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Prefab Prototypes: Site-specific Design for Offsite Construction
by Mark Anderson & Peter Anderson
Princeton Architectural Press, 2007
Architects Mark Anderson and Peter
Anderson started their firm as a design-build construction
company in 1984. Nearly 25 years later, this integration
of design and the means and methods of bringing them to
fruition comes across clearly in this large-format monograph
on the duo's primarily single-family residential projects.
We see this integration in highly-detailed axonometrics
(sometimes exploded, rendered lovingly with shadows, no
less), well-crafted models, construction and finished photographs,
and of course in the designs themselves. The tectonic expression
of each house is immediate without being being a one-liner.
Needless to say, the creation of space is as important as
the creation of the construction elements.
This book is more than a monograph
on the Seattle- and San Francisco-based office; it is a
treatise on prefabricated and modular construction. Split
into seven chapters (Panelized 2x4, CNC Timber Framing,
Concrete Systems, Steel Framing, Sandwich Panels, Modular
Systems, Further Experiments), the 30 projects run the gamut
in the now hot-top of prefab, showing how the architects
find the right expression and construction to each unique
circumstance, rather than trying to make a particular prefab
design fit every solution, what many prefab designs try
to do. The difference between the two means Anderson
Anderson Architecture's designs might take longer and
cost more than designs bought off the internet or from a
catalog, but if this book is any indication these aren't
the concerns of their clients. The
Orchard House, for example,
took three years to complete (due to a thorough design process,
not difficult construction), and with a five-acre site in
Sonoma County, California, a limited budget did not point
the way to prefab.
This difference should not be read
as a criticism of the duo's work or choice of clients, but
rather a questioning of prefab's role in residential architecture,
something that is commonly seen as a way to bring Modern
architecture to the masses through the low costs of offsite
construction. All too often these low costs are still higher
than the typical suburban developer cookie-cutters that
also use prefabrication and modular construction, but to
different effect. Is it perhaps better to see prefab as
an undeniable aspect of contemporary architecture and construction,
rather than a separate route for the two? Should architects
and their designs be considered either prefab or not, as
the media seems to lump them? Or should architects stop
denying the level of prefab already found in buildings that
don't bear the Modern style and embrace it as a something
that could influence not only construction but expression?
A yes to this last question would
point to the Andersons. Refreshingly they have created a
practice, and now a book, that places prefab high in their
design thinking, without forcing out the other particularities
of architectural programs that influence design, such as
site and client. Certainly a certain modularity does pepper
their designs, but that is not as pronounced as the variety
and freshness of their output. The highest praise on this
book might be to say that unlike other books and magazines
on prefab where one finds repetition, flipping through these
pages one sees potential.
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