The Prefabricated Home

(Paperback)

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Description

Industrialized building is nothing new: building components have been mass-produced in factories for at least 200 years. Machine-made bricks, ceramic tiles, sawn timbers, sash windows; all were familiar industrial products in nineteenth-century Europe and America. Sometimes complete buildings - barracks, warehouses, field hospitals, even churches - were made in kit form and shipped all over the world. Twentieth century examples include the 'prefab', the heavyweight precast concrete mass housing of the 1960s and containerized hostels for off-shore oil workers. These were not designed by architects, and in this book, Colin Davies shows how the relationship between architecture and industrialized building, which usually occupy different cultural territories, has now become an urgent issue for architects. While architects have continued to cultivate the historical, theoretical and artistic zones in their territory, they have neglected the field of practical construction and left it up to others to innovate. Industrialized building has continued to develop behind the backs of architects, who now feel increasingly marginalized. Davies traces the origins of the branded building phenomenon, citing examples from the Portakabin, the Dymaxion bathroom and even ikea's 'Bo Klok', a take-away flat-pack house for the individual buyer and small developer. After outlining the methods and motives of prefabricated buildings and assessing their architectural implications, the author also analyzes what is happening now in factories and on building sites over the world. He looks at the revival of interest in 'volumetric' modular buildings for housing, restaurants and petrol stations. A McDonalds drive-through restaurant, for example, takes just eight days to assemble on site. Finally he shows how prefabricated building manufacturers are unconcerned with the close relationship between the appearance and the method of construction that is so important to architects. Davies concludes that the involvement of architects in the new industrialized building has a potential to produce an exciting new architecture that is humane, liberating and environmentally friendly.

Reviews

easy-to-read and provocative . . . valuable to a wide and diverse audience of general readers, design students, practitioners, and academics . . . Davies achieves such broad appeal by cleverly packaging two narratives into one book. His polemic on modern architecture is embedded inside of a competent short history of western architects experimentations with prefabricated single family homes. * Design Issues *
The Prefabricated Home is a rare thing indeed - an academic but accessible architectural history thats crystal clear about where architects should be paying more attention if they are to continue to be central to building design and offsite methods. . . a revealing, jargon-free and instructive book * Offsite Construction magazine *

Author Bio

Colin Davies is Professor in the Department of Architecture at London Metropolitan University. He is the author of numerous architectural publications including High-tech Architecture (1990).