This article by Chris Knapp, the Director of Built-Environment Practice, originally appeared on Australian Design Review as "The End Of Prefabrication". Knapp calls for the end of prefabrication as a driver for design, pointing out its century-long failure to live up to its promise, as well as newer technology's ability to "mass produce difference".
Prefabrication – there is not another word in the current lexicon of architecture that more erroneously asserts positive change. For more than a century now, this industrial strategy of production applied to building has yielded both an unending source of optimism for architecture, and equally, a countless series of disappointments. This is a call for the end of prefabrication.
Read on after the break
At The Beginning: The End
As a body of professionals who collectively swarm around the discipline, architects, builders, developers, critics and politicians have used the term ‘prefabrication’ so many times and in so many ways that its clarity of purpose and focus for successful integration has been lost. Grappling with the best ways to enhance architecture through a genuinely intelligent application of prefabrication techniques, the industry has instead got better at manufacturing a culture of cool ‘prefab’ homes and a media apparatus to promote this effect, rather than doing the work needed to propel forward. Like the ‘green bling’ of sustainability, prefabrication has been reduced to a kneejerk response for solving various crises of housing today or to help support the commodification of Modernism.
This article does not allow for an exhaustive citation of every shortcoming in the history of prefabrication and nor does it allow for much reference to the few successes at integrating prefabrication into cultural acceptance – Japan and Scandinavia taking command in this regard. Yet all told, one must reflect upon this series of utopian misfires in prefabrication’s evolution and wonder why architects have not managed to capitalise effectively upon the platform.
A History of False Starts
When discussing prefabrication, this specifically refers to housing built off-site, either in part or whole. By definition, the term identifies a range of applications for building and building components of any scale, not just housing. Yet the target of prefabrication has been focused upon housing since the very beginning.
Barry Bergdoll, architecture and design curator at the Museum of Modern Art, presented the exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling in 2008. The emergence of prefabrication is traced principally to nineteenth century colonisation, which when combined with the onset of the industrial revolution, yielded prefabrication processes for ‘cast iron churches … wooden houses for Australia and New Zealand, and sheet metal houses for French, German and Belgian colonies’. From this era of Taylorist production that sought to find efficiencies in the application of new materials to architectural problems (much to the consternation of French architect, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, and English theorist, John Ruskin), came the early Modern attempt to systematise manufacturing techniques toward new approaches to building.
This new branch of industrial production appealed greatly to innovators such as US inventor, Thomas Edison, in his patent for a fully cast concrete house type, for example, and within the architectural canon, one cannot look past Le Corbusier’s Dom-Ino frame. Linked directly to the emergence of Fordist production, his spatial partí of stacked modules could be applied at the scale of the Maison Citroen or La Ville Radieuse. Was Le Corbusier’s use of the Dom-Ino mere polemic clad in the aesthetics of the machine, or did it offer something for housing that should have continued beyond the 1950s?
Similarly, Walter Gropius attempted for many years to develop a response of industrial production based on ‘artistically unified principles’ yet beyond his exhibition of houses for the Weimar Bauhaus (1923) and the Weissenhoff Estate in Stuttgart (1927), Gropius built very little despite his position of influence from the directorship of the Bauhaus and Harvard University. He did, however, spur further experimentation in the US extending from Marcel Breuer’s plywood homes to the steel Case Study houses of 1950s California.
Of the most impressive false starts in the history of prefabrication is that of R Buckminster Fuller. For a man who could lecture for eight hours straight and convincingly propose a geodesic dome to cover lower Manhattan, producing only a handful of his Dymaxion and Wichita Houses yields major disappointment. Fuller’s response to the postwar housing crises via the technology of aircraft – in terms of both material (aluminium) and process (the assembly line) – parallels Jean Prouvé’s important but limited attempts at componentised housing and foreshadows the thematic espoused by US architecture office Kieran Timberlake’s Refabricating Architecture some 50 years later.
Retrenchment of Relevancy
Standardisation, systemisation, material honesty and technical innovation in support of social progress were central concepts of the Modern movement, yet, as noted by Mark and Peter Anderson of US-based Anderson Anderson Architecture, these ideals that flourished in other industries lost momentum during the periods of intellectual retrenchment architecture undertook in the late twentieth century. Retreating to debate compositional contradiction or post-Structuralism did not aid architecture in keeping up with societal needs for quality housing or technological engagement. Additionally, architects spent this same epoch divesting themselves of liability by relinquishing risk, relevance and profit to builders, developers and insurers. Meanwhile, the automotive and aerospace industries effectively harnessed the technical and commercial potential of the industrial era, resulting in products of wide recognition and cultural value.
It is worth highlighting key events that further complicate this history. On 16 May 1968, Taylor Woodrow’s Ronan Point Flats project in East London partially collapsed due to structural insufficiency of prefabricated wall panels from which the 22-storey tower was made. The combination of public housing and prefabrication technology together in this fire-induced, fatal disaster helped cement public opinion in Europe about prefabricated housing’s shortcomings. Coupled with the planned detonation of Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe project in 1972 and the proliferation of very cheap manufactured housing throughout the US, it is no wonder that a significant stigma follows prefabrication and Modern housing wherever they might be found. In the last decades of the twentieth century, prefab came to be equated with low-quality building that is not easily personalised, desired or culturally meaningful.
Add to this the continued preponderance of prefabricated housing types produced by architects that continue to be inaccessible to the typical consumer and one wonders how much longer the prefabrication project can survive. Enter recent examples such as Kieran Timberlake’s 2008 Cellophane House from the Home Delivery exhibition, or the 2006 Loblolly House prototype, which was built for their own use. Both houses act as vehicles for the rhetoric of change in the prefabricated industry, while doing nothing to counter the insurmountable excesses of expense. The FlatPak House by Charlie Lazor or the many Dwell-promoted houses of Modern sensibility, and equally, the formally particular and Wilkinson-winning BURST house by Systemarchitects is a further example of prefabrication’s continued inaccessibility. Quite honest to this dilemma, BURST designer Jeremy Edmiston noted that "prefab is not about controlling cost, it is about managing risk". Indeed.
A Bespoke End is the Beginning: The True Expertise of the Architect
Returning to the early twentieth century, it is worth pointing out something identified by Los Angeles architect Wes Jones that Le Corbusier apparently got wrong: his attitude toward championing abstraction over difference in his response to technology and mechanisation. The legacy inherited from this choice – the reductive language of Modernist formal austerity – fits particularly well with prefabricated architecture. Economy of means, couched in the aesthetics of pragmatism produced over the past century, has alienated generations who do not care for Modernist ideals. The prefab box and its reference to mid-century Modernism, or the suggested efficiency of the shipping-container-as-domicile, limit the sensibility of those wishing for more than abstraction and reduction of geometric form. Consumers crave individuality, difference and specificity, and in the best cases, they also crave craftsmanship and attention to local, cultural conditions. Instead, the Corbusian trajectory of prefabrication has conditioned society to expect everything but.
The use of prefabrication as a platform to justify and influence the public sphere of opinion must end. It no longer helps and, in fact, for years it has done nothing but diminish the appeal and impact of architects in the housing market. The proof is in the suburbs of cities everywhere. Having now moved beyond the industrial age and fully into the era of information, the capacity to customise and to mass-produce difference as enabled by automated, digital and real-time processes has never been more viable. Yet ‘prefabrication’ is not an adequate or appropriate concept for the discipline to take forward. Similar to the innovative semantic shift that saw the sale of ‘used’ cars change to ‘pre-owned’, architecture needs to put a similar tactic in play and do away with ‘prefabrication’. It is a conceptual and semantic anachronism, and a deleterious one at that.
The concept and practice of fabricating architectural elements in either part or whole under conditions separated from the contingencies of the construction site is now more important and relevant to gain efficacy as a profession today than ever before. Architects should continue to pre-build off-site, out of the weather, out of harm’s way, and in the most intelligent manner possible. This should include trusses, insulating sandwich panels, curtain walls and modular concepts, but the result needs to be considered, implemented and promoted with greater sophistication. It is no longer enough to simply appropriate shipping containers or to feel content with a chassis-mounted project. More of the same is just more of the same. Today’s tools – both the software and the hardware – allow for the ability to conceive, develop, evaluate, coordinate, build and distribute meaningful work.
Greg Lynn’s Embryological House project (1997–2002), while unbuilt, set a proposition that is ripe for development in the post- prefabricated era: to make instances of individual housing that are never the same twice, using efficient automated processes that consume material resources from a closed-loop, cradle-to-cradle pool of ‘technical nutrients’. Such a project can embody the local, cultural specificity of a personally owned commodity, while maintaining identity in a global system of capital flows.
In addition to spatial awareness, the intelligence of the architect has always been the capacity to synthesise and integrate. Mass production is the realm of the industrial designer and the process engineer – so let them maintain claim over that territory. The bespoke is the true specialty of the architect and the contemporary profession has more facility than ever to implement difference in the most intelligent of ways.
The Australian Design Review is an online design magazine representing two print magazines: Architectural Review Asia Pacific, and the interior design magazine Inside.
