «Tabouret» system

Prefabrication experiments - 281 - modular city building - 02 - City in the Air

 

Dwelling mobility and interoperability were the basis of utopian postwar architectural projects for rebuilding Japan by young architects who in their way were the protagonists of a high modernist architectural regime articulated to technology. A Pritzker Architecture Prize winner in 2019, Arata Isozaki was an emblematic proponent of the Japanese metabolist movement, which perceived and designed the city as an organic organism. Expanding and contracting as needed, urbanity was organized around megastructures that provided the community infrastructure and services for modular clustered dwellings. The city would evolve according to a predetermined cellular structure. Dwellings were imagined as moveable commodities within the overall framework, inserted or replaced as needed. The entire city would be a type of scalable entity established from modular components. Even though Isozaki is known for much more than these ideas, The City in the Air project he designed outlined the basic elements of the metabolist architectural solution.  

 

In Isozaki's vision, horizontal circulation would branch out from vertical cores generating areas for horizontal dwelling distribution akin to linear viewing portals radiating from the central trunks. Further, building this new city infrastructure over the existing one would act as a type of pressure valve allowing the city to scale up or down as required. Metabolist speculative visions inspired architects and academia and repurposed the component based construction systems that were becoming familiar in Eastern European collective housing blocks to apply them to city making. Many megastructures were elaborated around a basic concept; a vertical circulation element anchored to place onto which modular units were attached leaving the ground plane free for urban networks. Perhaps inspired by LeCorbusier's Cité Radieuse, densely packed vertical dwellings would liberate the ground plane and elevate dwellings bringing them closer to light and separate them from perceived unsanitary living conditions closer to the streets.  This vision was applied in both an inverted pyramid towering proposal and an inhabitable bridge truss proposal. 

 

More streamlined versions were explored in many experiments and portrayed most ambitiously by Habitat 67 in Montréal by Moshe Safdie; individualized units had their own personal and private access and further the checkerboard type disposition allowed for each unit to be a singular recognizable element in the overall composition. 

City in the Air model

 

Prefabrication experiments - 280 - modular city building - 01 - City Tower

The correlation between a basic construction unit or element and its multiplication or aggregation into whole edifices is the conceptual starting point for connecting prefabrication, design and construction. Known as modular coordination, this modernist canon argues for component interoperability driven by dimensional standards for materials and assemblies. This idea percolated mainstream construction as of the 1930s and still outlines conventional construction coordination and documentation. Although, not as typical, the same posture was and is still sometimes applied to city planning and building.  The Megastructure with interchangeable dwelling units or the platform modular repeatable building such as the panel building in post-war USSR, posited a standardized approach to housing based on mass-produced parts assembled into urban puzzles. 

 

The next ten posts will examine diverse examples and strategies of modular city building, horizontally (mat housing) or vertically (supports and infill) and the infinite number of possibilities in between. The modular approach even led to exploring the building itself as a city or a microcosm of urban life; Louis Kahn's , City Tower (1956), a collaboration with Anne G. Tyng envisioned a parcel in Philadelphia as a towering framework assembled from industrialized parts to construct a vertical mixed-use support structure. City Tower explored a tetrahedral geometry similar to lightweight spaceframes but at a monumental scale and in reinforced concrete. Alexander Graham Bell, Bucky Fuller and Konrad Wachsmann explored and employed the tetrahedron cell (triangular pyramid) as a robust modular unit capable of formal and spatial multiplication generating large spanning structures with minimal weight.  

 

Kahn’s Megastructure would contain all urban functions and evolve as required to become a complete city fragment functioning independently from the urban field and fabric to which it was moored.  This experiment represented a counterproposal to the «generic» international style office towers sprouting in every city. The expression of structure as architecture would showcase a type of potential cityscape open to the environment relating to light and wind as each platform could be either enclosed or open,  built up completely or partially, reproducing the dynamism of a dense city scape in a vertical composition. 

City Tower representation

 

Prefabrication experiments - 279 - fabricating worlds - 10 - Pattern buildings

Context and setting in architecture habitually refer in some way to a site, a staging area, or a physical, geopolitical place where an edifice is to be moored. This concept implies a singular way of anchoring and differentiates a building from generic commodities because it must address a plurality of contextual factors. Industrialized building systems’ barriers are often discussed with singular anchoring in mind as systems must combine the generic (building as a commodity) with the non-generic (site specificity). 

 

As globalization and information technology reaffirm industrializations basic principles of making quality products affordable and accessible, construction's industrialisation is once more being touted as a way to reform construction, with one major difference from what was the basic value proposition in the past. If industrial driven proprietary models could characterize twentieth century experiments or one-off architectural designed prototypes, a new generation of architects is tackling this problem with an approach to bridge the two fields. Whether inspired by open-source and crowd sourced business models a shareable architecture is taking hold based on principles being applied through DfMA (design for manufacturing and assembly) principles in parallel industries. This new setting for architectural production based on industrialized systems is platform based. Nuanced products, models, types can be created from a controlled set of modular components similarly to how a programmer defines an application from predetermined and shared language and syntaxes. 

 

While certainly not unique within this space, 369 Pattern Buildings is the work of a cooperative of professionals and academics proposing a modular platform of timber volumes applicable to varied building types.   The basic modular component is analogous to an ISO container arranged with timber edges and bottom and top timber ribbed plates that are assembled with steel corner or vertex connectors. The modular unit can be stacked and juxtaposed to create a plurality of organisations. Facade elements, demising wall elements, mechanical as well as plumbing systems can be designed and fabricated according to underlining modular dimensions to easily fit within the system. While the system remains marginally applied, its setting is truly contemporary as it allows anyone to interact, download and iterate components into a personal architectural product adaptable to any site.  

Pattern Building modular components

Prefabrication experiments - 278 - fabricating worlds - 09 - The Walking House

Mechanization generated many new systems, materials and methods in architecture. From modernism to high-tech architecture, the systemic use of technology as a response to any problem or the representation of newness expressed by the machine aesthetic underlined industrial manifestations in architectural design. Machines and devices became part of design’s theorisation of utopias or dystopias. Archigram's walking city is the case and point of architecture becoming a machine capable of constructing, developing and displacing cities; a depiction of technology taking over urbanity. This vision of an a-contextual architecture where a machine could build or rebuild a globalized habitat in any setting challenged the regional vision of architecture and the classic canon of architecture relating to its site as the fundamental aspect of its composition.  Mechanisms for dwelling were imagined in exigent times, reacting to the second world war, the cold war and the arm's race with the invention of the H bomb. Machines would help control climate and environments in a potentially inhospitable war-torn planet. 

 

Today's challenges while equally geopolitical and certainly increasingly environmental are the focal point of extensive exploration in the area of moveable dwellings; being able to set up house anywhere and self-sufficiently are two themes that are driving this research. The Walking House (2009) designed by N55 combines the microdwelling with a reaffirmation that mechanisation of architecture could lead to moveable housing and that technology could make this type of dwelling sustainable. The walking house is a mobile unit: an octahedron or hexagonal based prism placed on one of its surfaces and lifted off the ground by steel trusses made up of six spider like steel hydraulic limbs that propel the volume forward at a maximum speed of 1 meter per minute. The basic structure is made of timber panels. The unit harvests solar and wind energy and has the potential to collect rain-water. A wood burning stove and composting toilet complete the modules basic living systems. The Walking House, like Archigram's walking, city is not dependent on the existence of a collective infrastructure or network but can move around according to its inhabitant’s nomadic lifestyle over any type of field or earthwork. 

The Walking House by N55

Prefabrication experiments - 277 - fabricating worlds - 08 - Building on Mars

 

The race for space in the twentieth century accelerated the development of new technologies and materials. In architecture, the space race inspired prospective visions and construction systems conceived to colonize and terraform unforgiving climates and remote settings. The use of plastics, carbon fibres, powerful adhesives informed by advances in chemistry and military use, became iconically applied in architectural experiments and in futuristic capsule or pod aesthetics pushed by groups like the Japanese metabolists, Archigram and Future Systems. The race for space with its extraterrestrial imagery and narratives influenced a generation of architects to explore speculative forms, geometries and their application. Today another race is taking shape, the race for interplanetary exploration. Determined by new potentials in artificial intelligence driving both digital tools and processes, machines like rover explorers can be deployed equipped to explore and eventually build with little manpower. 

 

Outer space construction was recently explored in a design and process competition organized by NASA. Two finalists were awarded 700 000 US$ to conceive building systems for an eventual Mars colony.  AI Spacefactory, one of the finalists, promotes itself as a technological integrator that explores autonomous robots and leverages sustainable materials to build in any context or setting. Their proposal for NASA, the Mars Habitat «Marsha» combined additive manufacturing with composite materials to imagine a vertical oblong curved hive analogous to early brick firing kilns. This idealized compressive geometry relates to the material properties, which closely mimic concrete - high compressive strength.  The material invention is a hybrid fluid material that hardens once cured. A mixture of basalt (pulverized volcanic rock) and polymers (PLA) generates a hardened substance lighter than regular concrete and that can theoretically be locally sourced. Basalt concrete is not entirely new. Roman engineers employed pozzolanic volcanic ash to create a very durable concrete, water proof and resistant to freeze thaw cycles. The structural concept is a double-shell wall using an egg-like shape. The double skin's exterior layer insulates the interior shell and spaces from harsh exterior environments and extreme temperatures. The separation of the exterior bowed wall from the interior also frees the interior to be developed and arranged according to individualized needs and wants.

AI Spacefactory's proposal

Prefabrication experiments - 276 - fabricating worlds - 07 - research stations

 

The remotely located research station as a building type has charted many interesting strategies for transportable and designed for assembly kits. Colonization advanced «high modernism» as an approach to building in unknown territories. Designing components and systems for delivery, assembly and durability in harsh and unforgiving environments imposes a separation from conventional onsite building methods. Buckminster Fuller’s Radomes, icons of the arctic North American defense DEW Line, were produced as a complete kit of parts from the south and erected over the frozen landscape. In industrial production, Misawa’s Antarctic research station shows in a similar way, how designing for isolation can stimulate innovation. The Japanese company developed a prototype for an easy to transport and construct structure. The research station demands a comprehensive strategy to determine every aspect of a building’s construction. From its earthworks to its mechanical systems, every element and subassembly must fit into an overall sequence as onsite construction in remote locations is unforgiving; it is impossible to adjust, locate or reproduce any missing pieces onsite. 

 

Broghton Architect’s Halley Vi research station in Antarctica inaugurated in 2013 epitomizes the architectural experiment for an unpredictable environment. Built as a series of integrated functional volumetric modules, 180 meters in length, the string of research spaces is composed as a linear wall perpendicular to prevailing winds, which allows snow to drift under the elevated structure. Each module responds to a particular function. Divided in two, each half of the enfilade has its own power plant and could be used as emergency power in case of damage to one side of the structure. A bridge between the two halves could also quarantine each section in response to a particular shut down or glitch. The entire station is supported by telescopic ski foundations that can glide over the icy landscape and shift up or down vertically according to snow depths and climate conditions. As the ice shelf melts, the whole station can be pulled further inland. An insulated laminated composite GRP (glass fibre reinforced plastic) panel,  a construction method associated with unforgiving climates, wraps the steel structure limiting any thermal bridging.  The reticulated substructure supporting the modules and transferring loads to the skis is also entirely insulated from the interior spaces in a type of double skin configuration.

left: Radome, middle: Misawa research station, right: Halley Vi 

 

Prefabrication experiments - 275 - fabricating worlds - 06 - From Midget house to Green house

Reinventing housing often comes in response to crises. The episodes following wars, natural disasters or political turmoil drive demand for rebuilding and for dwellings that are affordable and quick to build. Industrialisation made it possible to reimagine housing production specifically in difficult times applying the mass production model successfully applied to commodities toward architecture. A prime example was the massive investment in industrial development in Japan after the second World War creating a type of prefect storm for a country whose vernacular already included modularity and standardized components. Many prefab house producers were established during this period including the iconic Daiwa. Nubuo Ishibashi founded Daiwa Housing Industry, or the Daiwa House Group today, in the early 1950s to produce affordable dwellings on a massive scale. The Pipe house in response to a destructive Typhoon in the region of Kansai and later the Midget house in response to the baby boom helped the company become one of the most famous and prolific house producers in the history of prefabricated houses in Japan and beyond.

 

Today the company remains well known in its field and has expanded to include all areas of housing production and continues to promote an ideal of resilience in their housing systems development. In response to another global challenge, the demand for fresh produce, the company has allied their knowledge for housing with novel agro-production techniques to create the Agri-cube, a compact 5m x 2.5m volume-unit. The marketing pitch: the cube fits in a regular sized parking spot. In lieu of a polluting vehicle, the spot is transformed into a fresh-produce making device. According to the company the hydroponic greenhouse can yield 10 000 servings of fresh food per year. Delivered as a turnkey product, the Agri-cube requires little maintenance for its lighting and hydroponic mechanical distribution. Constructed on a steel chassis frame, the floor, wall and roof panels are insulated. The cube can be moored to a simple granular foundation requiring minimal site work for infrastructure hook-ups, plumbing and other services. Completely self-contained with solar panels, the Agri-cube placed over a parking spot could transform any strip mall lot into large-scale urban agriculture production.

Midget House (left) Agri-cube (right)

Prefabrication experiments - 274 - fabricating worlds - 05 - Reforming modernism

The first half of the twentieth century could be characterized by partnerships between architects and industry fostering new materials and mass production to conceive affordable housing. As the century progressed, architects worked with a drastically different modus operandi using industry to develop representations, either utopian or dystopian. In both cases the paper trail is both rich and inspiring. The space race, concern over latent nuclear war, the overwhelming rise of economic emancipation in industrialized countries nourished architects’ speculation on how social and political developments would influence housing and architecture. Bubble houses, the promotion of plastics, Archigrams collage comic book representations or even Lebeus Wood's dystopian visions, drawings and speculative representations became the expression of a generation, a type of guidebook for living in future cities dominated by technology. 

 

These original and creative visions had little to do with pre-World War II modernist architects who, in a way, saw functionalism as a tool for developing a new way forward for architecture. The 1960s, 1970s, and 80s were reactionary years. Architects attempted to shed the abstract purity and whiteness of modernism while endeavoring to reconnect and rebrand architects as city builders. The metabolist movement in Japan that harvested and synchronized industrial developments with representation became ground zero for this type of architectural propaganda.

 

Future Systems founded by radical Czech architect Jan Kaplický explored this type of speculative architecture. The firm’s system-based architecture integrated highly sophisticated materials with mechanical means to produce what has become known as High Modernism. After stints with offices like Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, Kaplický defined his personal take by designing conceptual schemes that reformed architectural theorems of context and composition by juxtaposing mechanics, aerodynamics with  industrial design requirements like ergonomics, prototyping, and mobility. The Peanut Project 124 is a prime example of the combination of machines with the micro living spaces made famous by Japanese prototypes like the Kurokawa’s capsule tower.  The speculative nature of Kaplicky's architecture symbolizes at once the canyon that had developed between everyday practice and architectural theory and the conceptual distance that architects had taken from more conventional manufactured architecture and its representation.

Future System's Peanut Project

Prefabrication experiments - 273 - fabricating worlds - 04 - The Fun Palace

Sometimes referred to as twentieth century cathedrals, skyscrapers spanned precipitously and used materials to their limit states, in the same way the ribbed vaults and flying buttresses of the middle ages did. Technology evolved significantly during the first half of the twentieth century making possible the construction of commercial buildings at never before seen scopes and scales. New materials and methods offered potentials for a burgeoning service economy demanding agility and flexibility. The open and free planning of floor plates resulted directly from the removal of load bearing walls replacing them with distanced slender posts and beams. Moreover, spans made from mass produced, repeatable and scalable components could be expanded in all directions. The tall buildings’ modular skeletons were adaptable to any use and inspired new urban visions based on office blocks as great evolving machines for a serviceable urbanity. 

This type of programmable urban and civic infrastructure inspired even further reflection on technology’s role in the construction of civic infrastructure. Cedric Price's Fun Palace is perhaps the emblem of using technology to shape adaptable social interactions free from classic civic conventions. A metallic cathedral erected to unite folks to learn and experiment with developing techniques and theories. Even its name denotes great exhibit palaces of the 19th century; The Crystal Palace (1851), a conservatory showcased the way forward for modern building culture. In the Fun Palace, Price along with theatre director Joan Littlewood conceived an open framework for exploring and communicating knowledge.  

Cedric Price argued for a common architecture that reformed archaic civic and social conventions. In Price's work, technology was the backdrop, an open building framework for stimulating spatial and social possibilities. The Fun Palace's reticulated skeletal megastructure was proposed as a completely open plan that could be assembled on any suitable site and disassembled to be erected later in another context. The prefabricated kit-of-parts contributed to constructing the ideal of adaptable structures: flexible, malleable and mutable. The Fun Palace's skeletal structure was a complete revolution and foreign from the massive and classic civic buildings of the past; architecture was stripped of its permanent monumentality and represented a way forward to adapt to a constantly shifting world.

Cedric Price's Fun Palace rendering