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Each year in November, the Miami chapter of the American Institute of Architects produces a month-long celebration that shines a spotlight on the city’s architecture and its creators. This past November, Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, visited Miami to give a lecture titled “After ‘Home Delivery’: Pasts and Futures of Prefabricated Housing,” which was sponsored by the Wolfsonian/FIU and the University of Miami, and held at the Wolfsonian/FIU. As the title implies, the lecture was composed of Bergdoll’s musings about “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” an exhibition he staged at the Museum of Modern Art from July 20 through October 20, 2008.
The show was both a survey of the past, present and future of the prefabricated home and a building project on the Museum’s vacant west lot. As Bergdoll noted of his first big endeavor at MoMA, three-quarters of a million people saw the show, which took four days to assemble. The five houses that were included in the exhibition represent the “current thinking about prefabrication,” said Bergdoll, who added, “Largely due to the revelation of the computer, we’re on the brink of a computer-aided manufacturing process that will do away with the fear that everyone would be living in a cookie-cutter dwelling. The concept of mass customization is one of the reasons I decided to stage this exhibition.”
Bergdoll had placed Buster Keaton’s short film, “One Week,” which played in a continuous loop, in the lobby during the exhibition. In the short, Keaton attempts to build a prefabricated house to hilarious effect given his talent with physical comedy. Bergdoll chose this comedic riff on the horrors of construction for the unskilled because he saw it as a parody of fear juxtaposed against the real advancements in parametric design that was illustrated by the dwellings that were presented.
“There’s something compelling for people when they visit other people’s houses,” he said. “We went to great lengths to try to get them to concentrate on prefabrication.” This included a web site, a live feed on which illustrated the progress of construction for three months prior to the exhibition. Bergdoll called this visual reportage the exhibition’s “baby book.”
During his lecture, Bergdoll took the audience through a sweeping history of prefabrication, including the interests of Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in creating prefabricated architecture; the building of Levittown on Long Island; and Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, which Bergdoll noted was perceived as “a cranky product of a crank” in it’s time. “He was trying to solve the problem of weight,” said Bergdoll. “He understood that one of the main problems of prefabrication is how much it weighed because the biggest expense is shipping.”
Bergdoll also discussed Marcel Breuer’s Yankee Portables, which could be mounted on rails. Each of the examples he presented combined to represent the unrealized potentials of modern prefabrication, which he noted could provide incredible urban solutions today. Comparing the difference in prefabrication in the computer age to what took place before, Bergdoll juxtaposed a Ford Motors assembly line with workers replicating the same thing over and over to an assembly line at a BMW factory with humans and robots delivering a nearly endless variety of options.
“I was determined that with this exhibition, the public would go away from the show and say, ‘Those are viable architects and these are viable buildings,’” he said. “It’s my hope that some manufacturing cowboy could see from the exhibition that this could be an alternative.” From whom would these cowboys take note? Bergdoll’s diverse list included Hector Guimard, who he described as an extraordinary thinker of prefabrication in the 1930s; Stephen Kieran, who’s book on refabricating architecture is available online; Richard Rogers’ Zip-up House; Paul Rudolph’s Oriental Masonic Gardens in New Haven, CT; and Teddy Cruz’s studies of Tijuana shantytowns.
Citing the photovoltaic cells and solar panels on 3 of the 4 facades of the exhibited houses, Bergdoll declared the architecture perfect for a sunny climate like South Florida’s. And, after seeing three-quarter of a million people tromp through the structures in the exhibition, the curator reported that the homes were in very good shape, adding, “Someone would have to entertain a lot to feel as if one of these homes wouldn’t hold up to foot traffic!” About the construction designed by Kieran Timberlake Associates, Jeremy Edmiston and Douglas Gauthier, Horden Cherry Lee Architects, Haack + Höpfner Architects, the Massachusetts Instistute of Technology School of Architecture