Dennis Hollingsworth

Notes on PreFab Architecture

I went to see the show on prefab architecture at MoMA last week, Home Delivery. I had a few thoughts about it, here are a few of them:

-There's a lot of post-fab going on in the prefab world, isn't there?

-Strange that none of Marcel's readymades made it into the dialog over the years.

-Fabricating the full spectrum of architectural systems (structural, skin, HVAC, stuff like that) into prefab components must be a bear, especially when only a fragment can be fabricated at a time, to be eventually assembled together on site. Each fragment must possess multiple fragmented systems, to be linked up eventually. That's quite a trick.

Pre-Fab-Frags. That's what they are.

-I began day dreaming about growing a house by planting seeds that could sprout into a home... accelerated life forms like a Nexus-6 replicant that die and anchor in place once they mature into habitable status... "like tears in the rain."

But happier.

Tears of joy.

Home sweet home, time to die.

-What if one could reach into some huge product inventory to pluck and arrange ready made objects into human habitation?

Here are some sketches along those lines:

and

Well... ok. But this scheme needs a structural system to hold everything aloft.

What about something that needs no separate structural system? What if we could stack something together like bricks?

I'd sure like to try this out in P.S.1's courtyard someday.