The Prefabricated Home

The Prefabricated Home Colin Davies reaktion books The Prefabricated Home The Prefabricated Home Colin Davies REAKTION BOOKS Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 79 Farringdon Road London EC1M 3JU, UK www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2005, reprinted 2005 Copyright © 2005 Colin Davies All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Davies, Colin The prefabricated home 1. Prefabricated houses 2. Architecture, Domestic – 20th century 3. Buildings, Prefabricated 4. Architecture, Modern – 20th century I. Title 728.3'7'09045 ISBN 1 86189 243 8 Contents Introduction 7 PART I: HISTORIES 1. An architectural history 11 2. A non-architectural history 44 3. House of the century: the mobile home 69 PART II: THEORIES 4. The question of authorship 88 5. Professionalism and pattern books 107 6. Down with the system 130 PART III: PRACTICES 7. Ideal homes 148 8. Little boxes 169 9. The robot and the carpenter 186 Conclusion 202 References 209 Bibliography 214 Acknowledgements 216 Index 217 When I was younger It was plain to me I must make something of myself. Older now I walk back streets Admiring the houses Oftheverypoor... from Pastoral by William Carlos Williams Introduction This is a book about the prefabricated house, but more importantly it is a book about modern architecture. The idea is that a study of the prefabricated house might shed light on the true nature of modern architecture and show the way forward to its much-needed reform. ‘Architecture’ in this book doesn’t just mean the design of buildings. It refers to something broader and vaguer: a ‘field’ in which people compete for cultural and social capital. The architecture field includes everything to do with architecture: values, ideologies, specialized skills, jargon, codes of conduct, professional institutions, education, history, books, exhibitions, networks of patron- age, prominent personalities, mythical heroes and canonical buildings. The idea of architecture as a field, rather than a profession or a discipline, comes from a book called The Favored Circle by Garry Stevens, who borrowed the gen- 1 eral concept of the field from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Anyone familiar with the architecture field can say with some certainty what is included and what is not. For example, a semi-detached suburban London house built in the 1930s probably doesn’t count as architecture, but the back extension to the house, designed by a newly qualified architect with the passion that only a first commission can arouse, probably does. On the other hand people who are called architects might sometimes find themselves excluded from the architecture field. The design of the British Iron and Steel Federation house of the late 1940s, for example, has been attributed to Frederick Gibberd, a famous architect, but this does not disqualify it from inclusion in the non-architectural history of the prefabricated house. One of the advantages of the concept of the field is that it gives critics and historians room to manoeuvre. The bound- ary between the architectural and the non-architectural can be gerrymandered to suit the argument. Nevertheless most people will allow that what is untrue in a narrow professional sense can be true in a broader cultural sense. Why should the prefabricated house be the key to the reform of modern architecture? Because, although we think of architecture as being in some 7 sense in charge of the activity of building, for 150 years or more the prefabricated house has managed perfectly well without architecture’s guidance. Situated outside the architecture field, it has cheerfully ignored architectural law. The strength of the prefabricated house lies in its popularity, its cheapness and the industrial base from which it operates. These are precisely the areas in which modern architecture is weakest. Modern architecture is unpopular, expensive and divorced from industrial production. This is why whenever it has tried to extend its field to include the territory of the prefabricated house it has failed and been forced to retreat. Art and construction are also fields. One of the curious characteristics of the architecture field is that it is more closely allied with art than with construction. In the introduction to his Outline of European Architecture, first published in 1942, the great Modernist architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner defines architecture in purely artistic terms. Painters, he says, deal with line and colour, sculptors deal with form, and architects deal with space. There are some obvious objections to this idea that the architect is an artist not too different from a painter or sculptor, such as the fact that buildings are useful objects, more like bridges or boats than paintings or statues. Architecture and construction, which one might assume to be very close, actually have very little in common. Architects and builders may be able to rub along together on a professional level but culturally they are worlds apart. They speak different languages, they have different aims and different tastes, they are educated dif- ferently and they have different histories. In the developed world the great majority of buildings, perhaps 80 per cent by value, are not designed by architects and fall outside the architecture field. Yet inside the architecture field, in schools of architecture for example, it is normal to speak and act as if all buildings were designed by architects. It is a fiction tacitly maintained to preserve the illusion that architecture is a real force for change in the world. Ironically, this self-delusion is one of the reasons why architecture is at present not a real force for change in the world. Most of the non-architectural 80 per cent of buildings are houses. Very few ordinary houses count as architecture. This is another of architecture’s guilty secrets: that it fails to have any effect on most people’s most intimate experience of buildings. Combine this with the widening gulf between architecture and construction and you can begin to see why the prefabricated house is architecture’s biggest challenge. Prefabrication is nothing new. Parts of buildings have been made in factories for at least 200 years. Machine-made bricks, ceramic tiles, sawn timber, sheet glass, sash windows, cast-iron columns and beams – all were familiar factory-made products in nineteenth-century Europe and America. Whole 8 | The Prefabricated Home buildings – houses, hospitals, churches, factories, barracks – were made in kit form and shipped to colonies and war zones all over the world. Twentieth- century examples include the mobile home, the post-war British ‘prefab’ and container cabins for offshore oil workers. But the relationship between architecture and prefabrication has always been problematic. Architects have found it hard to come to terms with the idea that the products of their art might be made in a factory. This is not surpris- ing, perhaps. When the industrial revolution first stirred, architecture was already an ancient craft. Some have seen architecture as a bulwark of resist- ance against industrial culture, maintaining eternal values in a world driven mad by what money can buy. ‘When we build,’ said John Ruskin, ‘let us think that we build for ever.’ In the nineteenth century architecture remained aloof from industry, concerning itself with churches, art galleries and town halls while ignoring factories, railway sheds and urban housing for the poor. But then in the early years of the twentieth century it seemed that architecture and industry might be reconciled. Progressive architects in France and Germany tried to create a new architecture that would use the products of industry while teaching industry about art. Stripped of all traditional ornament, the new Modernist architecture would be the very embodiment of a reformed industrial world. The early Modernists put the prefabricated house at the centre of their pro- gramme of reform. Architectural history may pretend otherwise, but the fact is that their prefabricated house projects all failed. Some architects interpret this as a failure of the prefabricated house per se, a proof that buildings do not lend themselves to factory production. But this is not true. Millions of success- ful prefabricated houses have been built all over the world, but architectural history ignores them because they are beyond the pale of the architecture field. While architecture has been struggling to find the true artistic expression of industrial production, construction has been quietly industrializing itself behind architecture’s back. Why should this matter? Architecture failed to change the world, but so what? No one seems to mind very much. Why not just accept that society expects some buildings, like art galleries and skyscrapers, to be architecture, but is content for other buildings, like ordinary houses, to be non-architecture? The usual answer, spoken from inside the architecture field, is that the quality of the built environment would be so much higher if architects were allowed to design more of it. But it is common knowledge that architects’ architecture is often disliked by non-architects. So the argument quickly shifts its ground: in that case the general public should learn to appreciate good architecture. It is all a question of education. We need visual awareness classes Introduction | 9 in primary schools and preliminary architecture courses in secondary schools. In other words, the world will have to change to suit architecture, not vice versa. But architecture has already tried and failed to reshape the world in its own image. Its chances of succeeding now are virtually nil.

Load more