[PDF] The Dream Of The Factory Made House eBook

Author : Colin Davies
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 228 pages
File Size : 35,10 MB
Release : 2005-06-15
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781861892430

GET BOOK

An account of prefabricated architecture around the world, from McDonalds drive-through restaurants to Ikea's flat-pack house.

Author : Gilbert Herbert
Publisher : MIT Press (MA)
Page : 438 pages
File Size : 43,34 MB
Release : 1984
Category : Architecture
ISBN :

GET BOOK

This is the story of what came to be known as the "packaged house," one of the few architect-inspired attempts to manufacture and market a prefabricated home. The plan began in the 1940s as a major collaborative effort between Walter Gropius, then at the height of his fame, and Konrad Wachsmann, a rising star-both in exile from their native Germany. For both men, this was the culmination of many years of experience in the field of industrialized housing and an unparalleled opportunity to make their long-cherished dream of a factory-made house a reality. How did this venture, which seemed to have everything going for it, turn out to be such a dismal failure? The answers to that question make this one of the most fascinating studies in the annals of modern architecture. Gilbert Herbert's analysis of the bold undertaking has within it not only the elements of personal drama, as far as Gropius and Wachsmann are concerned, but it unfolds consequences of more drastic significance for the development of industrially-produced housing the world over. Both architects represented a formidable combination of ability and experience; both had contributed significantly to the theory and practice of prefabrication, and had devised a system that was technically impeccable. That "only a small number of these immaculately conceived and engineered houses was actually sold" was not only a great disappointment for them, it was a grave shock to the whole movement for industrially-produced housing. The facts of the Gropius-Wachsmann case—now fully disclosed with extensive visual documentation—are instructive in themselves. But the real significance of this book lies in its ability to relate the facts to the history of industrialized housing and to the modern architect's confrontation with technological, economic, and social forces.

Author : Brenda Vale
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 205 pages
File Size : 11,35 MB
Release : 2022-02-19
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1000553701

GET BOOK

Originally published in 1995, this book unravels the history of the ‘temporary bungalow’ and shows that perhaps it was more a question of providing a new peace-time product for factories than a means of providing accommodation for the homeless. Built in a period of housing history which remains fascinating for architects and planners and admired by some of their first occupants but berated by others, those prefabs remaining today are subject to preservation orders but also perhaps offer a solution to the ongoing housing crisis in the UK. The book includes chapters on the development of the prefab house in the UK; comparisons with temporary housing programmes in the USA, Sweden and Germany; political and economic considerations to the UK Temporary Housing Programme and a discussion of the design of the Arcon, Uni-Seco, Tarran and Aluminium Temporary Bungalows.

Author : Mark Erlich
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 127 pages
File Size : 41,71 MB
Release : 2023-07-18
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0252054571

GET BOOK

The construction trades once provided unionized craftsmen a route to the middle class and a sense of pride and dignity often denied other blue-collar workers. Today, union members still earn wages and benefits that compare favorably to those of college graduates. But as union strength has declined over the last fifty years, a growing non-union sector offers lower compensation and more hazardous conditions, undermining the earlier tradition of upward mobility. Revitalization of the industry depends on unions shedding past racial and gender discriminatory practices, embracing organizing, diversity, and the new immigrant workforce, and preparing for technological changes. Mark Erlich blends long-view history with his personal experience inside the building trades to explain one of our economy’s least understood sectors. Erlich’s multifaceted account includes the dynamics of the industry, the backdrop of union policies, and powerful stories of everyday life inside the trades. He offers a much-needed overview of construction’s past and present while exploring roads to the future.

Author : Kimberly Elman Zarecor
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 30,6 MB
Release : 2011-04-10
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 082297780X

GET BOOK

Eastern European prefabricated housing blocks are often vilified as the visible manifestations of everything that was wrong with state socialism. For many inside and outside the region, the uniformity of these buildings became symbols of the dullness and drudgery of everyday life. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity complicates this common perception. Analyzing the cultural, intellectual, and professional debates surrounding the construction of mass housing in early postwar Czechoslovakia, Zarecor shows that these housing blocks served an essential function in the planned economy and reflected an interwar aesthetic, derived from constructivism and functionalism, that carried forward into the 1950s. With a focus on prefabricated and standardized housing built from 1945 to 1960, Zarecor offers broad and innovative insights into the country's transition from capitalism to state socialism. She demonstrates that during this shift, architects and engineers consistently strove to meet the needs of Czechs and Slovaks despite challenging economic conditions, a lack of material resources, and manufacturing and technological limitations. In the process, architects were asked to put aside their individual creative aspirations and transform themselves into technicians and industrial producers. Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity is the first comprehensive history of architectural practice and the emergence of prefabricated housing in the Eastern Bloc. Through discussions of individual architects and projects, as well as building typologies, professional associations, and institutional organization, it opens a rare window into the cultural and economic life of Eastern Europe during the early postwar period.

Author : Anthony Sully
Publisher : Springer
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 47,60 MB
Release : 2018-08-07
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 3319903977

GET BOOK

The book demonstrates how new houses can be designed to be more sustainable and ergonomic. Specifically, it describes a prototype building that could be constructed in the near future. Responding to some of the poor standards of mass estate housing in the UK and its out-of-date space standards, it contributes towards improving the current status quo by describing a house design, including drawings, that can compete with today’s mass housing. The author examines the traditional geometrical reliance on the square in the design of houses and the planning of housing estates and promotes instead the adoption of polygonal forms. This is explained using geometric analysis, diagrams and references to existing housing. These concepts have been developed with reference to technical literature from various companies with one company interested in taking it further. Providing a novel and up-to-date design concept, this book is of value to practitioners and researchers looking to improve the standard of mass housing in the UK. It is also of interest to anyone wishing to build their own house and to manufacturers wanting to move into modern housing technology.

Author : Gwendolyn Wright
Publisher : Pantheon
Page : 471 pages
File Size : 43,49 MB
Release : 2012-05-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0307817113

GET BOOK

For Gwendolyn Wright, the houses of America are the diaries of the American people. They create a fascinating chronicle of the way we have lived, and a reflection of every political, economic, or social issue we have been concerned with. Why did plantation owners build uniform cabins for their slaves? Why were all the walls in nineteenth-century tenements painted white? Why did the parlor suddenly disappear from middle-class houses at the turn of the century? How did the federal highway system change the way millions of Americans raised their families? Building the Dream introduces the parade of people, policies, and ideologies that have shaped the course of our daily lives by shaping the rooms we have grown up in. In the row houses of colonial Philadelphia, the luxury apartments of New York City, the prefab houses of Levittown, and the public-housing towers of Chicago, Wright discovers revealing clues to our past and a new way of looking at such contemporary issues as integration, sustainable energy, the needs of the elderly, and how we define "family."

Author : Thomas P. Hughes
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 237 pages
File Size : 35,19 MB
Release : 2005-05-13
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 022612066X

GET BOOK

To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In Human-Built World, thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential. Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life. Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In Human-Built World, he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.

Author : Xiangnan Xiong
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 42,96 MB
Release : 2022-06-17
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1000600815

GET BOOK

Mies at Home is a radical rereading of one of the most significant periods in Mies van der Rohe’s career, from the mid- to late 1920s when he was developing his seminal spatial ideas— ideas that would culminate in his celebrated design of the Tugendhat House. The book examines how Mies’s experience of residing in his apartment, doubling as a studio, in central Berlin had an impact on his spatial concepts. It uncovers one of the most profound but virtually untold aspects of Mies’s development: how his visions of an ideal lifestyle came out of his own living experience and how they, in turn, informed his domestic architecture. Mies’s quest featured two breakthroughs. In the Weissenhof apartment building, he conveyed a flexible and manifold lifestyle that many of the avant-garde artists, including himself, were practicing. Later, in the Tugendhat House, he put forward an alternative way of living that centered on contemplation. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Mies at Home offers a fresh investigation of the diverse intentions and strategies the architect used in creating his iconic open spaces. It will be an insightful read for researchers, academics, and students in architectural history and theory.