UCLA 2009 PreFab Research Studio

Recent Trips

2009-04-24T16:31:00.000-07:00

It's been a while, but we have gone on one more field trip. Four of us went up to the Bay Area to visit two companies.

One is called ConXtech, located in Hayward, CA, a steel frame manufacturing company that is designing a cutting edge space frame with system that allows for steel beams to slide into place within specialized connections that are welded onto moment columns. The welding is done in the factory; the erection of the frame on site is quick and efficient, requiring only bolts and with no on-site welding, time and cost is greatly reduced. We had to sign a non-disclosure form, so none of the photos we took will be placed on this site, but going to their website will inform you of their many innovations.

The other company we went to is called Swerve, a furniture company that is creating prefabricated kits for custom furniture. The designer is actually one of Mark Mack's former students, and an alumnus of Cal. I'm not sure if we're allowed to show all of the photos, but here's a before and after of the aluminum pieces he creates with robotics:
Before going into the machine...
After!

The latter half of the trip involved seeing the Academy of Sciences, one of Renzo Piano's recent works. This has nothing to do with pre-fabricated design, but in terms of architecture, the building is amazing:

Rooftop!

Retrospective: Vienna

2008-11-06T09:53:00.000-08:00

And now, Vienna, where we got to see some more amazing spectacles:

Zaha Hadid's housing project that should have been successful, but now stands empty.

This project was a cooperative effort between Mark Mack and Roland Hagmueller, with 126 units in the 22nd District of Austria.

There's Mark, sporting a new trend.

Mark and his buddy Roland, having a grand old time.

A beautiful sunset to finish off a wonderful trip.

So that was our trip, a radical sprint through Europe, 4 countries, 6 cities, 10 days. I'd suggest it to anyone who wants to be inundated with architecture and culture and drowned in the spirit of travel. It was exhausting, exhilarating, and exciting. I'm glad I went, and I feel ready to tackle the issues of prefab multistory housing in the following months ahead.

That's all for now.

Well, just one more photo:

Retrospective: En Route to Vienna

2008-11-06T09:35:00.001-08:00

We headed to the ELK factory after we left Judenburg, after a super amazing home cooked dinner with Mark's childhood friend and wife.

So we piled into the Focus and the Mondego and drove to the boonies, where we toured the ELK Factory. They pre-fabricate homes so you don't have to. Here's some videos of the factory bustling with activity.

Moving a wall over to another belt.
Mirror To YouTube

Using a vacuum to pick up wall elements.
Mirror to YouTube

Flipping!
Mirror to YouTube

Pan of the final factory area, where the finished walls are loaded onto trucks and sent off.
Mirror to YouTube

When we finally arrived in Vienna, we met up with Professor Hubert Riess who designed this project below:
This was a housing project in Vienna, the Residential Project Spottlegasse, built between 2003 and 2005. It's a complex of 150 subsidized apartments, and is built mostly out of wood, in fact, out of KLH panels. The use of wood was hoped to promote the use of wood in multilevel construction, to make it more acceptable, and to prove that it could comply with Vienna building code, which only allowed wood buildings to be up to 4 stories.

The KLH panels, due to cost, were used as load bearing elements but not always exposed to show that it was bearing the weight. Cladding for low energy requirements covered up the KLH panels in most places, taking away the ability to see the wood and its strength in holding up the building. Nonetheless, the fact that the structure was entirely made of wood shows new possibilities in timber fabrication and new thoughts about how we in the United States could potentially use this material in our projects.

The prof also gave us the most delicious apples that I have ever eaten, and will probably be the best apples I will ever eat in my entire life. I regret that I didn't eat more of them...

Tons of wood jokes were made during this trip. Holz-o-matic.

Retrospective: En Route to Salzburg

2008-11-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

Continuing our sprint through Europe, we drove madly down the autobahn towards Austria, stopping at the border to get some kind of car tax sticker before careening through the countryside towards our destinations.

The lovely Red Bull Hangar in Austria was a nice site to see along our crazy drive through the country.

These next two detail shots were taken at the house en route to Salzburg that Mark designed, which was a very nice house, and I'm sure my classmates will post more photos; I only have the two, unfortunately.

This appears to be some kind of epoxy with pebbles embedded in it, used for the bathroom tile.

This is KLH, the company that makes cross-laminated timber, and it is a very viable building material, if only they produced it in the States...

Right, moving on to Judenburg and Vienna.

Retrospective: Munich

2008-11-06T09:04:00.000-08:00

Ah, Munich, city with the sausages and the history. Well, that's all I can say about that for now, since most of this has already been written about. Photo dump!

These photos were taken at the BMW Welt in Munich. We had a nice dinner there, and I finally learned what a real wiener schnitzel is:

This was an interesting building just because the damaged portions are called out due to the difference in materials. You can easily tell where the building got bombed, and it makes no attempt to hide it.

I can't remember what this building was, I just remember that it was closed and we all attempted to get in somehow...

Allianz Arena by HdM.

The site of the Munich Olympic Games. Hard to believe that all of this was done before Rhino3D!

Right, now off to Austria, where we hit Salzburg, Judenburg, and Vienna.

Retrospective: Copenhagen

2008-11-06T08:50:00.001-08:00

Beautiful, lovely, cold Copenhagen. It was tragic that we couldn't stay beyond our 2.5 days, but still, it was well worth it.

My colleagues have already waxed poetic on the day we spent traipsing around the city of Copenhagen looking at latest and greatest architectural works, and that was the day my camera was unfortunately out of commission due to me forgetting to put my charged battery into the camera. Outright stupidity on my part, but fortunately, the others have tons of photos.

During our stay, we visited the office of BIG, one of the hottest firms today. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post photos of inside the office, but at the very least, I can post the photo I took of their front door to prove we were there.

So one of the project managers of BIG took us out to two of their housing projects and gave us a personal tour. I'll just post some photos here, since it's already been written about at length:

And now, on to Munich.

Retrospective: Stockholm

2008-11-06T08:16:00.001-08:00

This is a little outdated, but of course, only one of us had a laptop during the trip. So I'll be posting a 6-part retrospective on the trip, with my photos and notes along the way. (It'll be mostly photos, since Ryan has so kindly provided most of the technical information about our trip.)

During our stay in Stockholm, we took a little bus tour with Dr. Bo Göran from KTH Stockholm. We saw a lot of housing communities, each with their own character, but for most of them there was a strong emphasis on the Swedish aesthetic.

Typical Housing

Duplex Housing

Single Family Homes with Sod Roofing

Super Colorful Housing Community

Multi-story housing in construction.

Dr. Bo Göran's son's House

Check out the detail of the first few stairs!

Awesome built in deli slicer on the kitchen counter.

BO KLOK Housing by IKEA and Skanska.

More housing communities.

Even more housing communities.

We mistook these for BO KLOK upon arrival, but these are just normal duplex housing.

This is all for Stockholm images; Copenhagen is next.

Sunset in Vienna

2008-11-03T03:13:00.000-08:00

After a grueling ride with two cars and1236km of Alpine driving, we concluded our tour of housing projects with a stroll through Vienna's recent prefabricated Housing projects. The students and their Guides, Roland Hagmueller and Kristy Balliet- UCLA Alum and currently Assistant to Greg Lynn's Studio at the AAK in Vienna; are posing in front of the last buildings visited. This housing project is a Hagmueller/Mack collaboration and features 126 subsidized housing units in the 22nd District of Vienna.

While the students where ready to think about how to spend the last night in the Pastry Capital of the World- dancing at FLUC or FLEX or spending the the evening chasing down some exotic Wuerstel, the seniors remembering the old times sitting on a designer park bench.

Munich, big and small

2008-10-29T02:23:00.000-07:00

Our next big stop was the town on the Isar, where we visited Prof. Richard Horden in his own Micro Home. All of us, 5 girls and 6 boys, fitted in the 2.6x2.6M home. While Richard Horden is trying to make a mobil call from his metallically shielded home, Nespresso was brewing behind him in the compact kitchen. This was one impressive feat for neat freaks.

The large olympic stadium complex, Frei Otto oder Auer/ Behnish-who cares, impressed not only the hardcore biomorphic and fluid-form inclined, but must also scared the jizzas out of CooP and their flow of creativity designing the BMW World across the street.

We finished happily with 1 liter glasses of beer and typical Baverian Food at the Hofbrauhaus, with Prof.Ebner and Prof. Kauffmann, who both teach at TUM. As an after dinner digestive we took in two commercial buildings by H&dM in the center of Munich and a large sphere by Olaf Eliasson; sip.

Next stop Austria, Land of Wood and Pastries.

10.28.2008 - Munich

2008-10-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

Today was a marathon.

First thing in the morning, we visited the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and toured the surrounding district, which included post World War II reconstructed buildings and an art center extension by Coop Himmelblau.

Once returning to TUM, we received a lecture by Prof. Richard Horden on compact design strategies inspired by aviation and industrial engineering. Prof. Horden’s latest work has been the Micro Compact Home, an example of small scale living outfitted for business class lifestyle. Here, he merges elements of high design with what he defines as the four main functions of living – eating, sleeping, working, and hygiene – into a 2.6 meter cube. After the lecture, we visited Prof. Horden’s personal Micro Compact Home in a student village of 10 cubes, where we saw how he practices what he preaches. All nine of us plus Prof. Mack and Prof. Horden fit snugly into the home, with students perched on the countertop, bunk bed, and into the shower area.

Next, we headed to the Allianz Arena, a soccer stadium designed by Herzog and de Meuron. The outer skin is composed of an inflatable ETFE skin that has changing backlighting based upon which team, if any, is playing there that day. The high level of design, from the overall composition all the way down to the details that permitted the inflatable bladders to operate, was highly impressive.

After the Allianz visit, we toured the Olympic Park, home to the Olympic Stadium roof designed by Frei Otto. As students whom have mainly worked in the digital medium, the complex forms created nearly 40 years ago without the use of these tools was staggering. The landscape melded the various venues together and reinforced the undulating form of the steel and Plexiglas roof.

En route, we spotted the Loft Cube by Werner Aisslinger and were able to visit this prefabricated module home.

Finally, we returned to TUM to meet with Prof. Kaufmann, a leader in innovative wood design. He explained the various capabilities of wood technology available today and stressed the benefits of wood construction amongst a predominately precast concrete building culture. Technologies such as cross-laminated timber panels (i.e. KLH), provide the benefits of building stronger fire-retardant wood structures to heights previously unattainable. This lecture was particularly relevant to our studio research as we head to Austria to further explore the benefits of wood construction.

A f*gly great building

2008-10-28T21:05:00.000-07:00

Visiting the KTH in Stockholm was great. The Architecture Design building was the most self-mocking, ugly, strong and aesthetically estranged piece of architecture; so filled with self deprecating doubt that is was in fact intelligent and smart. This building in a way reflects to me the Swedish mentality in the good and bad sense.

In the tradition of Asplund, Leverentz and Celsing the architectural message is never clear, mixed with sophisticated references yet pure and simple. The rawness was captivating and the simplicity refreshing.

I hope we see more of them and I wish the students would blogg more frequent. But we are tired, freezing and wet most of the time. So this is just a filler piece untill we get our bearings again-Salzfrei

10.27.2008 - Copenhagen to Munich

2008-10-27T23:59:00.000-07:00

Today, we visited the BIG (Bjarke Ingalls Group) and were greeted by Kai-Uwe Bergmann and then given a tour of the office. We were impressed by the extensive model building facilities and the dynamic work environment. We then proceeded to the Orestad District south of the city to meet with a project manager with BIG, who gave us a tour of both the Mountain House and the adjacent VM House.

We then flew from Copenhagen to Munich and after landing, headed to the BMW Welt to join Prof. Peter Ebner for dinner in the newly opened showroom facility. The project clearly works to further the BMW brand, harmoniously blending innovative architecture with automobile design. It is our understanding that the showroom has become a destination for both visitors interested in BMW as well as those taking delivery of their new vehicle.

10.26.2008 - Copenhagen

2008-10-26T18:51:00.000-07:00

Today’s travels consisted of walking around a rainy Copenhagen, witnessing many multi-unit dwellings as well as many of Copenhagen’s fine cultural facilities. The first visit was to the new Copenhagen Library, locally referred to as the “Black Diamond,” designed by schmidt hammer lassen, which straddles a street and links the city with the waterfront. Next, a visit to the Danish Architectural Center was in order, where we browsed their fabulous bookstore and viewed two exhibitions. The first exhibition was “Building Sustainable Communities,” which showed work by Danish architectural firms that contribute in a positive way to the United Nations Global Compact for improving the lives of people around the world. The second exhibition highlighted the Bryghusprojektet, the first project by OMA / Rem Koolhaas in Denmark, which will become the new home to the Danish Architectural Center as well as house commercial and residential space.

Afterwards, we continued through the Christianshavn district, where we found the Torpedohallen, designed by Tegnestuen Vandkunsten and occupied in 2003. The concrete hall was constructed in 1952 to build motor torpedo boats, but has now been converted into 67 condos. While mostly new, the building retains the original concrete frame and boat slip. The material palette emphasizes the maritime heritage of the site.

Next was a visit to The Opera by Henning Larsen Architects, which opened in 2005. It is sited on a direct axis with the Royal Danish residences, directly across the harbor. The large cantilevered roof allows for a protected public space.

Within view of the Opera across the harbor is the new Playhouse by Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects, which opened just this year. The rich material palette consists of deep red-brown klinker bricks, dark wood decking, colored glazing storefront system, and deep red interior accents.

After that, we schlepped up to the Østerbro district, which has seen a recent surge of high density residential development. The first stop was Fyrtanet, a residential complex by Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects, which contains 89 condos. The structure consists of precast concrete panels, the predominant building system in Denmark, and clad in dark gray slate. The architecture takes advantage of the trapezoidal site formed by the street grid and the adjacent train corridor.

Nearby was the Nordlyset by C.F. Möller, also constructed from precast concrete panels and skinned in an EIFS system. The multi-color lighting and fritted glass inserts provide interest to the otherwise stark design. The apartments flank a courtyard.

Lastly, we stumbled upon a still under construction housing project, also constructed of precast concrete and making a direct connection to the courtyard by elevating one end of the housing block.

10.25.2008 - Stockholm to Copenhagen

2008-10-25T23:59:00.000-07:00

The day began as we headed south of Stockholm to Woodland Cemetery, designed by architects Asplund and Lewerentz, competed in 1915. The vast landscape, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, consists of a gently rolling terrain, large open lawns, and densely wooded burial sites. Scattered across the site are numerous chapels and a crematorium, each of a distinct design. The landscape and buildings are an example of early modernist design.

The public transportation system in Sweden was impressive for its efficiency, speed, and comfort. Both the Metro system in Stockholm as well as the regional rail system ran smoothly, quickly, and on-time.

After arriving in Copenhagen, we checked into the Danhostel Copenhagen City, the first design hostel in Europe, appointed with designer furniture by Möbi. We met for dinner and drinks with UCLA alumnus Kai-Uwe Bergmann, who currently works for Bjarke Ingalls Group (BIG) in Copenhagen. We dined at Wagamama, an inexpensive Asian fusion restaurant, outfitted with high-end interior finishes an articulated façade composed of twisted aluminum louvers designed by 3XN Architects of Copenhagen.

10.24.2008 - Stockholm

2008-10-24T23:59:00.000-07:00

In the morning, we met with Dr. Bo Göran from KTH Stockholm who led us on an architectural bus tour of Stockholm and outlying areas. He gave a brief history of State and institutional buildings in the central city area and spoke to us about the historical building methods, primarily masonry in response to the city’s history of fire.

Just south of Stockholm, we observed several different multi-unit residential housing projects under construction as well as prototypical conditions for single-family suburban dwellings. One of the salient features of Swedish suburban developments was the preservation of greenspace and provision for community services, such as preschools and parkspace.

Dr. Göran informed us of the energy strategy of Sweden, where approximately 50% of electricity is produced by hydroelectric and the other 50% by nuclear. To offset the need for fuel oil, natural gas, or electric heating, many communities have developed a district heating infrastructure, which provides for up to 5,000 homes. This is further assisted by geothermal loops, which can be drilled as deep as 200 meters through rock.

According to Dr. Göran, most modern dwellings have been constructed from high-quality precast concrete systems, some of which utilize an aerated autoclaved production technique, but wood framing systems have seen increasing popularity over the last decade. These systems can either be a precut wood stud wall systems or “massive timber” cross-laminated timber panels.

One project that we visited that does not fit into either of these categories was the IKEA / Skanska BO KLOK system, which is comprised of volumetric modules constructed from wood stud walls. These modules are shipped with all finishes already installed and an entire building consisting of six dwelling units and twelve modules can be finished in one week after all site work is completed. The system is placed upon a prefabricated concrete slab on grade and the modules are installed on a highly precise construction schedule. The project can only be placed in locations that meet particular criteria, including a flat site to reduce site grading costs, proximity to public transit, and creating a mixed income community.

The BO KLOK program has been wildly popular in Sweden, with thousands of families applying for the 3,000 units produced so far, with Skanska limiting production to 800 units per year to keep both quality and demand at a high level. The program has been highly successful from a public relations standpoint for Skanska, where 98% of BO KLOK buyers who have been polled would recommend the homes to friends and colleagues. BO KLOK is designed to be affordable enough so a single nurse with one child, the average Swedish family, can afford to purchase a home that would otherwise be forced to rent an apartment. The units cost approximately 20% less than similar units since the designers focused on optimizing functionality on a smaller footprint and not allowing any customization.

Welcome to the future

2008-10-19T21:27:00.000-07:00

This Research studio focuses on the subject of prefabricated multi story housing as an intelligent and sustainable alternative to the high cost of providing housing today.

As a group we will investigate the current state of prefabrication in various European countries and in the Americas.

Our first step is a fact finding excursion to Scandinavia, Germany and Austria, sponsored by the Charles Moore Traveling Fellowship at the Department of Architecture at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The following posts will chronicle our findings and our explorations.

/ Mark Mack, Professor at UCLA