Grace Walker VCU Senior Port: 2008-11-02

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Prefabricated Builidings

Manufactured

“Prefabricated architecture may well be an idea whose time has come. If architectural authorities are to be believed, we may soon be buying flat-pack houses, IKEA-style. Already in Japan the Toyota House has become a reality, with robot production lines capable of producing several hundred houses a week.”

-Margot Osborne The Advertiser (Australia)

Adney, Ken "History of Pre-fab Housing." History of Pre-fab Housing. 7 Oct. 2008. EzineArticles.com. 5 Nov 2008 <http://ezinearticles.com/?History-of-Pre-fab-Housing&id=1562954>.

Ken Adney is a writer for EzineArticles online. In his essay he discusses MoMA’s recent exhibition Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwellling that explores the history surrounding the beginnings of prefabrication. Adney cites several factors in the development of prefab buildings: Thomas Edison’s single pour concrete system, Wachsmann and Gropius’ General Panel System, and Australian designer H. Manning who designed “Portable Colonial Cottage for Emigrants” in 1830, employing the use of easy to ship flat panels. Of course prefabrication would not be where it is today without the Ford Motor Company demonstrating in 1919 “how assembly-line manufacturing could produce a ‘ready-made home’” (Adney). However, Adney points out among these the most successful “were the mail-order kit homes sold by Sears, Roebuck and Company. Between 1908 and 1940, Sears shipped more than 70,000 mail order homes which included all the materials (including shingles, flooring and paint) to build a home. There were 447 different styles and they cost between $650 and $2500 ($14,000 to $53,000 in today's dollars). Good thing it came with instructions, because it weighed 25 tons and had 30,000 parts.” After noting the history that brought us to where we are today, Adney then discusses the 5 full size homes that are on display as part of the MoMA exhibit. “There is a micro-compact home of just 76 square feet, a 5 story townhouse wrapped in cellophane, a "shotgun house" intended for disaster relief areas, one built from 570 square foot components that let the home grow as the owner's family grows and a computer designed house built of plywood and steel that lets the architect and owner choose their design simultaneously.” Adney ends his article by stating: “A home for everyone may yet be a dream, but imagination, innovation and technology are making it more possible.”

Reading this article helped me understand the background of pre-fab buildings. I had heard about the Sears houses and knew that many people ordered pre-fab structures because of the low prices, but I didn’t realize that prefabricated homes are still being developed today. Reading about the new prefabricated homes that are being designed with modern issues in mind (such as green design and disaster-relief) was definitely interesting. When I take photos of buildings I usually look for older areas, because I figured if I were to find any pre-fab buildings they would be from older generations. After reading this article, I now know that this isn’t the case.

Image:

http://www.momahomedelivery.org/

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Charles Sheeler

Charles Sheeler was born in Philadelphia in 1883. In 1903 he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, with William Merritt Chase as his professor. After a trip to Paris in 1908 “he experienced his conversion to Cézanne, Picasso, Braque, and Matisse” (Artchive). After returning to Philadelphia, Sheeler began to do commercial photography to support his painting. During this time he worked with Morton Schamberg. It was then that Sheeler’s style began to emerge, he had a “talent for high-definition photography, with stark, plain, and well-Judged masses of tone, [he] shied away from human documentary: he avoided figures in favor of near-abstract subjects, images of anonymous architecture, such as the sides of barns in Bucks County, Pennsylvania - plain American vernacular” (Artchive). Sheeler’s preference of shooting anonymous architecture “came from his belief that a common line of empirical functionalism was the "unseen soul" of American tradition, linking the old barn to the new industrial plant” (Artchive). Sheeler had a long career in photography and painting. In 1927 he was hired by Ford Motor Company to photograph its River Rouge plant. Sheeler was obviously quite impressed with the factory, stating that “Our factories are our substitute for religious expression.” Sheeler photographed the factories in such a way that this could almost be true. “The interiors of the mighty factory buildings are high, clean, invested with a numinous light, and free of all human presences except when they are needed to give scale” (Artchive). Sheeler also expressed his feelings about big industry in his famous painting American Landscape done in 1930. “It holds no nature at all, except for the sky (into which a plume of effluents rises from a tall smokestack) and the water of a dead canal. Whatever can be seen is man-made, and the view has a curious and embalmed serenity, produced by the regular cylinders of silos and smokestack and the dark authoritarian arms of the loading machinery to the right” (Artchive). Charles Sheeler died in 1965, at the age of 81.