“Suburban Sublime: Herman Miller Factory” (original) (raw)
Related papers
2009
In the fall of 2007, a fifth year studio at the University of Tennessee was co-taught by a professor of architecture and a designer with Clayton Homes. Clayton Homes is a BerkshireHathaway company and the nation’s leading producer and retailer of manufactured and modular homes. In addition to sales and manufacturing, the company finances and insures homes, and develops land and communities. Until recently, the company held numerous land-lease community developments where residents owned manufactured homes and leased lots from Clayton. In 2007, the company sold these communities to instead focus on building subdivisions of modular single-family homes to sell as developed lots. In both approaches, home sites are typically green fields, or undeveloped land. Growing homebuyer and municipality interest in environmental issues, however, is creating a demand for not only ecologically-minded homes but also ecologically-minded home sites. Furthermore, sustainability includes conservation of ...
Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities
Design for Rethinking Resources : Proceedings of the UIA World Congress of Architects Copenhagen 2023, 2023
Today, technologies of the emerging bioeconomy present one focused opportunity to unwind and transmute industrial operations into sustainable, regenerative work. Relying on standing industrial process design methods, however, may tether this hope to the same consequences and disparities industrialization has already suffered us the last few centuries. Instead, process design methods reconsidered to begin from specificity of place and reverence for relationship may be a helpful balance to methods that begin from abstract process operations or intended product outcomes, alone. This essay posits that drawing architects deeper into the pragmatics of designing and delivering factories, refineries, waste/energy plants, or other industrial infrastructure might support the above re-tooling of process design methods toward kind, non-modern practice. Process architecture is an established professional capacity for working spatially and relationally on plant design in collaboration with process engineering, though it is often practiced more by former plant operators than by architects. When included, the role of Process Architect can also be technically well-positioned within standing project delivery structures to help identify and implement better designs for the substantial footprint this building type has in ecological relationship, carbon emissions, material and waste flows, worker’s rights, concentration of capital, and patterns of land use and urbanization. To invite more architects to this seat at the table, this essay offers a very basic introduction (for architects) to the roles of process architecture and process engineering in industrial operations today and to how these disciplines might support a deeper sustainability in the near future. With a stronger coalition of architects working in skillful partnership with the vast webs of human and non-human assemblages shaping today’s industrial landscape, perhaps together we may help re-weave some of today’s most barren and extractive industrial practices into thriving, mutually nourishing convivialities.
The Machine and the Craftsman: The Hope for Technology in Prefabricated American Architecture
The beginning of the 20th century marked a shift in thinking about construction as hands that previously used simple tools went from directly building homes to constructing new tools to build homes. The connection of the machine to the craftsman in modern American architecture is reflected in the case study of the Tournalayer. The complex Tournalayer was a Rube Goldberg-like hand-made machine conceived by the industrialist Robert Gilmore “R.G.” LeTourneau and his desire for pragmatic technology in 1944. The Tournalayer could pour, lay, and deliver a concrete house in a single day. The machine formed many architecturally diverse communities throughout the United States in a very short period of time. The machine was created with newly developed technology; the gas torch and the electric arc welding machine were the new hand-operated tools that were used to create construction machines instead of directly creating the homes themselves. The resulting new homes were affected by the creation of this new tool as architects worked within the new constraints of the community building tool the Tournalayer. This paper brings to light the interdependence between the hand, mind, and the control of the tool and its effect on architectural theory and practice.
Taking the Pulse of Bluff: Design Build Practices in Native American Communities
The School of Architecture at the University of Utah has hosted a design Build Program in Bluff, Utah for ten years. The emergence of the program at the same time as the consolidation of digital technologies in architectural schools is no coincidence. Favoring the conceptual, rather than the practical, modeling software and digital fabrication, have introduced notions of space, materiality, and locality that take little notice of the capacity of the building industry to realize them. They have drawn a wedge between the high and low design opportunities available in the marketplace; and have created graduates alienated from the dominant conditions of the material production of the built environment. Design Build Bluff, in contrast, is conceptualized around the desire to immerse students into the realities and exigencies of construction industry. It encourages a more lateral relationship between the ideas on paper and “nuts and bolts” on site. Every spring a number of graduate students move more than 300 miles away from the school of architecture and form a tightknit commune to build a small single family home for a beneficiary on the Navajo reservation near Bluff. This paper will access the successes and failures of the pedagogy of learning-by-doing as practiced at Bluff by taking a closer look at the three most interesting houses built by the students of Utah in the past ten years. It will think through Rosie Joe (2004) that put the program on the map, Sweet Caroline (2006) a playful exploration of the geometry of a Hogan, and Rabbit Ear (2013) the last completed expression of its teaching philosophy. Taking the pulse of the school’s decade long involvement with the reservation, the paper will argue that moving into its second decade, the critically acclaimed program needs to transcend the object-centric architectural education for it leads to an impossibly narrow, technocratic, and ironically, market-driven pedagogy and understanding of the role of the future architect.
Paradigms in Computing: Making, Machines, and Models for Design Agency in Architecture, 2014
While not always well recognized, agency is deeply intertwined with our ability to identify and extract measurements and world parameters that enable an effective synoptic level of control. While acknowledging the necessity of this practice, the political scientist James C. Scott identified that this methodology and subsequent power has led to powerful disaffections and dystopic conditions. The hazards of employing a inevitably narrowed vision of the world required for administrative management, one that crops out far more of a phenomenon than it contains, are compounded by how we build to feed these measurements, structuring a world that maximizes select parameters and neglecting a world “outside of the brackets”. However, with the powerfully transformative advances in computational power should there not be the promise to measure better and more and administer more richly textured schematics?
The Culture of a Machine Crafted Architecture: The First Tournalaid Communities
The Tournalayer was a remarkable mechanized system for crafting prefabricated housing that established the first Tournalaid communities in the United States during the mid-1940s. These houses and communities are exemplary models that epitomized the entrepreneur Robert Gilmore Letourneau’s experimental energy to apply new technology to create the first Tournalaid communities in Vicksburg, Mississippi and Longview, Texas. The revealed history of the Tournalaid communities demonstrates how the building materials, innovative technology and the unique “house in a day” construction system came together to form neighborhoods with lasting cultural bonds and memories. The Vicksburg Tournalaid community lasted for over half a century until the mid 1990s when the community of houses was destroyed; the Longview, Texas community has several houses remaining. In view of the fact that the Vicksburg houses have been removed, the community bonds and memories are still being revealed, though they are gradually becoming lost. This research seeks to bring forward the cultural heritage of the first Tournalaid community through the people, the place and the prefabrication technology that made the community culturally and architecturally meaningful. This research highlights how designers had the ability to develop technology to suit their needs. A simple case study of worker housing in the 1940s will reveal how the larger ideas of modernism influenced the impact of housing on the community and their families. The machine and the craftsman interacted with the technological processes to reveal hope for the future.