Prefabrication experiments - 336 - U-build

 

Self-build formulas and systems are an integral part of prefabrication history. Moreover, architects and architectural academia have always been fascinated with the design and knowledge sharing potential of generating bespoke houses or buildings from elegantly thought-out kits. Ken Isaacs (Living Structures Matrix, 1954) and Walter Segal (The Self-build method, 1962) explored the D-I-Y theme with the publication of prescriptions and platform systems elucidating the construction of inhabitable objects, houses or furniture from the same modular components. Construction education, the inspiration for the proposals countered industrialization’s hyper-specialization considered as a factor distancing individuals from the social act of home building.  The user, builder or dweller should, with minimal know-how, be directed step by step in the construction process. Democratization of digital fabrication tools is generating a fertile environment for people to get involved with their material culture and built environment. Alastair Parvin’s (Wikihouse, 2011) is a notable example reviving similar attitudes to what Segal and Isaacs proposed federated by current hacker and open-source strategies for leveraging social building knowledge.

 

A recent project established on similar values, U-Build, developed by architectural firm Studio Bark (https://u-build.org) along with structural engineers Structure Workshop proposes a simple flat pack building system for creating a large variety of small housing structures, micro-dwellings or accessory dwelling units. Cut plywood sheets are assembled into prisms, boxes or ribbed surfaces that fit together to shape walls, floors and roofs. Analogous to cinder block construction, the open timber cases are dry stacked and fixed with bolts to form a rigid wall.  The 19mm spruce or birch plywood sheets are divided and cut numerically with a CNC machine into faces fitted with box joints and glued to form the basic units; a five-faced rectangular prism. The timber structure can be insulated and clad in a variety of materials. The modular boxes shape a cavity wall where the case sides are aligned vertically and horizontally to form studs and girts. Wing-nuts and bolts placed in predrilled holes in the case’s perimeter faces hold the structure together. Anchored to concrete foundations or placed over any other stable base material, the structural system is an example of ribbed waffle slab construction applied to wall, floor and roof construction. 

U-build method, from https://u-build.org

Prefabrication experiments - 335 - House 19 mobile studio

Mobile homes or manufactured dwellings, epitomized by early singlewides effectively applied mass production theory to housing. This segment of factory production has been both hailed when discussed in terms of democratization of affordable dwellings and ostracized as poorly designed, built and rot with social difficulties. 

 

The mobile home is particularly interesting as it conceptually links two rival fields and conceptualizations: it strives to be at once a commodity with no particular anchorage and yet function as a dwelling with all the human and social implications of domestic architecture. In the history of prefab, projects that have been able to be successfully applied and appreciated simultaneously in both fields (architecture and manufactured housing) are a rarity. Most are specifically commercial, while others are prototypes of architectural creativity.

 

An example of mobile home principles applied by architects, House 19 designed by Dutch firm Korteknie Stuhlmacher architects in 2003, acts as a moveable studio for resident artists to live and work in the city of Utrecht. Rigorous container dimensions outline a robust and weathertight mass timber structural envelope. The «black box» is structured by cross laminated timber panels reinforced and braced by steel frames. The composite sandwich envelope panels are layered with insulation, weatherproofing, and cladding. 18m long, 4m high and 3.2 m wide, the studio adheres to transport restrictions. A centrally located service core contains all required cooking and hygiene functions and separates night from living spaces. Operable drawbridge elements deploy rich interior and exterior connections not usually associated with manufactured transportable houses. Further exploring these connections, two large, suspended panel doors in the living room and one aligned with the service core create dynamic thresholds.

 

Contrary to conventional mobile homes or container houses these operable spatial components along with a strategically placed vertical skylight over a dining area gives this linear volume an especially airy feel. Two additional small skylights illuminate the bedroom and living room. A large 19 painted on the side of the box reinforces a type of commodification; the unit number intimates a production lot, part of a much larger batch of mobile studios. 

House 19 - mobile artist studio

Prefabrication experiments - 334 - Dieter Schmid House

Polymers have completely integrated and in a sense taken over our material culture. Everything we own is somehow associated to plastics, from the keys on our keyboards, to the cases that guard our smart phones and the countertops where we prepare our food. Plastics are lightweight, durable, malleable, and cheap to manufacture. Plastics are also omnipresent in architecture and construction, employed as pieces, elements in every building system including insulation, sealants, roofing and even polymer-based reinforcing or aggregates for concrete. 

 

The 1950s and 1960s were a heyday for plastics, promising to completely reform our dwellings.  Traditional design iconography would be replaced by the form generating possibilities of molding. Further, the plastic capsule house along with its production methods would make houses commodities free from the vernacular habitual constraints of locus and setting. Prototypes of the plastic house idealized mobility, transportability and eliminated massive earthworks as in masonry and timber-based building cultures. 

 

Matti Suuronen’s Futuro and Walt Disney’s Monsanto House are probably the most famous of these prospective proposals. Other more marginally known prototypes were equally important to the development of plastics as a futuristic material representation applied to house construction.  A notable example was designed by architect Dieter Schmid in 1963 and demolished in 1975.  Lifted off the ground on thin stilts, the habitable prism was composed of glass reinforced plastic composite panels. The dry assembly would make the house a breeze to assemble and eventually disassemble, making it moveable. Inspired by the molding process, exterior wall panels were shaped to enhance, frame and celebrate openings, sills, and windows. The cast stressed skin monocoque included walls, roof and the prism’s undersurface as an idealized continuous envelope. Each modular panel, recognizable in the overall structure, was simply fixed to the adjacent panel. A weathertight strip covered each joint. 

 

An access stair and an extruded reinforced concrete space for servicing the upper volume are the only spatial elements that contact the ground. Even if plastics could reform conventional construction in matters of materials and form, a house’s anchorage to site remains a fundamental factor in its capacity to serve its function. This anchorage was often an incongruous element in the designs for an idealized plastic house.

Dieter Schmid House

Prefabrication experiments - 333 - Alside instant house

The connection between architects and industry shaped many infamous experiments toward the factory production of housing or building systems. For a time in the middle of the twentieth century, themes of mass production, architectural ideals and industrial design innovations coalesced contending to reform construction’s lagging productivity. Modularity and dimensional coordination were and remain the conceptual foundations for applying manufacturing principles to architecture to repeat parts and components from design to design; repetition being the mainstay of any manufacturing doctrine. Applying these strategies to architectural design was the objective of  Emil Tessin's partnership with Alside Corporation to market and produce a modular house, also publicized as the instant house. 

 

A graduate of MIT's Building Engineering and Construction program, Tessin, like many of his contemporaries believed the industrialization of construction would reduce costs and increase quality in much the same way other commodity’s fabrication had been transformed by mass production. He worked for the Alside corporation and directed Alside Homes in the late 1950s consolidating the company's foray into housing construction. Alside is probably best known for inventing the first baked enamel aluminum siding in the USA. 

 

Tessin's patent for a modular house (1962) was granted during his stint with Alside. The houses' design employed the proprietary aluminum technology for composite panels, exposed a steel skeletal structure and was assuredly inspired by modernist principles; links with the case study houses realized a decade earlier are evident. 

 

The patent explains the systemic idea of a 8x12x14-foot volume, a prime unit of space that along with other units would organize any number of valid architectural aggregations or juxtapositions. The unit’s construction employed repeating mass-produced parts, connections and details: steel vertical or horizontal structural members formed the volume edges and Alside sandwich panels were used for the volume's faces. The factory was set up to mass produce 200 homes per day in the early 1960s in Akron, Ohio. Even with a sales and production target of 10 000 houses in 1964, the apparent newness factor in both architectural esthetics and construction techniques were too much for the era's conservative consumer. Only a couple of hundred houses were produced and this idealized relationship between architect and industry ended. 

source:

https://thefrosthouse.com/home/emil-tessin/

Prefabrication experiments - 332 - Conzelman Wall Construction

Some names are synonymous with the history of reinforced concrete. Hennebique, Monier, Lambot are three figures that stand out as the great influencers and French pioneers. All three developed processes to reinforce a cement based concrete mixture with iron or steel to harmonize compressive and tensile stresses through the hybrid monolithic material. The Italian lineage owes its development to Hennebique’s licensees throughout Italy. Attilio Muggia being the most prominent who handed the reigns to Pier Luigi Nervi with his version of ferrocement inspired by both Lambot and Monier’s tighter reinforcing meshes. Wayss and Freytag and George Wimpey marketed systems in Germany and the UK as reinforced Concrete construction became the go to material for multi-unit building recognized as durable, strong and fireproof, its most sought-after property for building densely populated buildings in industrial cities. In North America, Ernst Ransome and Julius Kahn are commonly identified with early reinforced concrete frame building. 

 

One name is often absent from historical narratives but is particularly important to the development of systemic ideals of unit or elemental construction applied to concrete edifices. John E Conzelman of St. Louis Missouri applied for multiple patents to protect his innovative approach to both reinforcing, joinery (GB191013782A), and to unitized concrete (US1045521) in his patent for wall construction.  Along with publishing his ideas for post and beam or post and slab construction, Conzelman pioneered precast systems. He proposed and illustrated a veritable concrete kit of parts for every component of the building’s structural frame and external bearing components. Elements were uniquely grooved or profiled to fit together as in a large-scale puzzle assembly. Joints were then filled with mortar and cured forming a monolithic structure.  The structural concept was composed of unit slabs that spanned over precast beams which were then supported by posts crowned by angled capitals. Concrete panels filled-in the structural skeleton and were laid in layers, joined together and to the foundation with beds of mortar as in masonry construction. Internal reinforcing steel bars were protected from the elements and concrete covering ensured adequate fire protection. The precast kit of parts was invented in 1911 foreshadowing industrialized building kits and building platforms that today are considered innovative.

Patent drawings

Prefabrication experiments - 331 - Myton precast concrete Plank construction

Part of vernacular in forest-rich settings, plank construction is a straightforward and widespread manner of constructing walls. Timber board widths share equivalent lengths, widths and thicknesses. The planks are juxtaposed, aligned and joined either horizontally or vertically to form story height load bearing enclosures. Vertical plank systems relate to palisade building, while horizontal systems are akin to Scandinavian log construction as planks are placed one over another with corner overlaps or some type of detailed joinery. Construction methods have also included tongue and groove joints between vertical or horizontal pieces to ensure greater dimensional stability. In all strategies, plank width is the dimensional module for composing partitions.  An alternative system employed vertical and horizontal planks as a post and beam frame infilled with horizontal pieces. This construction method is sometimes referred to as the Québec Plank Frame or pièce sur pièce in French. 

 

Offshoots have been attempted in both steel and concrete. The Myton house system is an industrialized construction system deployed in Great Britain in the outbreak of post-war prefabricated building systems. The Myton unit is a vertical precast concrete strip reinforced with ribs, to shape a shallow U-plan, the ribs are inset in relation the panels’ width generating a perimeter lip that is set against the subsequent panel’s lip forming a continuous modular ribbing pattern on the inside of the panels.  The precast panels infill a precast concrete skeleton composed of corner posts and horizontal floor beams. The concrete wall envelope emphasized greater strength and thermal mass than conventional stud wall construction. Planks were structurally dowelled together, and joints were caulked. The organizing grid was 16 inches in width by 8'-0" in height (one storey). Structurally, the system relates to box frame construction as the planks, posts and beams shape a rigid braced surface area. Conventional floor and roof joists completed the two storey structures. The dowel, bolt and steel plate assembly made it simple to assemble and theoretically possible to facilitate repairs and replacements as the panels could potentially be dismantled. The exterior concrete wall finish was criticized and deemed defective for shoddy construction and premature weathering most certainly caused by inadequate weathertightness.

 

System description from CMHC's Catalogue of House Building Systems (source:  

https://dahp.wa.gov/sites/default/files/Catalogue_of_House_Building_Construction_Systems_1960_0.pdf)

Prefabrication experiments - 330 - Manufacturing methodologies - 10 - A brief tale of production in architecture

A rich list of manifestos recounts the potential application of manufacturing processes in architecture and construction. Albert Farwell Bemis, perhaps the most prolific published The Evolving House in 1933. Almost 20 years later Burnham Kelly's The Prefabrication of Houses (1951) compiled what arguably remains the most comprehensive academic/industrial study of factory production applied to dwellings.  Both proposed industrialization as a rational way forward to alleviate pressing housing shortages.  Masters of Architectural modernism, Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann practiced extensively during this period and authored similar narratives for efficient production while promoting the idea of architectural variability through systemic componentization (Gropius, Principles of Bauhaus production 1926) (Wachsmann, The Turning Point of Building (1959). 

 

In 1980, Barry James Sullivan's Industrialization in the Building Industry presented a broad state of the art in the USA, including the generative collaborative initiatives in the steel industry and successful systems linked to HUD’s low-cost housing competition Operation Breakthrough. Richard Buckminster Fuller's introduction and Moshe Safdie's foreword praised the harmonization of manufacturing with architecture and the resulting economies of scale for providing innovative affordable housing. A contemporary reboot of comparable themes came from Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake in the early 2000s. Their research practice and their prototype houses (Loblolly House (2007), Cellophane House (2008)) presented a framework for harnessing manufacturing methodologies and information technology already present in the automotive, naval, and aeronautic industries. From master builder to master assembler Refabricating Architecture (2004) discussed the changing role of the architect within evolving IoT culture. 

 

These analogies were again brought to the forefront 13 years later in 2017 by Bryden Wood. Bridging the Gap between Construction and Manufacturing even proposed a specific term; platform production, studied in the automobile industry, as a way of cross-pollinating knowledges, commanding efficiencies, and industrial parameters across all types of buildings. Bryden Wood's analogy compares scalable platforms for different buildings to Ikea’s flatpack furniture components: a platform for creating an assortment of  objects from a predetermined set of parts. This comparison brings us full circle to Gropius and Wachsmann's argument for a type of component pattern language. This characteristically architectural vision has often conflicted with less flexible industrial imperatives.   

Bemis' concept compared to Kieran and Timberlake's vision

 

Prefabrication experiments - 329 - Manufacturing methodologies - 09 - Advanced Manufacturing

Modern Methods of Construction, Off-site construction, Industrialized building and Prefabrication are often cited interchangeably to denote efficient factory methodologies applied to building construction. Directing the benefits of manufacturing logistics to building, makes sense as they have bred quality and productivity in most other industries. Still, Generalized use of factory production in architecture has eluded commonplace construction. An ingrained quest for a alleged singularity has disconnected design, fabrication and construction. The evolution in information technology is outlining a digital revolution that some hope will finally tune factory production with construction. 

 

All three previous periods of industrialization, mechanization, mass production and automation generated new and faster ways of making things.  Current digitization of manufacturing, in an interesting way, federates the three previous eras; this 4rth industrial revolution introduces information technology to producing and connecting everything from, toys to clothes and anything in between. 

 

While Industry 4.0 refers to connectivity of processes and objects (IoT), advanced manufacturing (AM) includes a myriad of technologies from advanced information modelling for design, big-data metrics or management, intelligent production systems for controlling logistics, and robotic tools and devices for digital fabrication. In architecture and construction, these ideas all revert to thinking about or controlling a building and its parts before it is produced onsite. Information technology allows this process to be comprehensive and informs virtual design, fabrication and construction. The ability to apply the industrial design product prototyping process - a trial and error course of perfecting a product before it is built - reforms traditional onsite fragmentation. Construction has always been a one-off process and IT is fostering this virtual twin strategy to prototype a building virtually with all stakeholders to rationalize its completion.

 

The imposing advancements in mass timber construction over the last decades has been pushed by this prototyping process as pieces and components are designed, modelled and then precisely cut and logically identified to be arranged and assembled easily on site. The kit-of-parts industrialized construction strategy is facilitated by advanced manufacturing principles specifically from the perspective of design for manufacturing and assembly as the design process continues throughout the entire project schedule uniting design criteria, with fabrication methods and onsite logistics and management. 

WASP large-scale 3d printer

Prefabrication experiments - 328 - Manufacturing methodologies - 08 - Discrete manufacturing versus building construction

Discrete manufacturing is defined by strict guidelines and procedures both in terms of parts and supply management. Product’s composing constituents, parts of an industrial recipe, are either recognizable or indistinguishable at the end of the production process. In both cases, the completed objects are cohesive but can be broken down into their original ingredients. Objects made in this manner theoretically facilitate elemental replacement or repair to avoid premature obsolescence. 

 

Building construction is an interesting case study when assessed and examined in relation to discrete manufacturing. Building is probably the only industrial sector that liberally combines products, parts or components generated from disparate visions of the overall process and minimal prototyping of how edifices are assembled. 

 

A building is an example of discrete manufacturing in the same way an automobile or a computer is. However, a building also contains components that are prepared by process or batch manufacturing incorporating ingredients or outlined by specific formulas that once generated are fixed in a state that impedes disassembly. Concrete, mortar, or polymers are materials that act as glues or binders. Their production is permanent and can’t be reversed. Even through demolition the composing parts aren’t returned to their original state. 

 

Industrial building culture defined building design as a systemic organization of predetermined, premade, catalogued, and standardized parts assembled into a distinct or singular edifice produced for a particular function or use that is usually demolished at the end of its service life. Making construction even more distinct from manufacturing, certain elements are not linked to any production, for example: site or context. Buildings are set in a particular locus requiring setting-specific foundations and earthworks for their long-term stability. At best, complementary visions of production that come together in construction are a fusion and harmonization of discrete production, job and process production. At worst building construction is fragmented, entangled and leads to perpetual conflict.  

 

Offsite construction, prefabrication and industrialized building systems are designed to facilitate building assembly and speak to a type of discrete manufacturing that aims to address the longstanding fragmentation by streamlining design, fabrication and construction through a coherent product-based ideological thread that includes systematic prototyping for assembly of segments and sub-assemblies in the building process.

Discrete manufacturing from https://www.ibaset.com

Prefabrication experiments - 327 - Manufacturing methodologies - 07 - Integrated product and project delivery

 

The connexion between design (architecture) and production (construction) is often a discordant one. The design-bid-build methodology common in the delivery of buildings has been the standard form of procurement through many eras, as far back as Roman master builders, and has led to the separation of design experts from construction trades with contractual documents (drawings and specifications) being the only negotiating tool. This fragmented, conflict prone process requires comprehensive itemization and detailing for outlining systemic responsibilities. Any orphaned element in the design process becomes a fertile ground for friction among project participants. 

 

Inspired and informed by lean manufacturing principles a more integrated process can address this continuous entanglement of trades and conflicts. In this model, design criteria and project objectives are shared from the onset among stakeholders. Further, a risk-reward relationship completely reforms the antiquated design-bid-build process into a process analogous to Design for Manufacturing principles to bridge the ever-widening gap between design and construction. The separation of design from production in construction is also present in manufacturing. The disconnect is known as «over the wall» tensions; the wall separates design from engineering and from manufacturing. Design for manufacturing and assembly tackles this disintegration by incorporating production criteria, designers, and process engineers in the design of a product, eliminating the proverbial wall. 

 

In a similar way to DfMA, IPD (Integrated project delivery) fosters all project participants’ criteria from planning stages through a contractual framework that clearly defines project requirements and responsibilities. Prefabrication, off-site construction or even industrialized construction relate to the integrated process in as much as manufacturers should always be included in the design process to fine-tune detailing from predetermined and interoperable parts. Both integrated project delivery and design for manufacturing and assembly underline necessary inclusion of production and making principles in the design process.  Contemporary modelling tools are driving more integration though information sharing. Architecture is more closely related to production or even manufacturing as digital coordination between different fields is becoming the norm. All stakeholders’ conditions can be federated by BIM employing advanced modelling to collectively organize and generate the project virtually before it is built. 

Above: DfMA; Below: IPD; both showing effort and involvement in planning