Prefab Architecture E-Book

Ryan E. Smith

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 692

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

"Prefab Architecture . . . is beyond theory, and beyond most of what we think we know about pods, containers, mods, and joints. This book is more than 'Prefabrication 101.' It is the Joy of Cooking writ large for the architecture and construction industries." --From the Foreword by James Timberlake, FAIA THE DEFINITIVE REFERENCE ON PREFAB ARCHITECTURE FOR ARCHITECTS AND CONSTRUCTION PROFESSIONALS Written for architects and related design and construction professionals, Prefab Architecture is a guide to off-site construction, presenting the opportunities and challenges associated with designing and building with components, panels, and modules. It presents the drawbacks of building in situ (on-site) and demonstrates why prefabrication is the smarter choice for better integration of products and processes, more efficient delivery, and realizing more value in project life cycles. In addition, Prefab Architecture provides: * A selected history of prefabrication from the Industrial Revolution to current computer numerical control, and a theory of production from integrated processes to lean manufacturing * Coverage on the tradeoffs of off-site fabrication including scope, schedule, and cost with the associated principles of labor, risk, and quality * Up-to-date products featuring examples of prefabricated structure, enclosure, service, and nterior building systems * Documentation on the constraints and execution of manufacturing, factory production, transportation, and assembly * Dozens of recent examples of prefab projects by contemporary architects and fabricators including KieranTimberlake, SHoP Architects, Office dA, Michelle Kaufmann, and many others In Prefab Architecture, the fresh approaches toward creating buildings that accurately convey ature and expanded green building methodologies make this book an important voice for adopting change in a construction industry entrenched in traditions of the past.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

Introduction

Acknowledgments

PART I - CONTEXT

Chapter 1 - History of Industrialized Building

1.1 British Contributions

1.2 Mass Production and Kit Homes in the United States

1.3 Fordism

1.4 Wartime Housing

1.5 Postwar Housing

1.6 Mobile and Manufactured Housing

1.7 Precast Concrete

1.8 Digital Production

Chapter 2 - History of Industrialized Architecture

2.1 Beginnings of a Profession

2.2 Gropius and Wachsmann

2.3 Mies van der Rohe

2.4 Le Corbusier

2.5 Frank Lloyd Wright

2.6 Architectural Engineers

2.7 Late-Twentieth-Century Prefab

2.8 Lessons Learned

Chapter 3 - Environment, Organization, and Technology

3.1 Environmental Context

3.2 Organization

3.3 Technology Context

PART II - APPLICATION

Chapter 4 - Principles

4.1 Principles

4.2 Tradeoffs

4.3 Conclusion

Chapter 5 - Fundamentals

5.1 Systems

5.2 Materials

5.3 Method

5.4 Product

5.5 Class

5.6 Grids

Chapter 6 - Elements

6.1 Components

6.2 Panels

6.3 Modules

6.4 ISBU Shipping Container

6.5 Conclusion

Chapter 7 - Assembly

7.1 Mass Customization

7.2 Assembly Strategies

7.3 Assembly Detailing

7.4 Sequence

7.5 Transportation

7.6 Setting

7.7 Tolerances

7.8 Conclusion

Chapter 8 - Sustainability

8.1 Time

8.2 Lifecycle Assessment

8.3 Verification

8.4 Challenges

8.5 USGBC LEED

8.6 Market

8.7 Conclusion

PART III - CASE STUDIES

Chapter 9 - Housing

9.1 Rocio Romero Prefab

9.2 Resolution: 4 Architecture

9.3 EcoMOD, University of Virginia

9.4 Michelle Kaufmann

9.5 Marmol Radziner Prefab

9.6 Jennifer Siegal, OMD

9.7 Hybrid Architects

9.8 Project Frog

9.9 Anderson Anderson Architecture

9.10 Bensonwood

Chapter 10 - Commercial and Interiors

10.1 KieranTimberlake

10.2 SHoP Architects

10.3 Steven Holl Architects

10.4 Moshie Safdie/VCBO Architects

10.5 MJSA Architects

10.6 Neil M. Denari Architects,

10.7 Office dA

10.8 Diller Scofidio + Renfro

PART IV - CONCLUSION

Chapter 11 - Conclusion

Endnotes

Illustration Credits

Index

Color Insert

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Smith, Ryan E.

Prefab architecture : a guide to modular design and construction / Ryan E. Smith ; foreword by James Timberlake.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-27561-0 (cloth : alk. paper);ISBN 978-0-470-88046-3 (ebk);ISBN 978-0-470-88043-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-0-470-88044-9 (ebk);ISBN 978-0-470-95030-2 (ebk);ISBN 978-0-470-95055-5

1. Buildings, Prefabricated. I. Title. II. Title: Guide for architects and construction professionals.

NA8480.S66 2011

721’.04497—dc22

2010016474

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOREWORD

Quality Assurance, Quality Control

James Timberlake, FAIA, KieranTimberlake

Since the beginning of time, buildings have been executed in situ, on-site. From the first primitive hut through the pyramids, ancient Rome and Greece, all of our modern cities and great cultures have been served by men and women working the trenches of construction stick upon stick, brick against brick, element by element. As wealth began to afford more and more manual labor and greater craftsmanship, and time was defined as “forever,” the results were profound: the greatest, largest, most opulently finished structures ever. Improving quality meant putting more labor on the problem. Increasing scope meant putting more labor on the problem. We reaped the benefits of inexpensive labor and massive amounts of time for large program scopes and the highest quality until the turn of the twentieth century.

The historical chronicles of prefabrication are well and widely published, most notably in 2008 by Barry Bergdoll in his catalogue for Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit on the historical and contemporary significance of factory-produced architecture. Prefabrication in its earliest form was less about addressing quality and time or managing scope and costs—let alone about applying an environmental ethic—than it was about a fascination with industrial commoditization, production, and replication. Focused generally on housing typologies, the scalability of offsite fabrication was more focused on meeting a theoretical need for a booming housing market than it was on the integration of systems, materials, and production with the possibility for mass-customization.

With a lack of focus on integration, early attempts at factory production collapsed without firm ground up foundations in place. As George Romney, the Housing and Urban Development Department Secretary and refugee of the automotive industry learned in the 1970s, the “top down” strategy of forcing the construction industry to adopt offsite construction while encouraging its promise was quite damaging. The lack of integration tools available to the industry, and the post-war rollercoaster economy conspired to doom the effort. People were left bankrupt, demoralized, and discouraged from ever attempting to change an industry so entrenched. Since that initial effort to change the construction industry, we have seen a steady decline in the productivity of the construction industry, leaving architects to assume the burden of change.

What has changed in the world to make prefabrication viable today?

First, other industries have changed the way they work and provide products. As Stephen Kieran and I chronicled in Refabricating Architecture, the automobile, shipbuilding, and aerospace industries have remade themselves completely, sometimes twice over, since 1995. Their production methods are leaner, more time and material efficient, and more worker friendly. Their output range extends from a fully mass-customized product (automobiles) to a nearly fully customized one-off product (ships). The scale of these products on average also exceeds the complexity and scale of almost anything produced in architecture. Arguably, a ship, plane, or car, all of which have to move and carry occupants and products safely, day in and day out, are more complex overall than many of the buildings the construction industry produces. Simply, the construction industry needs to deliver a product that meets the requirements of design, on budget, on time, without falling down or leaking. It often fails at this task.

Second, the critical difference is that the air, ship, and auto industries integrate—both at the source of inspiration and at the source of supply. They have a captive supply chain and during the past two decades have integrated, redefined, and then reintegrated leaner supply chains and products. Efficiency begins at inception and is consistently interpreted and reintegrated throughout the design and production cycles. The design side of these industries is also integrated—usually with captive design divisions informing and collaborating with production teams, allowing for continuous evaluation and improvement.

By contrast, the supply chain for the architecture, construction, and building product manufacturing industries is extended and fragmented. Architects often rely on uncoordinated and poorly integrated product supply references, such as the Sweets Catalog, to research, understand, and specify products. Those products are often placed into documents and projects as open choices to be further whittled down by the construction bidding and procurement process. From there, a vast array of mostly uncoordinated products is destined for an onsite construction project with the workforce relegated to coordinating, fitting, and integrating these products into a coherent whole. This process is pure chaos, even under the best and most organized conditions. Often, a vast number of trades converge on a single point of finish within a project—bathrooms and kitchens often the most cited example—where they cannot all work, let alone fit, at one time. Yet each is under great pressure to complete the work not just on time, but ahead of time. Add to this chaos unpredictable weather or work conditions, outside of the normative comfort zones for a normal workplace, and the stress of completing the work increases with the likelihood of diminishing the quality that most architects and clients demand.

Yet architects’ tools to integrate have changed. The architecture profession has embraced three-dimensional building information modeling and production tools. We are now able to visualize and correct “busts” before they are built. We have better communication tools, some of which have been embraced by the construction industry, such as online document and project management software, enabling real-time sharing of designs, information, and results. We are now capable of sending a fully visualized, and virtually formed, model to a production line, bypassing the document interpretation phase, with all of its back and forth checking, redrawing, and margin for additional errors and omissions, ultimately improving the quality of the final product.

Third, however slowly, the environmental ethic of the architecture profession and the construction industry has begun to change. Onsite construction has been estimated to waste up to 40% of all new products brought to site. Imagine a clean, 4 × 8 foot sheet of brand new drywall. Now imagine approximately 2 feet square of each and every sheet brought to the site ending up in a dumpster and headed to a landfill. Add to that load after load of metal stud ends, wires, components, broken glass, aluminum, concrete block, and brick and it adds up to a small building’s worth of components and raw materials wasted each and every time we construct a building. The industry, the profession, and the world can no longer tolerate that sort of waste, let alone continue to absorb the economic impact of it.

Integration modeling, the backbone of offsite fabrication and manufacturing, leans the product supply chain, helps architects and constructors manage the amount of materials needed and allows for a positive repurposing of the left over materials. Further, offsite assembly offers the promise of disassembly and reuse. Rather than repurposing a whole building, we might now consider disassembly as a way forward to altogether new re-uses for building materials. The holistic integration of sustainable materials helps to produce a greener final product. Rather than haphazard applications of materials and systems in a way that purports to be sustainable—a practice I often refer to as “green bling”—offsite construction and manufacturing offers what we might call “total sustainability,” broadly defined as being 100% compliant throughout all building materials and systems in an economic and useful manner. Offsite construction presents the opportunity for this high level of compliance through integration, document and supply controls, and material management.

In addition, despite incredible improvements in workplace safety, the construction site remains a dangerous place, fraught with potential accidents, and generally exclusive of women. The construction industry must become leaner, safer, and broaden its workforce in order to remain safe, economically competitive, and relevant. A more inclusive workplace with real safety measures, and eliminating the factor of weather by building indoors rather than outdoors for the vast majority of the project, is also a long-term sustainable measure. It ensures greater productivity, the potential for growth, and the broadening of a workforce and workplace that is unlimited.

Ryan Smith has demonstrated with numerous examples of experimentation, collaboration, and hard work by countless individuals in his book the premise that “something has to precede something else.” Prefab Architecture is a first read—the “pre” in whichever mode of fabrication that an architect and client choose to embrace. This book provides a guide to frontloading a project, and in turn, a means of changing our economy, changing the way we think about architecture and design, and changing the affordability and the quality of what is produced. Call it “nextgen” construction logic. It is beyond theory, and beyond most of what we think we know about pods, containers, mods, and joints. This book is more than “Prefabrication 101.” It is the “Joy of Cooking” writ large for the architecture and construction industries.

INTRODUCTION

Prefab Architecture is intended to reach a wide range of readers, including architects who design detached dwellings, architecture and building technology students, and researchers and practitioners interested in the application of prefabrication as a production method for building. In addition, readers of magazines such as Dwell will be interested in the prefab examples and possibilities.

Prefabrication—often associated with the terms “off-site,” “assembly,” or just simply “fabrication”—can be viewed as stuck in the trenches of nineteenth-century conventions of standardization and twentieth-century modernism. Common construction means have not changed drastically over the last 80 years. In order for architecture to come into fruition—to actually be built—it takes many years, requires heavy investment, and is fraught with confrontation, value engineering, headaches, and inevitable heartache. This is not to say that new materials and methods of production have not advanced other industries, on the contrary. John Fernandez writes, “It is widely believed that construction is the slowest of all industries of such scale in implementing proven, scientifically sound technological innovation.”1 There are many reasons for the lack of innovation in the production of architecture that will be discussed throughout this book. The reality of this lack of building construction innovation must be definitively stated as an argument for why prefabrication should be pursued.

As a beginning we need to define what “offsite fabrication” is and what it is not, to alleviate confusion on its meaning herein for the reader. Webster says that “prefabricate” means, “to fabricate the parts of at a factory so that construction consists mainly of assembling and uniting standardized parts.”2 This definition in the contemporary dictionary has an entry date of 1932, seemingly not to have changed since. Prefabricate is a transitive verb. The noun “prefabrication” is then the parts that have been produced and then are assembled onsite; but one might wonder why the “pre” in prefabrication. The only explanation is that fabrication was at one time considered something that happened on the site; hence prefabrication meant that there was a body of work that occurred before the actual onsite fabrication commenced, or in today’s terms, before assembly onsite. Therefore, should prefabrication be called manufacturing? The technology of industrialization has progressed since 1932, but the word has not, leaving us to continue to say prefabrication when in fact we may mean something very different. The lack of progress in the word usage is an indication of a lack of dialogue concerning construction methods and progress in the construction industry in general.

Prefabrication, however, is a pervasive term and it would be futile to try to debunk it within this context. Suffice it to say, throughout this book, the terms “prefabrication,” “offsite fabrication,” and “offsite production” are used interchangeably to mean elements intended for building construction that are produced offsite to a greater degree of finish and assembled onsite. The topic of prefabrication for this book is a jumping-off point to explore many other related aspects of building culture including housing, building technology, and architectural practice today. The intention in writing this book is to relate the history of industrialized building, the theory of technology in architecture, principles of industrialized building, classifications of industrialized building, products, and how the integrated process can lead to finding a greater balance between economy, efficiency, and aesthetics.

There is a growing interest in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry in developing approaches to building that allow for greater efficiency and precision, are environmentally conscious, make better use of a declining workforce, and provide shorter construction cycles. As an alternative to conventional building practices, there is growing reliance on assembling offsite-manufactured and fabricated components throughout the industry. The expanding middle classes cause increased demand for buildings, from the prosaic to the remarkable, and the working class offers up fewer skilled laborers to produce these buildings. As a result, the construction industry has had to rethink its processes, relying in many cases on technology transfer from the manufacturing industry. Offsite manufacture and computer numerically controlled digital fabrication toward mass customization have far more relevance to architects today than any of us might have predicted only 10 years ago.

Prefab architecture is not new, and the points in history when it was most relevant often mirrored the circumstances of today. The Crystal Palace of 1851 by Joseph Paxton is cited as one of the earliest prefabricated buildings (although there are many examples that preceded) whose production also reflected the technological advances and expanding middle classes of nineteenth-century England. This economic expansion continued throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, and the need to house the burgeoning middle classes supported a diverse range of residential kit suppliers throughout the world. In the period during WWII, the need to build whole cities as part of the war effort again required sophisticated building production systems, although the quality of construction was often sacrificed. The skewed relationship between production quality and design quality continued in the postwar period, and its effect lingers even today in the profession’s unwillingness to engage the manufacturing and fabrication industry because of the stigma placed upon prefab.

Prefabrication is not a cure-all solution that automatically promises lower costs and higher quality. While greater reliance on manufactured production has created a bland, monotonous landscape, this is also not a universal result of relying on fabrication. Rather, buildings that rely on fabrication are only as good as the demands placed on them. In that regard, by ignoring the opportunities of fabrication, architects assure that our work is increasingly irrelevant for much of the construction industry. On the other hand, a reliance on fabrication processes can offer greater precision, shorter construction periods, better value, and greater predictability. By building in a controlled environment away from the construction site, it is possible to create safer working conditions, reduce waste and promote recycling, and sustain less damage onsite. But each of these attributes reflects a sliding scale of opportunities or tradeoffs, rather than clear benefits.

At first glance, improved working conditions seem agreeable to everyone: instead of building in conditions dictated by the weather, fabricators supply controlled environments with ergonomically considered equipment. Yet in many fabrication environments, reliance on minimal skills leaves laborers with little room for skill advancement or intellectual challenge. Although prefabrication may save on material waste, it does not say anything about the environmental impact of materials used in construction other than the distance of transportation from shop to construction site (it may be noted that neither does the LEED rating system offer embodied energy accounting). As a solution to buildings that may be disassembled as easily as they were assembled and reused as industrial nutrients, prefabrication seems to be a possibility. In the entire hype surrounding prefab, these are concepts that have not been addressed satisfactorily in the construction industry.

Architects, engineers, and contractors need to develop an understanding of the history, theory, and pragmatics of prefabrication so that they may effectively develop and implement these methods into the production of architecture. As a profession, architects lack a structure for determining the reasons for deciding where and when fabrication is appropriate, and an understanding of the range of choices that are inherent in relying on fabricators. Effectively using the fabrication process in construction requires rethinking the earliest stages of the design process. This book is therefore an educational and, most especially, a professional text that offers the information necessary to make informed decisions and ask pertinent questions concerning existing commercially available prefabricated systems during design and also methods for developing new systems with manufacturers and fabricators in the future.

This book is about the role of offsite fabrication in the making of architecture, synthesizing history, theory, and technical information of offsite fabrication for architects and construction professionals. The ultimate goal herein is to facilitate the proliferation of prefabrication into the AEC industry, finding ways to overcome barriers and push opportunities. The book is broken into four parts:

• Part I—Context reviews the history and theory of prefabrication technology.

• Chapter 1 focuses on the history of industrialized technology generally, illustrating moments in that development and their impact on society and the building industry’s understanding of prefabrication as a concept and practice of industrialized construction.

• Chapter 2 illustrates the history of prefabrication from an architectural perspective, arguing that the maturation of the profession is concurrent with the developments of the Industrial Revolution and societal modernist movement making prefabrication an engrained design ethic in the culture of architecture.

• Chapter 3 presents a theory on technology in general, and offsite fabrication specifically. Whether offsite construction occurs and the degree to which it is implemented is contingent upon three constraints including environment, organization, and technology context. The contextual concepts of collaboration, integrated practice, lean construction, building information modeling, and mass customization are presented.

• Part II—Applications introduces the principles and outputs that define and characterize offsite fabrication in architecture.

• Chapter 4 discusses the principles of prefabrication including the triad of cost, schedule, and scope and their accompanying tenants of labor, quality, and risk. This chapter is intended to aid construction professionals to weigh the opportunities and challenges of prefabrication in order to make informed decisions concerning when and how to implement offsite strategies.

• Chapter 5 is concerned with technical and constructional fundamentals that are foundational to understanding prefabrication in construction. The chapter focuses the following fundamentals: building systems, materials, methods, product, class, and grids.

• Chapter 6 identifies and presents three elements of prefabrication, namely components, panels, and modules. Each is discussed with examples given of wood kits, precast, metal building systems, panelization, SIPs, light gauge panels, enclosure panels including glazing and cladding, and finally wood and steel modular elements.

• Chapter 7 discusses designing for assembly that includes various concepts of its practice: designing for detailing, designing for increased manufacturing productivity, loading and unloading, transportation, and onsite assembly strategies.

• Chapter 8 focuses on the role of offsite fabrication in reaching sustainability goals in architecture. Fundamentally, prefabrication uses less material, but can also be a method to control the material going into a building, and, therefore, increase the quality of the construction. The majority of this chapter discusses the concepts of designing for disassembly and lifecycle.

• Part III—Case Studies focuses on contemporary examples of offsite fabrication in architecture and construction. The case studies are distinguished by chapter topic.

• Chapter 9 is concerned with the prefabrication fad in single, detached housing and makes an argument for using the lessons learned for mass-housing solutions. Architects working in single-family dwellings and prefabrication over the last decade are presented, including:

• Rocio Romero Prefab

• Resolution: 4 Architecture

• ecoMOD Project

• Michelle Kaufmann

• Marmol Radziner

• Jennifer Siegal

• Hybrid Architects

• Project Frog

• Anderson Anderson Architecture

• Bensonwood

• Chapter 10 discusses commercial and interior architectural applications for prefabrication in precast, cladding, modular, curtain wall, and digital fabrication through contemporary case studies. The following architects are presented:

• KieranTimberlake

• SHoP Architects

• Steven Holl Architects

• Moshie Safdie Architects

• MJSA Architects

• Neil M. Denari Architects

• Office dA

• Diller Scofidio + Renfro

• Part IV—Conclusion

• Chapter 11 concludes the book with a call for education, government, and industry to collectively work toward increasing integrated practices and prefabrication technology in the building industry.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many individuals have made this book possible and deserve a sincere thank you:

• John Wiley & Sons Senior Editor John E. Czarnecki, Assoc. AIA, and Wiley staff for their support and advice throughout the process

• University of Utah College of Architecture + Planning administration Dean Brenda Scheer and Architecture Director Prescott Muir, and staff Mayra Focht, Cathay Ericson, and Derek Bingman

• Many students over the past six years who have inspired and motivated the topics in this book from courses on offsite fabrication, CAD/CAM and materials-integrated technology, enclosures, and assembly

• A special thanks to student researchers Brian Hebdon, Jonathan Moffit, Jennifer Manckia, Chase Hearn, Adam La Fortune, Kristen Bushnell, Ryan Hajeb, Jenny Gill, Tom Lane, and Scott Yribar, who have tirelessly collected images, developed case studies, produced drawings, and engaged in critical discussions of contemporary offsite fabrication in architecture

• Thanks and love to Lindsey, my wife, and our kids for their patience and support.

A special acknowledgment goes to the individuals in the companies that opened their doors to interviews and factory visits, and provided illustrative images. Specific photo and image credits are included at the back of the book. The following individuals and companies have provided information:

Anderson Anderson Architecture, San Francisco, CA

• Mark Anderson

• Peter Anderson

Architectenburo JMW, Tilberg, The Netherlands

• Jeroen Wouters

A. Zahner Co, Kansas City, MO

• L.William Zahner

Bensonwood, Walpole, NH

• Tedd Benson

BHB Engineers, Salt Lake City, UT

• Don Barker

Blazer Industries, Inc., Aurnsville, OR

• Kendra Cox

Blu Homes, Waltham, MA

• Dennis Michaud

Burton Lumber, Salt Lake City, UT

• Debbie Israelson

• Clint Barratt

Professor Charles Eastman Georgia Tech University Atlanta, GA

DIRTT, Calgary, Canada

• Lance Henderson

Dwell Magazine, San Francisco, CA

• Sam Grawe

EcoMOD—University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA

• John Quale

• Scott Smith

Eco Steel Building Systems, Park City, UT

• Joss Hudson

Professor Edward Allen MIT/University of Oregon Nantuckett, MA

Elliott WorkGroup, Park City, UT

• Roger Durst

Euclid Timber Frames, LC, Heber City, UT

• Kip Apostol

• Joshua Bellows

Fast Fab Erectors, Tucson, AZ

• Michael Gard

Fetzers Architectural Woodworking, West Valley City, UT

• Paul Fetzer

• Ty Jones

Front, Inc., New York, NY

• Min Ra

Professor George Elvin Ball State University Muncie, IN

GMAC Steel, Salt Lake City, UT

• Gary MacDonald

Guy Nordsen Associates Structural Engineers LC, New York, NY

• Guy Nordsen

Hanson Eagle Precast, Salt Lake City, UT

• James McGuire

Hybrid Architecture, Seattle, WA

• Robert Humble

• Joel Egan

Irontown Homes, Spanish Fork, UT

• Kam Valgardson

• Amanda Poulson

Kappe + DU Architects, San Rafael, CA and Berkeley, CA

• Ray Kappe

Professor Karl Wallick University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH

KC Panel, Kamas, NM

• Craig Boydell

KieranTimberlake, Philadelphia, PA

• James Timberlake

• Chris Macneal

• Richard Hodge

Kullman Buildings Corporation, Lebanon, NJ

• Tony Gardner

• Amy Marks

• Casey Damrose

Living Homes, Santa Monica, CA

• Steve Glenn

Marmol Radziner Prefab, Los Angeles, CA

• Todd Jerry

• Alicia Daugherty

Michelle Kaufmann Design (formerly), San Francisco, CA

• Michelle Kaufmann

• Paul Warner

• Verl Adams

Minaean International Corporation, Vancouver, BC Canada

• Mervyn Pinto

MJSA Architects, Salt Lake City, UT

• Christiane Phillips

• Christopher Nelson

Modular Building Institute, Charlottesville, VA

• Tom Hardiman

• Steven Williams

MSC Constructors, South Ogden, UT

• Jason Brown

Office dA, Inc., Boston, MA

• Nader Tehrani

• Suzy Costello

Office of Mobile Design, Santa Monica, CA

• Jennifer Siegal

OSKA Architects, Seattle, WA

• Tom Kundig

Professor Patrick Rand North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC

Emeritus Professor Paul Teicholz Stanford University Berkeley, California

Professor Phillip Crowthers Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, Australia

POHL Inc. of America, West Valley City, UT

• Udo Clages

• Zbigniew Hojnacki (Ziggy)

Premier Building System, Fife, WA

• Tom Riles

Project Frog, San Francisco, CA

• Nikki Tankursley

• Evan Nakamura

• Ash Notaney

Resolution: 4 Architecture, New York, NY

• Joseph Tanney

Rocio Romero, LLC, St. Louis, MO

• Matthew Bradley

SHoP Architects, New York, NY

• Greg Pasquerelli

• Chris Sharples

• Georgia Wright

Steel Encounters, Salt Lake City, UT

• Derek Losee

Steven Holl Architects, New York, NY

• Julia van den Hout

• Tim Bade

Sustainaisance International, Pittsburgh, PA and Hallandale, FL

• Robert Kobet

Tempohousing, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Quinten de Gooijer

3Form Material Solutions, Salt Lake City, UT

• Willie Gatti

• Jeremey Porter

• Ruben Suare

Tripyramid Structures, Boston, MA

• Tim Ellison

• Basil Harb (formerly)

VCBO Architects, Salt Lake City, UT

• Nathan Levitt

• Steve Crane

PART I

CONTEXT

Chapter 1

History of Industrialized Building

“Three things you can depend on in architecture. Every new generation will rediscover the virtues of prefabs. Every new generation will rediscover the idea of stacking people up high. And every new generation will rediscover the virtues of subsidized housing to make cities more affordable. Combine all three—a holy trinity of architectural and social ideals.”1

—Hugh Pearman

Prefabrication architecture is a tale of necessity and desires. Individuals and communities have constructed shelter from the beginning as a matter of function. In order to build in remote locations, deliver buildings more quickly, or to build in mass quantity, society has used prefabrication, taking the construction activities that traditionally occur on a site to a factory where frames, modules, or panels are fabricated. Barry Bergdoll, curator of the Museum of Modern Art 2008 “Home Delivery,” an exhibition that tracked developments in prefabricated housing, differentiates prefab from prefab architecture. He states that prefab is a “long economic history of the building industry that can be traced back to antiquity” including the methods employed to build ancient temples and timber structures. Conversely, the history of prefab architecture is “a core theme of modernist architectural discourse and experiment, born from the union of architecture and industry.” 2 The relationship between need and desire in studying prefabrication is argued as follows: If industrial-manufacturing processes can produce other products and goods for society, then why can’t the same process be harnessed to produce higher quality and more affordable architecture?

Figure 1.1 This table illustrates the historical influences on the development of prefabrication. The value on the influence bar indicates the relative impact. White:—little to no impact; Gray—impact; Black—large impact. Note that many of the influences occur in the latter part of the 20th century with the large majority from 1960 onward.

Although not to the extent of other industries, prefabrication has already been realized in many buildings; but can architecture, a discipline rooted in image, exploit the principles of offsite fabrication to make itself more relevant? Can prefabrication be a tool by which architecture can have an impact on all areas of the built environment including and most importantly housing? How might the quality of both design and production concurrently be increased? These are questions that the early and late modernists—Le Corbusier, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Wright—as well as design engineers—Fuller and Prouve—have asked. These are the questions architects today including KieranTimberlake, SHoP, Michelle Kaufmann, and others are asking. In order to answer these questions, we will step back and evaluate the historical linkages between industrial manufacturing processes and the production of architecture to understand the context by which we find architecture today and to uncover the lessons learned from previous attempts in prefab architecture.

This chapter reviews the developments in industrialized building that shape our understanding of prefabrication in architecture and building. Chapter 2 will evaluate the relationship between the history of the architectural profession and prefabrication, uncovering the failures and successes. It will end with a summary of lessons learned from failed prefab experiments that may be applied to reassessing the future of prefab architecture in the twenty-first century. The techniques developed in other industries have been transferred to the construction sector to provide more appropriate production solutions to creating shelter. In addition to technology transfer, many societal and cultural factors have affected the development of prefab architecture.

1.1 British Contributions

The history of prefabrication in the West begins with Great Britain’s global colonization effort. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, settlements in today’s India, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States required a rapid building initiative. Since the British were not familiar with many of the materials in abundance in these countries, components were manufactured in England and shipped by boat to the various locations worldwide. The earliest of such cases recorded was in 1624, when houses were prepared in England and sent to the fishing village of Cape Anne in what is now a city in Massachusetts.3 The late 1700s and early 1800s was a time of Australian settlement by England. It is reported that the earliest settlement in New South Wales was home to a prefabricated hospital, storehouses, and cottages that were shipped to Sydney arriving in 1790. These simple shelters were timber framed and had timber panel roofs, floors, and walls. Speculation also suggests that infill material could have been canvas or a lighter timber frame infill system with weatherboarding. A similar system is reported to have been unloaded and erected a couple of years later in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to build a church, shops, and several other building types.4

English colonial building extended to South Africa. In 1820 the British sent a relief mission of settlers to South Africa, Eastern Cape Providence, accompanied by three-room wooden cottages. Gilbert Herbert writes that the structures were simple and shed-like, with precut timber frames, clad either with weatherboarding, trimmed and fixed on the site, or with board-and-batten siding. Door and window sashes were probably prepared as complete components.5 These structures were not as extensively prefabricated as our contemporary understanding of offsite fabrication; however, they represent a significant reduction in labor and time compared to onsite methods that preceded. The prefabricated shelters’ timber frame and complex joints were structurally and precision dependent on offsite methods.

1.1.1 Manning Portable Cottage

H. John Manning, a London carpenter and builder, designed a comfortable, easily constructed cottage for his son who was immigrating to Australia in 1830. Later known as the Manning Portable Colonial Cottage for Emigrants, the house was an expert system of prefabricated timber frame and infill components. It is described by John Loudon in the Encyclopedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture as consisting of grooved posts, floor plates, and triangulated trusses. The panels of the cottage fit between the grooved posts, standardized and interchangeable. 6 The system was designed to be mobile, easily shipped for furthering the colonial agenda of the British. Manning stated that a single person could carry each individual piece that made up the shelter. The Manning Cottage was an improvement of the earlier frame and infill systems designed by the English in that it offered an ease of erection. The system was simply bolted together with a standard wrench, appealing to the abilities and availability of tools to the emigrants. Herbert writes, “the Manning system foreshadowed the essential concepts of prefabrication, the concepts of dimensional coordination and standardization.” 7 Manning’s system used the same dimensional logic with all posts, plates, and infill panels being carefully coordinated. It built upon the need for a quick erection system for emigrants but relied upon the British carpentry skills in shipbuilding.

The Portable Colonial Cottage made its way to many settlements by the British throughout the nineteenth century. Its impact on the British-settled North America and the future U.S. construction industry is uncertain, however, it is assumed that the practices of timber architecture from Britain were the beginnings of the balloon frame in the United States. Augustine Taylor is often credited with the invention of the balloon frame in its implementation in construction of St. Mary’s Church in 1833 in Fort Dearborn near Chicago. The light frame, including the platform frame and balloon frame, resulted from two primary factors: a plentiful supply of wood in the new country and a rapidly expanding industrial economy with mass-produced iron nails and lumber mills. In the span of one spring and summer, 150 houses were built. Buildings were erected so quickly that Chicago was almost entirely constructed of balloon frames before the fire of 1871. The infamy of the speed of balloon frame construction preceded the building of the entire West, mostly in light wood construction.8

Figure 1.2 The Manning Portable Colonial Cottage for Emigrants was a timber and panel infill prefabricated system. Developed by Manning, this was a quickly deployable solution to the rapidly expanding British colonies in New Zealand and South Africa during the nineteenth century.

1.1.2 Iron Prefab

Another contribution that came out of the British colonial movement was the employment of iron manufacturing for building construction. Components such as lintels, windows, columns, beams, and trusses were manufactured in a foundry and fabricated in a workshop. 9 The components were brought to the jobsite and assembled into structure and enclosure systems. Like its prefabricated timber-framed counterpart, iron construction was not as extensive as prefab today, but fathered the beginnings of the steel structural movement in the United States and elsewhere.

One of the first employments of iron construction in the United Kingdom was in bridge building. The Coalbrookdale Company Bridge in 1807 was almost entirely prefabricated and erected in pieces onsite. This was followed by a host of bridges in England that progressively streamlined the process of production and erection. Pieces were standardized, cast repeatedly, and shipped to the site to be erected by fewer laborers and unskilled laypersons garnering a saving in time and cost in comparison with the traditional construction of handcrafted wood or masonry. Some of the better-known bridges were on the Oxford Canal made at the Horseley Iron Works, at Tipton, Staffordshire. John Grantham reports that this foundry was also the first to produce an iron steamboat. The ships were constructed of heavy plates riveted together to form units. The ships could be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled. One of these manufacturer/fabricators was William Fairbairn, who in the mid-1800s built four “accommodation” boats, now known as cruise ships. This technology was transferred and Fairbairn later built a prefabricated iron plate building. In the mid-1800s English lighthouses and other building types were constructed using prefabricated iron plates and rivets.10

Cast iron construction, the precursor to contemporary structural steel construction, used mass-produced cast components that were envisioned as a kit-of-parts. By standardizing manufacturing, the economy of scale helped realize a savings in time and cost. The technology was primarily used as a frame and could be turned into any stylistic expression including Gothic or Baroque. In addition to the bridges, ships, lighthouses, and prosaic buildings, the single most extensive use of the material was in the standardized structure and infill enclosure of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in England, otherwise known as the Crystal Palace. The structure was largely a repetitive system of standardized components that when assembled created a massive skeleton. Joseph Paxton, the project’s designer, had a background in green house design and claimed,

“All the roofing and upright sashes would be made by machinery, and fitted together and glazed with great rapidity, most of them being finished previous to being brought to the place, so that little else would be required on the spot than to fit the finished materials together.”11

The palace was certainly not the first in cast iron architecture, nor the last, but it linked the Manning Cottage precut timber frame with the new material of the day, cast iron. The large number of factory-produced components and the details of the Palace are quite astonishing considering the era in which it was realized. In addition, the Crystal Palace is important because it represents a shift in understanding among architects, that beauty may be as simple as the functional means of production. Paxton was more interested in the engineering, fabrication, and assembly process, than in traditional aesthetic references.

1.1.3 Corrugated Iron

The early 1800s also ushered in an additional innovation in metal: corrugated iron. Although prefabrication of frames was relatively well developed in the early part of the nineteenth century, panel and spanning material were underdeveloped. The Manning Cottage and iron trusses of prefab buildings used traditional canvas or wood planking as a means of roofing. Corrugated iron provided a quickly constructed, affordable, and structurally efficient material for roofs and walls. Corrosion obviously presented problems until 1837 when many companies began to hot-dip galvanize metals in order to protect them. Richard Walker, in 1832, noted the potential for corrugated iron for portable buildings intended for export. The corrugated sheet could be nested in multiple layers during transit and were cut into 3 ft × 2 ft panels that easily could be handled by one person, and fas-tened into place at the jobsite. Along with Manning’s Portable Cottage, Walker’s marketing and exportation of corrugated iron provided one of the first widely used prefabricated timber and iron building systems in the world.12

Figure 1.3 This image is of British Patent Number 10399 by John Spencer dated November 23, 1844. It is a corrugated iron rolling machine that became popular because of the wide availability of iron and hot-dip galvanizing in the 1830s.

Corrugated iron was employed in the Gold Rush of San Francisco in the mid-1800s. Because of the influx of people in search of new money, housing was in urgent demand. Entrepreneurs on the East Coast responded with using the latest iron technology from England and manufacturing simple shelters. Naylor from New York shipped more than 500 house kits made of corrugated iron during this time. Many of these homes were advertised in magazines and other publications so that patrons could order the shelter of their choice directly.13 Corrugated iron in buildings did not end with the kit homes of the Gold Rush era. The use of the panel had a large impact on the proliferation of Quonset huts during World War II, and later in industrial buildings, storage facilities, and even rural churches. Considered archaic by contemporary construction standards, what is not generally understood is that corrugated iron has its roots in fulfilling a need in transportable, quickly erected architecture that was prefabricated and shipped to be erected elsewhere. Its use in urban and rural temporary structures has continued since its inception.

Figure 1.4 One of the most common applications for corrugated iron has been by the U.S. (Quonset hut) and British (Nissen hut) militaries during World War II.

1.2 Mass Production and Kit Homes in the United States

Ordering kit homes from a catalog did not cease with the Gold Rush. At the turn of the twentieth century, amidst the rapidly increasing industrial revolution and the full adoption of balloon framing, kit homes from precut timber for light frame houses became common. Among them was Aladdin Homes, formed in 1906 by W.J. and O.E. Sovereign, brothers who believed that mass-production concepts could be used to produce mass housing. The Transcontinental Railroad, connecting the East and West coasts, was completed in 1869 and facilitated the proliferation of such companies. With the rapid expansion of the United States to the West, there was an urgent need for quick, affordable, and easily constructed housing. Aladdin homes followed the precedent of mail-order, knock-down boats that buyers could purchase and assemble themselves. Clothing had also become mass-produced with patrons ordering via mail service based on standardized sizes. The brothers believed that the housing industry could benefit from the same concept that had been used in these industries. Therefore, they marketed what they called the “Readi-Cut” system in which all the lumber necessary to build a complete home was precut in a factory and delivered. This process was to remove the waste associated with onsite framing, increase speed of manufacture, improve precision, and thereby allow purchasers to only need a hammer and time for erection. Although Aladdin was the first to pioneer the precut lumber systems of production for balloon-framed homes, Sears Roebuck and Co., with their marketing and financial power, were able to sustain prefabricated efforts through the 1930s.14

Sears Roebuck’s success was in large part due to its ability to offer a variety of housing options and financing. Offering model-based housing, whether from a catalog or built model home village, remains the method that many homebuilders sell today, complete with onsite financing and upgrade options. Sears took Aladdin’s ideas and created a strong business model backed by national retail capital and experience in mail order shipping. In the end, both Sears and Aladdin failed and pulled both their catalogs and production from operation. This failure is in large measure due to the Great Depression and housing crisis of the early 1920s and 1930s. As a mortgage broker as well as a product developer, it is reported that Sears lost over $5.6 million in unpaid mortgages during this time.15 Sears and Aladdin did not claim to make advances in architectural design, rather, their contribution to prefabrication was in providing a more efficient ready-to-build system of components, a strong marketing strategy, affordability, and variety within a standardized product to the consumer. Although not explicitly working to impact the future of prefabrication in architecture, implicitly these frame systems hid their industrialized production under wood siding and roof shingles. Housing architecture in the United States during the early part of the twentieth century was marked by veneers and finishes that worked to hide the method by which production was assumed.16

1.3 Fordism

The advances in pre-cut light-frame systems were developments that took advantage of new processes and technologies for production. The advents of Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line process provided lower cost yet higher quality automobiles. He was able to provide a more precise product and also decrease labor and time per unit output. This process of standardization and assembly line production was transferred to the housing industry and, by 1910, a number of companies began to offer prefabricated houses in a variety of scales and quality.

Figure 1.5 The Aladdin “Built In A Day” House, circa 1917, boasted lower cost per square foot of house in material due to its “Readi-Cut” system that maximized yield from standard lengths of lumber.

The principles of standardization, mass production, interchangeability, and flow that pervade manufacturing can be traced to Ford. Standardization is the limitation to the variety in product produced so that machines may be able to output set lengths, widths, and assemblies. This removes the waste associated with variability options and the margin of error in end products. Mass production is a sister concept to standardization. It claims the economy of scale, that the more of something that is produced, the cheaper and higher quality it can become. Ford also invested heavily later in the production of automobiles in interchangeability. This concept refers to the ability for parts to be used on a number of different end products. A prime example of this is a 2 × 4 in the construction of houses. The houses might all be different, but all are built from this standardized, mass-produced part. Products such as threading for bolts became standardized in the Ford factory, making connections easier and faster. Flow is the assembly line concept where products are driven on a line at which laborers perform a limited number of tasks in the operation. This repetition of task reduces time.

The industrialized world understands these principles implicitly because it is in many ways the decree by which we operate as a society. These principles have become accepted as standards in and of themselves. They have been used by manufacturers of products in many industries, including the building industry. Stephen Batchelor states that the impact of Ford’s principles of production on technology development is considerable:

“but in the wider world it is seen as one of the key ideas of the twentieth century, which has fundamentally altered the texture of Western life. The arts—music, literature, theatre, painting, sculpture, architecture and design—have all been affected.”17

There are problems with the acceptance of Fordism as a way of life. In addition to its effects on form in the arts, mass production is but one of many manufacturing strategies that can be conceived from today’s technology. Therefore, as Sabel and Zeitlin argue, the production of products in the future, including prefabricated architecture, will be determined not by the technologies that have been developed by Ford and others under the mass-production paradigm, but by the social struggles of the day.18 Just as social context was formed by the impacts of Ford’s production theory, Ford’s production theory is just as much a product of social desire. Consumerism is one of the social contexts in which mass production has thrived. But in recent years, the issues with the housing crisis, the constant thirst for the new, has placed the economy and its people in a terrible predicament. Although short-term desires have been met, long-term stability has not. The sustainability of this model is not everlasting in terms of both economics and environmental ethics. Mass production also presents problems with labor monotony, potentials of exploitation of the poor, and a lack of variety in the man-made landscape. More will be discussed on the perils of Fordist production and prefabrication later in the text. New paradigms are emerging that question this production method; however, suffice it to say that the impacts on the American social beliefs are long lasting.

1.4 Wartime Housing

Prefabrication in the United States was used to further the expansion westward in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many advances in applying Fordist mass production to the development of kit houses were exploited. This time of innovation was the first major paradigm shift in the location of production of buildings from site to factory. As the great economy deflated, much of the production during the 1920s and 1930s also declined. This period was not marked by large mass-housing initiatives, marketing strategies, or even the successful business practices that marked the early twentieth-century movements. On the contrary, it displayed one-off prototypical experiment houses that tested Fordist mass production, using automobile and shipbuilding technology in building construction.

In 1932, Howard T. Fisher developed the General Houses Corporation to produce postwar housing. The product differed from the Sears and Aladdin types in that they did not aim to mimic aesthetics of the past or tradition, but were intended to reflect the manner in which they were developed, the means of prefabrication. Fisher’s houses were centered on taking advantage of the Fordist mass production; his homes were to be assembled literally as an automobile. General Houses would implement building components from supply companies that were in the market place servicing other industries. Fisher’s greatest technological achievement was in the development of a metal sandwich panel wall system that used similar technologies from the airplane industry developed during the war. He also had the support of industrialists General Electric, Pittsburgh Glass, and Pullman Car Co. His efforts, similar to the architects of the time, were to produce modern buildings, flat roofs, and do it in an industrial aesthetic. Fisher was extremely optimistic about the public’s taste, and his marketing strategy to sell the most innovative and contemporary housing in convenience and aesthetic is attributed to his company’s near demise. Ironically, years later the company was successful in producing traditional-style houses in nine states. Fisher’s innovations provided a new chapter in prefab thinking—that a house can be factory bound and offsite assembled from components provided by different companies, much like an automobile of this time was produced.19

General Houses gave way to a number of similar companies looking to produce modern houses for the masses. Among them are notably the American Houses developed by McLaughlin, an architect, and Young, an industrialist. Their 1933 “Motohome” also had difficulty gaining success until McLaughlin retooled and developed more traditional wood precut homes. These houses were remarkably similar to Fisher’s company in that they had flat roofs and used a metal sandwich panel system for exterior walls. While General Houses and American Houses developed an innovative panel system, the Pierce Foundation prefabricated a services core that housed kitchen, bathroom, and all plumbing fixtures. The core also held heating and air conditioning services. American Houses implemented the Pierce Foundation’s service core in their prototype. The service core in the American Houses showing was one of the first identifiable modular examples in prefabrication building. This prefabricated service module mirrored Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House pod, which will be discussed in Chapter 2.20

Used in military applications in airplanes and ships and in the automobile industry, steel’s aesthetic appeal for designers and builders alike was alluring. Builder George Fred Keck developed both the “House of Tomorrow” and the “Crystal House” for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. On display were a number of examples of steel used in housing. Keck’s prototypes featured steel frame and glass infill walls. The House of Tomorrow comprised a 12-sided, 3-story structure that resembled an airplane hangar more than a house. Keck used prefabricated steel elements to develop the steel superstructure, enclosure panels, and railings. It is reported that 750,000 people visited this house during the first year of exhibition but not one buyer was secured. The Crystal House built upon the steel frame concept and could be erected in an impressive three days. It too was unsuccessful in market and sold for scrap to pay off Keck’s bills.21

1.5 Postwar Housing

The advances in the postwar era are not identified by technique, but rather are marked by business improvements. As World War II was coming to a close, returning soldiers increased market demand for housing. In 1946, the U.S. federal government passed the Veteran Emergency Housing Act (VEHA), giving a mandate to produce 850,000 prefabricated houses in less than two years. This initiative sparked numerous efforts in postwar housing design, including architects Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann’s “Prepackaged House” proposal, which will be discussed in Chapter 2. Although this mandate did not reach its envisioned breath of impact and completion, it gave rise to a number of prefabrication housing companies over the course of a decade. Among these companies were Lustron Corporation, Levitt Town, and Eichler Homes.

In 1948, Lustron Corportion began producing all-steel houses in airplane factories left vacant after the war. The houses were traditional in form, simple, with modest gable roofs and porches, but innovative in that they were constructed of entirely prefabricated enamel steel on the exterior and interior. Carl Strandlund, an industrialist from the prewar years, took the concept of automobile process to housing even more literal than experiments in the 1930s with metal sandwich panel technology. The method and even material in this case were literally to be fashioned after automobile manufacturing. Just as a car, the house had contained too many pieces to be feasible in construction. The components did not always make sense in their sizes in relation to manufacturing standard sizes of sheet metal and therefore created unnecessary waste. In the end, the houses were too expensive for modest income buyers. After only 2,500 homes were built, the company closed in 1950. In addition to the method of production being problematic, Lustron homes were cold, both visually and in temperature. Employing little insulation, the metal house would heat up in the summer and freeze in the winter.22 In a recent tour of a salvaged home at the MOMA exhibit in 2008, many patrons were over-heard remarking about the impersonal machine-like quality of the house.

Figure 1.6 The 1948 Lustron House was an all-enameled steel building system that used the automobile metal sandwich panel technology. This Lustron home still stands in Madison, Wisconsin.

William Levitt took advantage of the VEHA. Instead of producing homes in the factory, Levitt systematized the onsite process. Using principles of assembly line production and adding a separation of construction planning and execution borrowed from Taylorism, Levitt organized crews to maximize production efficiencies and material use.23 A developer by trade, Levitt produced entire subdivisions of housing, and in 1945 he developed Levittown in Pennsylvania. The homes were unremarkable, very similar, and were the plausible foreshadowing model of cookie cutter developments in the United States.

In California, Joseph Eichler similarly developed a systematized method for onsite construction by developing entire communities of housing. However, having grown up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house and being a lover of the arts, Eichler was appalled at the lack of variety and aesthetic appeal in Levitt’s product. Eichler, therefore, hired architects on the West Coast to design courtyard and exterior-interior relational plans that employed post-and-beam design and large expanses of glass. These homes were designed and built on a rigid grid, and featured standardized mechanical and plumbing systems that allowed for variety within a set system. Eichler was not only interested in style being influenced by California modernists, but was a socialist, wanting to open modern architectural design to the middle class of housing. In comparison to Lustron, Levitt, and many others already discussed, Eichler’s mission was somewhat successful, building developments in Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and San Rafael.

Eichler began in the mid-1940s and, by 1955, had become so efficient at delivering modern homes that, despite the marginal increase in cost of material of an exposed post-and-beam structure, could sell a house at a comparable price with the same amenities as conventional housing. The impact of these homes on prefabrication technique is next to none; however, in studying what prefabrication promises—increased quality and reduced cost—it was influential. At the end of the day the reason these homes succeeded and continue to succeed from one owner to another is attributed not only to their aesthetic appeal and unparalleled location, but to the commitment, attention to detail, design, and quality that Joe Eichler himself was willing to offer to the process.24

Figure 1.7 Systematized onsite building construction was developed in the mid-twentieth century and continues today as the pervasive method of residential construction. This house in Utah is modeled after mid-century Eichler houses. There are neighborhoods throughout the western United States that are built within the principles of courtyards, large expanses of glass set within a post-and-beam structure.

The postwar housing program in the United Kingdom mirrored the United States. Nissen huts, the UK equivalent of the U.S. Quonset hut, provided much-needed shelter during and after the war. Models including Arcon, Uni-Seco, Tarran, and Aluminum Temporary, or AIROH, were temporary bungalows under an organized government initiative to supply housing for the war-stricken country. The United Kingdom used innovative technologies of the time, including steel framing and asbestos cement cladding, timber framing, precast concrete, and aluminum. The homes were not overly stylized, and employed prefabricated kitchen and bathroom systems. It was at this time that many of the wartime and postwar prefabrication housing companies in the United States provided and influenced housing in the United Kingdom during their rebuilding efforts. In particular, the Tennessee Valley Authority project for the Roosevelt Dam in 1944 employed prefabricated temporary shelter for workers on the dam. This technology was used in the United Kingdom. for its recovery efforts, learning from the Americans’ methods as well as receiving actual houses that were produced in the United States and were shipped across the Atlantic for rebuilding efforts. The difference in the UK programs when compared to prefab initiatives in the United States, is that the houses were intended to be temporary, focusing on speed rather than quality.25